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Anthropic has behaved the least like this of the AI companies.
by SubiculumCode 6mo ago
Anthropic has behaved the least like this of the AI companies.
- Gigachad 6mo agoThey made a claim that 100% of code would be AI generated in a year, over a year ago.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoThey were right, it's hit 100% at a number of large tech companies. (They missed their initial prediction of 90% 6 months ago, because the models then available publicly weren't capable enough.)
- hn_acc1 6mo agoPlease tell me those companies so I can find alternatives. I'm using AI every day and there's no way I would trust it do that.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoThe transition is pretty complete at e.g. Google and Meta, IIUC. Definitely whoever builds the AI tools you're using every day isn't writing code by hand.
- Gigachad 6mo agoI really just don't believe it. I have not met anyone in tech who writes zero code now. The idea that no one at Google writes any code is such a huge claim it requires extraordinary evidence. Which none ever gets presented.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoI'm surprised to hear that. One of us is in a bubble, and I'm genuinely not sure who. I have not met anyone in tech (including multiple people at Google) who does still write code. I've been recreationally interested in AI for a long time, which is a potential source of skew I suppose, but I do not and most people in my circles do not work on anything directly related to AI.
- Toutouxc 6mo agoStatistically, knowing multiple people at Google is, IMO, a pretty good sign you're in a bubble. Unless you know a few thousand other software developers.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoAn entirely fair point that I really ought to keep in mind more often. Thanks for keeping me honest.
- solenoid0937 6mo agoCan confirm that basically no one at Google or Meta hand writes code outside extremely extremely niche projects
- baq 6mo agoAnecdotally me and my colleagues haven’t written a substantial line of code since January and this isn’t a mag7; I would be very surprised if mag7 were writing anything by hand unless it’s a custom DSL.
- Toutouxc 6mo agoI'm literally looking at Claude in the other window telling me that the bug we're working on is a "Clear-cut case", telling me to remove a "raise if this is called on this object" guard from a method, because "the data is frozen at that point" and is effectively proposing a solution that both completely misses the point (we should be calling a different method that's safe) AND potentially mutates the frozen data. We're 41k tokens in, we have an .md file that describes the situation and Claude has just edited the .md file with a couple of lines describing the purpose of the guards. I don't understand, are other people working with a different Opus 4.6 than I am?
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoNo, that matches my experience pretty well. Yesterday Claude implemented some functionality I asked for in entirely the wrong component, and then did it again after I clarified. If I'd been coding on my own, the clock time to a complete solution would probably have been lower - but then I would have had to be coding, instead of reviewing other people's PRs. A careful observer would note from when I'm posting this, of course, that this is perhaps not the only thing I get up to while Claude is busy. But I really do review PRs in a much more timely manner now. (There's people who insist that there's no need to review Claude-generated code, and to be frank I think they're the same people who used to insist that their 2000 line PRs should be reviewed and merged within a day.)
- skejeke 6mo agoSo why aren’t they laying people off and pumping the extra money towards research efforts associated with Llm’s? Lmao. They should all cut down their labour input right now if what you claim is true.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoAt many of the best tech companies, the conventional wisdom has always been that there's a huge backlog of stuff to be done. They don't want to deliver 100% of their roadmap with 50% of their employees, they want to deliver 200% of their roadmap with 100% of their employees. (And the speedup is not as high as these numbers imply for many kinds of performance, security, or correctness-critical software.) Some companies like Block, Oracle, and Atlassian have indeed been laying people off.
- skejeke 6mo agoLmao man this is absolute nonsense. Google has done nothing but destroy value with many of its ‘bets’. Your roadmap stuff is irrelevant - if you don’t have value creating projects in the pipeline and/or labour is augmented you should be laying off - period. Sundar’s job is to maximise the stock price. So once again - nonsense. Now stop spreading crap that clearly fills people with fear. I can tell you have no understanding of corporate finance and how the management of tech firms actually think these things through.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoI'm spreading what people involved in management of tech firms have told me. Perhaps they were lying, but to me it seems consistent with what I observe in the news and in my personal capacity. I'm also not quite sure your alternate theory is self-consistent. If Google has been frequently destroying value, and companies invariably lay people off when their projects aren't producing value, doesn't that mean they should have already been laying people off?
- solenoid0937 6mo agoHave you considered that some companies want to grow instead of laying people off? No one at Anthropic writes code, they manage 20 Claude Code SWEs.
- SubiculumCode 6mo agoThat was a prediction. It was not a claim of their current capabilities. If that is the one you reach for then I feel my point has been made.