4 ms·

Do you have an example of a prediction they’ve made in the last 3 years that was drastically wrong? This is not my impression.

al_borland 4mo ago
Do you think all white collar work will be replaced by AI in 18 months? https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-suleyman-predicts-ai-automation-18-months/ https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s... Altman and Amodei recently hard to start walking back their earlier predictions. https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walking-back-ai-jobs-apocalypse-prophecies-ipo/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
  Again, do you have an example of a prediction that was drastically wrong? I don't think it's productive to speculate about which things might or might not come true in the next 18 months. There were people last year making fun of Dario for predicting that writing code would be automated in the next year.
  - al_borland 4mo ago
    From the 2nd link I posted: > Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do. Is pivoting from 50% elimination to actually expanding work not a drastic enough? Do you think AI has eliminated writing code? I still write code every day. The AI is more a thing I ask questions and it gives me right answers about 40% of the time.
    - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
      Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code some time between December and March. (It's true that AI continues to routinely make errors; if you've heard the term "agentic workflows", that's the standard strategy for mitigating the error rate by allowing the AI to check its own work.) That's why I think Amodei's January 2026 prediction that AI could eliminate 50% of entry level white collar jobs in 1-5 years remains plausible. Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.
      - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
        > Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Then you are dead wrong. Anyone who gives a shit about doing a good job is still writing code.
        SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
        No, that’s not accurate. I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s like hearing that no serious programmer uses Python, it’s so far from my experience and that of everyone I know in the field that I don’t know how to engage.
        skydhash 4mo ago
        Do you think that everyone in the Linux kernel team write their code using AI only? What about Emacs? And cURL?
        reverius42 4mo ago
        Ok, how about Ladybird: https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ > I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns. Sounds to me like "wrote their code using AI only". And from the creator of Redis, antirez: https://antirez.com/news/158 https://antirez.com/news/158 > It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.
        potatototoo99 4mo ago
        I guess when you have 65k tests you can use an AI for transpiling, and it still seems it took an enormous amount of hand holding. That is very far from actually writing new code. But you tell me, are you a software developer? Write or have code written everyday? I am one and for me and everyone I know AI has been mostly just a (fantastic) replacement for google search.
    - threethirtytwo 4mo ago
      YOU still write code. I would say over 65-70% of modern programmers no longer write code. The paradigm shift happened within the last 365 days.
      - esailija 4mo ago
        65-70% "programmers" never wrote code in the first place. Before AI cargo culters just copy pasted code from tutorials, stack overflow, github and so on. With AI they merely continue not writing code. Some people didn't do anything, not even copy paste, see r/overemployed although I have not checked it after AI... maybe it's no longer possible to hold a dev job without actually doing anything. Programmers still write code. They have enough expertise from actually programming to understand that the untouched output from AI is not good enough to be professionally responsible for.
        threethirtytwo 4mo ago
        No. You can't get very far copying and pasting from stack overflow. I'm talking about legit programmers which are around 90% imho. Out of those programmers 65-70% no longer write code.
      - user43928 4mo ago
        At work I still write code, but at home I don't think I wrote anything in months. There's nothing that I can't tell Claude Opus or GPT 5.5 to do for me instead. At work, where I don't have cheap AI subscriptions, access to the SOTA, and where code needs to follow conventions more strictly, I still have to write the code by hand often.

al_borland 4mo ago

Do you think all white collar work will be replaced by AI in 18 months? https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-suleyman-predicts-ai-automation-18-months/ https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s... Altman and Amodei recently hard to start walking back their earlier predictions. https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walking-back-ai-jobs-apocalypse-prophecies-ipo/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...

SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
Again, do you have an example of a prediction that was drastically wrong? I don't think it's productive to speculate about which things might or might not come true in the next 18 months. There were people last year making fun of Dario for predicting that writing code would be automated in the next year.
- al_borland 4mo ago
  From the 2nd link I posted: > Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do. Is pivoting from 50% elimination to actually expanding work not a drastic enough? Do you think AI has eliminated writing code? I still write code every day. The AI is more a thing I ask questions and it gives me right answers about 40% of the time.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
    Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code some time between December and March. (It's true that AI continues to routinely make errors; if you've heard the term "agentic workflows", that's the standard strategy for mitigating the error rate by allowing the AI to check its own work.) That's why I think Amodei's January 2026 prediction that AI could eliminate 50% of entry level white collar jobs in 1-5 years remains plausible. Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.
    - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
      > Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Then you are dead wrong. Anyone who gives a shit about doing a good job is still writing code.
      - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
        No, that’s not accurate. I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s like hearing that no serious programmer uses Python, it’s so far from my experience and that of everyone I know in the field that I don’t know how to engage.
        skydhash 4mo ago
        Do you think that everyone in the Linux kernel team write their code using AI only? What about Emacs? And cURL?
        reverius42 4mo ago
        Ok, how about Ladybird: https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ > I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns. Sounds to me like "wrote their code using AI only". And from the creator of Redis, antirez: https://antirez.com/news/158 https://antirez.com/news/158 > It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.
        potatototoo99 4mo ago
        I guess when you have 65k tests you can use an AI for transpiling, and it still seems it took an enormous amount of hand holding. That is very far from actually writing new code. But you tell me, are you a software developer? Write or have code written everyday? I am one and for me and everyone I know AI has been mostly just a (fantastic) replacement for google search.
  - threethirtytwo 4mo ago
    YOU still write code. I would say over 65-70% of modern programmers no longer write code. The paradigm shift happened within the last 365 days.
    - esailija 4mo ago
      65-70% "programmers" never wrote code in the first place. Before AI cargo culters just copy pasted code from tutorials, stack overflow, github and so on. With AI they merely continue not writing code. Some people didn't do anything, not even copy paste, see r/overemployed although I have not checked it after AI... maybe it's no longer possible to hold a dev job without actually doing anything. Programmers still write code. They have enough expertise from actually programming to understand that the untouched output from AI is not good enough to be professionally responsible for.
      - threethirtytwo 4mo ago
        No. You can't get very far copying and pasting from stack overflow. I'm talking about legit programmers which are around 90% imho. Out of those programmers 65-70% no longer write code.
    - user43928 4mo ago
      At work I still write code, but at home I don't think I wrote anything in months. There's nothing that I can't tell Claude Opus or GPT 5.5 to do for me instead. At work, where I don't have cheap AI subscriptions, access to the SOTA, and where code needs to follow conventions more strictly, I still have to write the code by hand often.