I remember 2018-2020, when everyone was saying that in 1-2 years, all cars would be autonomous vehicles and we won't need drivers anymore. Guess what.
flohofwoe · 51m ago
Same for UML in the 90s: "in a few years programmers will be obsolete because a handful system architects will draw UML diagrams which will be synthesized into code", in the end the opposite happened, and the dedicated system architect role pretty much disappeared.
And UML even made a lot more sense to precisely describe a problem compared to human language prompts.
voxleone · 33s ago
And using UML selectively and intentionally can build the habit of thinking before coding. It's a mental exercise, much like test-driven development or writing pseudocode, that strengthens your design intuition.
glimshe · 17m ago
XML was going to end all other data formats.
pera · 53m ago
I still remember this one from 2016 very well:
A Driverless Tesla Will Travel From L.A. to NYC by 2017, Says Musk
Really not that far off in the grand scheme of things IMO.
Ray Kurzweil was even more on the money in his 2006 book "The singularity is near". I remember reading some of the stuff in there that is now happening. From the top of my head he predicted 2030 for human-level AI hardware and software that could be bought for 1000 USD by anyone. I feel he's going to be very close.
And how solving the trolley problem is the key to make it all work
danparsonson · 1h ago
Man selling shovels reports that every job requires a new shovel.
Or in other words, of course he says that; it's not really a useful analysis is it?
rasz · 1h ago
Ray Kassar, CEO of Atari, says every Atari 2600 owner will buy at least 3 copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial!
Fizzadar · 1h ago
100%. How is this even remotely considered newsworthy.
crinkly · 58m ago
Technically man selling shit and shovels. Or is it shovels that make shit.
hakanderyal · 40m ago
For CRUD/UI heavy web apps, it can. I have probably wrote ~5% of the code I produced in the last 2 months, but I've read and verified and corrected every line of code. Output increase is substantial.
But I'm not expecting that to hold true for linux kernel or postgres codebase or equivalent anytime soon.
CafeRacer · 24m ago
Im heavily using claude code right now... because i need something now. But it's a huge pile of technical debt.
With every piece of code created i write a doc of what id need to focus on when rewriting chunks.
AI has its usage, it makes some things faster... but spitting out more code does not necessarily make it more productive.
I ride AI train, but i ride my cb650r same way... sometimes wondering why i am still alive.
hakanderyal · 16m ago
With Claude Code, you need to create the docs beforehand, not after.
For my latest project, I have 20k+ lines of markdown docs to guide it, with great success. Some of them are generic rules, some of them describes how I code, some of them describing the codebase & features. Then I have another 17k+ that are used while coding. Plans, phases, todos, reviews etc.
All of them are written by Claude Code also. I'm calling it "spec-driven development".
Cursor has a much different flow, where you usually pair program with it, which I call "ai-assisted development".
onename · 1h ago
Meanwhile: Nearly half of all code generated by AI found to contain security flaws - even big LLMs affected
Are most junior devs honestly any better? In my experience no.
fzeroracer · 46m ago
In my experience, junior devs are actually better about this because they haven't been ground down by years of corporate bullshit and shellacking whenever they bring up security holes or issues. Some of them will be a bit over eager and miss obvious stuff but unlike LLMs you can actually train them to be better about it.
VBprogrammer · 4m ago
Yeah, to be honest I agree. I've worked with senior people who couldn't give a crap, "it works" is the only barrier to shipping it.
I've also worked with juniors who are technically much better than most of the senior people around them.
tdhz77 · 1h ago
All devs
righthand · 59m ago
All senior devs are now junior devs, that’s why we stopped hiring juniors.
Give me them downvotes all you want but I’m not the “senior” turning in slop Llm code.
akaike · 1h ago
Couldn’t it easily also take over the CEO job? Pretty sure it’s easier than producing code that works and is maintainable.
sameermanek · 52m ago
Given how much these CEOs are hallucinating these days while hopelessly losing money on every venture they pursue, I think AI is leaps and bounds ahead of these idiots for decision making.
ozgung · 53m ago
Good point. Maybe not for the CEO yet, but a manager without people to manage is a useless thing. So I think corporates will invent new Bullshit Jobs[1] for humans, to keep them in their organization chart.
As with driving cars, even if the AI is strictly better at doing these tasks than they are at writing code, mistakes aren't so easy to recover from and can destroy something unrecoverably in a 5-second attention lapse from a human overseer.
gf000 · 16m ago
So can software, if not more. Like, your healthcare data leaking, bank account losing your money, some legal document getting lost/wrongly issued, .. and then we didn't even talk about actual safety critical applications (which are hopefully not vibe coded) like airplanes/medical device, etc.
akaike · 52m ago
Well, the same goes for wrong code. One wrong line can cost millions or destroy everything completely, depending on the context. It is also not very easy to recover from.
ben_w · 39m ago
The two contexts where that applies is "interacts with the outside world and you deployed without tests", and "even though it only affects your own data, you don't have backups and you deployed without tests".
zarzavat · 14m ago
"AI" has been writing 90% of my code, on a per-character basis, since IntelliSense came out.
The question is not how many characters can a computer spit out, but whether you need a human in the loop or not. That's not going to change in 6 months. In a few years, perhaps.
anonzzzies · 48m ago
The thing is that this is probably currently indeed happening. The bizarre output of LoC by LLMs probably now eclipses whatever humans write by hand. I don't believe 90% passes the reviews though; a lot more gets written and a lot more gets discarded. My fear is more that this will change, and code will pass because less and less people know what is good or not. Not yet, but soon-ish, EVEN if the output quality does not improve.
bboygravity · 33m ago
90 percent definitely passes reviews.
Source: my commits pass reviews and it's not because the reviewers don't have like 50 years of experience between them.
It's funny how the comments on HN went from complete denial about coding with LLM's ever being possible at all like 1 year ago to "oh, it might be happening" now. I find it hard to understand how people can simultaneously be skilled (older) engineers while at the same time being completely oblivious to the concept of exponential improvement of tech in general. I guess people don't WANT to see the reality that is change and prefer to just look away and cope?
anonzzzies · 23m ago
I am unsure but as a formal verification (pupil of dijkstra and his students in eindhoven and Amsterdam) person, I see this happening in a crazy waterfall and indeed people on HN are the last deniers who keep saying 'it does not work for them'. It works for the rest of the world and things are going completely ape shit now. I am happy to be old as I probably won't live through the fallout; I would say I hope we change our ways and redistribute the gained wealth here but it won't happen. And then we also do not learn from having terrible software ruining lives...
edg5000 · 40m ago
For me this appears to be true actually, these days. It struggles more with large and terrible codebases though, because it has to ingest so much garbage code in order not to break anything, wheras with nicely strucured code it can do great work on a module level, as long as you direct it well.
fleebee · 54m ago
As a note to future historians, this sounded just as crazy back in March.
poniko · 50m ago
Did some bigger admin tool to do search and matching datapoints etc and decided to only use claude code. First version was wow awesome this saved me so much time .. now 2 weeks later putting back code that was deleted several times, removing 3 copy's of the same code, way to complicated sqls, verbose code and looking how its mixing htmx with some wird own JavaScript.
It really looks as a junior developer solutions, so I'm done using it for more then boiler plate things..
I will come back in 3-6 months and hope its better to understand its own limitations.
I'm guessing it would be less then a week for me to write it on my own.
The biggest issue is that I've now seen the shit it creates so I have zero trust in the code I now have from a security and stability standpoint. I know many have better experiences then mine.
verdverm · 36m ago
Have you tried agent instructions? They have been helping with these issues
urquhartfe · 1h ago
Well, he still has a month I guess
verdverm · 39m ago
I just did a week with AI coding and it did about 80%
That being said, I had to be very detailed and meticulous because they go off the rails and make poor decisions
Just means I type and search a lot less, and can get things out of my head and into computers much faster
heisenbit · 45m ago
I'm fairly sure in 3-6 months 90% of CEO pronouncements are prepared with AI.
lawgimenez · 42m ago
This might be true, but in my experience the code generated by AI are mostly a bunch of bad practices.
Project managers be like sending me AI code snippets like they know shit.
Exactly when depends what you count, but part of the path leading to ChatGPT was getting a bunch of dumb systems to work together to train a smarter system: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593 fig 1, and also section 4.4 for what can go wrong
password321 · 33m ago
It wasn't a serious comment but my point was about seeing Anthropic/OpenAI replace its own software engineers.
tobyhinloopen · 1h ago
I use AI a lot while coding and even I don't get close to 90%.
dachworker · 1h ago
I mean, trivially true, if you consider that AI-enhanced programming requires 1000% more code written, deleted and rewritten, countless times, by AI itself in it's feeble attempt to "reason" about the problem.
kosolam · 51m ago
“Writing the code” is not the same as programming. The ai WRITES most of the code for me, but I’m still doing 95% of the PROGRAMMING.
ethan_smith · 46m ago
Exactly. The AI writes the implementation details while I'm still doing the actual programming: defining problems, designing architectures, ensuring correctness, and making the difficult tradeoffs that require domain knowledge and judgment.
verdverm · 31m ago
I wonder how much of the sessions will be used to train up agents that can do more of the programming. I'm certainly providing lots of feedback so they don't mess up so often in the future
Someone also said extending this pattern into the future is probably why computers in Star Trek mess up
bboygravity · 27m ago
Writing the code? How about reading it and explaining it?
Working on undocumented legacy code (read: probably the majority of all embedded code in the world) is now like 100x faster. No need to plow through a massive codebase and trying to grasp expired toolchains for weeks/months anymore.
How is that not part of programming?
JCM9 · 1h ago
Probably a bit ambitious, but I do see a future not too far off where junior and mid-tier developer roles basically disappear.
BoingBoomTschak · 1h ago
Thing is that experiencde programmers must start at "junior" like any other...
JCM9 · 1h ago
You’re not wrong, but there’s a glut of junior developer talent at the moment that there’s no shortage of folks to take on those most senior roles. This this is a “tomorrow” problem that (for better or worse) will get ignored for now
thom · 48m ago
I suppose the question is whether the only way to educate good programmers is for them to spend time as a (possibly net-negative) apprentice in an enterprise job. Perhaps under the watchful and patient gaze of future AIs, they're able to blossom earlier, perfect their skills on open source, and enter into the workforce ready not to cause chaos. Personally I'd love the alternative version of the future where LLMs do all the bullshit (meetings, alignment, planning) and then seniors feel far less stress and pressure and rejoice in being able to spend time raising up their fellow humans.
Not sure either outcome is likely though.
z3c0 · 1h ago
Amodei's work history indicates that his background as a software developer is a single part-time job that he held for a year-and-a-half after college. As far as I'm concerned, he wouldn't even make it as a junior on my team. I'm not inclined to believe anything he says about what it takes to write production-ready code.
newsclues · 54m ago
Has an AI tool been used to develop a new programming language (perhaps that is better for AI than existing programming languages?
Or another way, if Rust didn't exist, could an AI create Rust?
wordofx · 52m ago
I would have to go searching and can’t be bothered. But there was a guy on Twitter earlier this year who said he had been wanting to create his own programming language for years and with AI he’s been doing it finally. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called.
This industry is full of snake oil salesmen and false promises, it's reliant on hype and an army of fanboys trained on twitter to fan the flames and create the impression of a revolution that isn't there and might never be there, just to prop the valuations of the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
It always follows the same playbook:
- The guru type e.g muskie, sama, adam neumann, elizabeth holmes, SBF, says something on twitter: "XYZ is the future"
- Army of same-thinkers lurkers start getting excited about it.
- VC fund bros who are also forming their opinion on vibes stalking twitter, also get excited about it.
- Big money poured in XYZ thing.
- Guru keeps claiming that XYZ version 2.0 is just behind the corner (AGI/Superintelligence, Autonomous Self Driving Cars, the Boring Tunnel, cure for whatever) projecting insane and out of touch with reality timelines.
- XYZ thing either becomes the future (not likely), or gets abandoned (remember when buying pixelized pics of apes on the internet was an "investment"?) and the collective amnesia of the fanbase doesn't keep the guru accountable. It's easy to make hundreds of claims if getting it right once, even by chance, makes you some kind of a prophet and all your wrong claims of the past are dismissed due to your fanbase's dog-like adoration for you.
- Cycle repeats.
The LLM craze reminds me of the NFT, web3, crypto grift all over again, but this time with a product that at least has some value.
There was this wave of outsourcing of engineering jobs to countries with cheaper labor back in the 1990s and 2000s, all at the expensive of quality, accompanied by mass layoffs in the western countries of course. The industry was testing the limits of how much lower the bars of quality can go until customers stop paying for software, and as it turned out, customers could tolerate a lot.
Now, AI is the new outsourcing it seems. Let's lower the bars of quality, see how much crappiness and glitchiness can be tolerated, freeze it right there as the new "industry standard" and move on to the next cost cutting thing.
And UML even made a lot more sense to precisely describe a problem compared to human language prompts.
A Driverless Tesla Will Travel From L.A. to NYC by 2017, Says Musk
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
Ray Kurzweil was even more on the money in his 2006 book "The singularity is near". I remember reading some of the stuff in there that is now happening. From the top of my head he predicted 2030 for human-level AI hardware and software that could be bought for 1000 USD by anyone. I feel he's going to be very close.
Or in other words, of course he says that; it's not really a useful analysis is it?
But I'm not expecting that to hold true for linux kernel or postgres codebase or equivalent anytime soon.
With every piece of code created i write a doc of what id need to focus on when rewriting chunks.
AI has its usage, it makes some things faster... but spitting out more code does not necessarily make it more productive.
I ride AI train, but i ride my cb650r same way... sometimes wondering why i am still alive.
For my latest project, I have 20k+ lines of markdown docs to guide it, with great success. Some of them are generic rules, some of them describes how I code, some of them describing the codebase & features. Then I have another 17k+ that are used while coding. Plans, phases, todos, reviews etc.
All of them are written by Claude Code also. I'm calling it "spec-driven development".
Cursor has a much different flow, where you usually pair program with it, which I call "ai-assisted development".
https://www.techradar.com/pro/nearly-half-of-all-code-genera...
I've also worked with juniors who are technically much better than most of the senior people around them.
Give me them downvotes all you want but I’m not the “senior” turning in slop Llm code.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Apparently it's lots of fiduciary duties.
As with driving cars, even if the AI is strictly better at doing these tasks than they are at writing code, mistakes aren't so easy to recover from and can destroy something unrecoverably in a 5-second attention lapse from a human overseer.
The question is not how many characters can a computer spit out, but whether you need a human in the loop or not. That's not going to change in 6 months. In a few years, perhaps.
Source: my commits pass reviews and it's not because the reviewers don't have like 50 years of experience between them.
It's funny how the comments on HN went from complete denial about coding with LLM's ever being possible at all like 1 year ago to "oh, it might be happening" now. I find it hard to understand how people can simultaneously be skilled (older) engineers while at the same time being completely oblivious to the concept of exponential improvement of tech in general. I guess people don't WANT to see the reality that is change and prefer to just look away and cope?
I will come back in 3-6 months and hope its better to understand its own limitations.
I'm guessing it would be less then a week for me to write it on my own.
The biggest issue is that I've now seen the shit it creates so I have zero trust in the code I now have from a security and stability standpoint. I know many have better experiences then mine.
That being said, I had to be very detailed and meticulous because they go off the rails and make poor decisions
Just means I type and search a lot less, and can get things out of my head and into computers much faster
Project managers be like sending me AI code snippets like they know shit.
Exactly when depends what you count, but part of the path leading to ChatGPT was getting a bunch of dumb systems to work together to train a smarter system: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593 fig 1, and also section 4.4 for what can go wrong
Someone also said extending this pattern into the future is probably why computers in Star Trek mess up
Working on undocumented legacy code (read: probably the majority of all embedded code in the world) is now like 100x faster. No need to plow through a massive codebase and trying to grasp expired toolchains for weeks/months anymore.
How is that not part of programming?
Not sure either outcome is likely though.
Or another way, if Rust didn't exist, could an AI create Rust?
No comments yet
https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...
https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas...
This industry is full of snake oil salesmen and false promises, it's reliant on hype and an army of fanboys trained on twitter to fan the flames and create the impression of a revolution that isn't there and might never be there, just to prop the valuations of the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
It always follows the same playbook:
- The guru type e.g muskie, sama, adam neumann, elizabeth holmes, SBF, says something on twitter: "XYZ is the future"
- Army of same-thinkers lurkers start getting excited about it.
- VC fund bros who are also forming their opinion on vibes stalking twitter, also get excited about it.
- Big money poured in XYZ thing.
- Guru keeps claiming that XYZ version 2.0 is just behind the corner (AGI/Superintelligence, Autonomous Self Driving Cars, the Boring Tunnel, cure for whatever) projecting insane and out of touch with reality timelines.
- XYZ thing either becomes the future (not likely), or gets abandoned (remember when buying pixelized pics of apes on the internet was an "investment"?) and the collective amnesia of the fanbase doesn't keep the guru accountable. It's easy to make hundreds of claims if getting it right once, even by chance, makes you some kind of a prophet and all your wrong claims of the past are dismissed due to your fanbase's dog-like adoration for you.
- Cycle repeats.
The LLM craze reminds me of the NFT, web3, crypto grift all over again, but this time with a product that at least has some value.
Tom Renner wrote an excellent article on the "LLM inevitabilism" https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/
Now, AI is the new outsourcing it seems. Let's lower the bars of quality, see how much crappiness and glitchiness can be tolerated, freeze it right there as the new "industry standard" and move on to the next cost cutting thing.