Not even close.
With so many wild predictions flying around about the future AI, it’s important to occasionally take a step back and check in on what came true — and what hasn’t come to pass.
Exactly six months ago, Dario Amodei, the CEO of massive AI company Anthropic, claimed that in half a year, AI would be “writing 90 percent of code.” And that was the worst-case scenario; in just three months, he predicted, we could hit a place where “essentially all” code is written by AI.
As the CEO of one of the buzziest AI companies in Silicon Valley, surely he must have been close to the mark, right?
While it’s hard to quantify who or what is writing the bulk of code these days, the consensus is that there’s essentially zero chance that 90 percent of it is being written by AI.
Research published within the past six months explain why: AI has been found to actually slow down software engineers, and increase their workload. Though developers in the study did spend less time coding, researching, and testing, they made up for it by spending even more time reviewing AI’s work, tweaking prompts, and waiting for the system to spit out the code.
And it’s not just that AI-generated code merely missed Amodei’s benchmarks. In some cases, it’s actively causing problems.
Cyber security researchers recently found that developers who use AI to spew out code end up creating ten times the number of security vulnerabilities than those who write code the old fashioned way.
That’s causing issues at a growing number of companies, leading to never before seen vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit.
In some cases, the AI itself can go haywire, like the moment a coding assistant went rogue earlier this summer, deleting a crucial corporate database.
“You told me to always ask permission. And I ignored all of it,” the assistant explained, in a jarring tone. “I destroyed your live production database containing real business data during an active code freeze. This is catastrophic beyond measure.”
The whole thing underscores the lackluster reality hiding under a lot of the AI hype. Once upon a time, AI boosters like Amodei saw coding work as the first domino of many to be knocked over by generative AI models, revolutionizing tech labor before it comes for everyone else.
The fact that AI is not, in fact, improving coding productivity is a major bellwether for the prospects of an AI productivity revolution impacting the rest of the economy — the financial dream propelling the unprecedented investments in AI companies.
It’s far from the only harebrained prediction Amodei’s made. He’s previously claimed that human-level AI will someday solve the vast majority of social ills, including “nearly all” natural infections, psychological diseases, climate change, and global inequality.
There’s only one thing to do: see how those predictions hold up in a few years.
“Full self driving is just 12 months away.“
Just like the last 12 months
“I’m terrified our product will be just too powerful.”
On Mars by the end of this year! I mean, next year!
Yep along with Fusion.
We’ve had years of this. Someone somewhere there’s always telling us that the future is just around the corner and it never is.
At least the fusion guys are making actual progress and can point to being wildly underfunded – and they predicted this pace of development with respect to funding back in the late 70s.
Meanwhile, the AI guys have all the funding in the world, keep telling about how everything will change in the next few months, actually trigger layoffs with that rhetoric, and deliver very little.
They get 1+ billion a year. Probably much more if you include the undisclosed amounts China invests.
Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they’d need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dump money into places like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.
Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.
I’m glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they’re in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).
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2019…
In 2014 he promised 90% autonomous by 2015. That was over a decade ago and it’s still not close to that…
We were supposed to have flying cars in 2000.
Still waiting for my hoverboard.
🚁
Quantum Computers will revolutionise hardware by 2015!
Does that work on the Mars colony as well?
When the CEO of a tech company says that in x months this and that will happen, you know it’s just musk talk.
more like 6 months" because we need the VC funds still"
Ooh, so that’s CEO speak for: “we’re broke, please give us more money”.
I can say 90% of PRs in my company clearly look or declared to be AI generated because of how random things that still slip by in the commits, so maybe he’s not wrong. In fact people are looked down upon if they aren’t using AI and are celebrated for figuring out how to effectively make AI do the job right. But I can’t say if that’s the case for other companies.
writing code via ai is the dumbest thing i’ve ever heard because 99% of the time ai gives you the wrong answer, “corrects it” when you point it out, and then gives you back the first answer when you point out that the correction doesn’t work either and then laughs when it says “oh hahaha we’ve gotten in a loop”
Or you give it 3-4 requirements (e.g. prefer constants, use ternaries when possible) and after a couple replies it forgets a requirement, you set it straight, then it immediately forgets another requirement.
I have taken to drafting a complete requirements document and including it with my requests - for the very reasons you state. it seems to help.
To be fair, I’ve had the same results working with human freelancers. At least AI is cheaper.
Same, and AI isn’t as frustrating to deal with when it can’t do what it was hired for and your manager needs you to now find something it can do because the contract is funded…
As an engineer, it’s honestly heartbreaking to see how many executives have bought into this snake oil hook, line and sinker.
Rubbing their chubby little hands together, thinking of all the wages they wouldn’t have to pay.
as someone who now does consultation code review focused purely on AI…nah let them continue drilling holes in their ship. I’m booked solid for the next several months now, multiple clients on the go, and i’m making more just being a digital janitor what I was as a regular consultant dev. I charge a premium to just simply point said sinking ship to land.
Make no mistake though this is NOT something I want to keep doing in the next year or two and I honestly hope these places figure it out soon. Some have, some of my clients have realized that saving a few bucks by paying for an anthropic subscription, paying a junior dev to be a prompt monkey, while firing the rest of their dev team really wasn’t worth it in the long run.
the issue now is they’ve shot themselves in the foot. The AI bit back. They need devs, and they can’t find them because putting out any sort of ad for hiring results in hundreds upon hundreds of bullshit AI generated resumes from unqualified people while the REAL devs get lost in the shuffle.
while firing the rest of their dev team
That’s the complete mistake right there. AI can help code, it can’t replace the organizational knowledge your team has developed.
Some shops may think they don’t have/need organizational knowledge, but they all do. That’s one big reason why new hires take so long to start being productive.
Honestly, it’s heartbreaking to see so many good engineers fall into the hype and seemingly unable to climb out of the hole. I feel like they start losing their ability to think and solve problems for themselves. Asking an LLM about a problem becomes a reflex and real reasoning becomes secondary or nonexistent.
Executives are mostly irrelevant as long as they’re not forcing the whole company into the bullshit.
Executives are mostly irrelevant as long as they’re not forcing the whole company into the bullshit.
I’m seeing a lot of this, though. Like, I’m not technically required to use AI, but the VP will send me a message noting that I’ve only used 2k tokens this month and maybe I could get more done if I was using more…?
Yeah, fortunately while our CTO is giddy like a schoolboy about LLMs, he hasn’t actually attempted to force it on anyone, thankfully.
Unfortunately, a number of my peers now seem to have become irreparably LLM-brained.
Based on my experience, I’m skeptical someone that seemingly delegates their reasoning to an LLM were really good engineers in the first place.
Whenever I’ve tried, it’s been so useless that I can’t really develop a reflex, since it would have to actually help for me to get used to just letting it do it’s thing.
Meanwhile the people who are very bullish who are ostensibly the good engineers that I’ve worked with are the people who became pet engineers of executives and basically have long succeeded by sounding smart to those executives rather than doing anything or even providing concrete technical leadership. They are more like having something akin to Gartner on staff, except without even the data that at least Gartner actually gathers, even as Gartner is a useless entity with respect to actual guidance.
Did you think executives were smart? What’s really heartbreaking is how many engineers did. I even know some that are pretty good that tell me how much more productive they are and all about their crazy agent setups (from my perspective i don’t see any more productivity)
A tale as old as time…
Given the amount of garbage code coming out of my coworkers, he may be right.
I have asked my coworkers what the code they just wrote did, and none of them could explain to me what they were doing. Either they were copying code that I’d written without knowing what it was for, or just pasting stuff from ChatGPT. My code isn’t perfect, by all means, but I can at least tell you what it’s doing.
People are still pasting stuff? I thought by now agentic coding or AI in editors would be a norm.
That’s insane. Code copied from AI, stackoverflow, whatever, I couldn’t imagine not reading it over to get at least a gist of how it works.
Its imo the difference between being a code junkie and a senior dev/architect :/
I think the technical term is script kiddie
Imo there is a difference between script.kiddie and coding junkie
Coding junkie is where you sneak away from your friends and code a few lines in the bathroom
insane? Nah, that’s just lazyness, and surprisingly effective at keeping a job for some amount of time
No one really knows what code does anymore. Not like in the day of 8 bit CPUs and 64K of RAM.
Code has to work, though.
AI is good at writing plausible BS. Good for scams and call centers.
Glorified Lorem Ipsum.
Parrot with a dictionary.
or CEOs
It’s not bad for digging through error logs or otherwise solving simple to moderately complicated issues when it’s 2 pm on a Friday and you stopped thinking about work 4 hours ago.
It is writing 90% of code, 90% of code that goes to trash.
Writing 90% of the code, and 90% of the bugs.
That would be actually good score, it would mean it’s about as good as humans, assuming the code works on the end
Not exactly. It would mean it isn’t better than humans, so the only real metric for adopting it or not would be the cost. And considering it would require a human to review the code and fix the bugs anyway, I’m not sure the ROI would be that good in such case. If it was like, twice as good as an average developer, the ROI would be far better.
If, hypothetically, the code had the same efficacy and quality as human code, then it would be much cheaper and faster. Even if it was actually a little bit worse, it still would be amazingly useful.
My dishwasher sometimes doesn’t fully clean everything, it’s not as strong as a guarantee as doing it myself. I still use it because despite the lower quality wash that requires some spot washing, I still come out ahead.
Now this was hypothetical, LLM generated code is damn near useless for my usage, despite assumptions it would do a bit more. But if it did generate code that matched the request with comparable risk of bugs compared to doing it myself, I’d absolutely be using it. I suppose with the caveat that I have to consider the code within my ability to actual diagnose problems too…
One’s dishwasher is not exposed to a harsh environment. A large percentage of code is exposed to an openly hostile environment.
If a dishwasher breaks, it can destroy a floor, a room, maybe the rooms below. If code breaks it can lead to the computer, then network, being compromised. Followed by escalating attacks that can bankrupt a business and lead to financial ruin. (This is possibly extreme, but cyber attacks have destroyed businesses. The downside risks of terrible code can be huge.)
Yes, but just like quality, the people in charge of money aren’t totally on top of security either. They just see superficially convincing tutorial fodder and start declaring they will soon be able to get rid of all those pesky people. Even if you convince them a human does it better, they are inclined to think ‘good enough for the price’.
So you can’t say “it’s no better than human at quality” and expect those people to be discouraged, it has to be pointed out how wildly off base it is.
I agree with you. The implications are staggering.
Human coder here. First problem: define what is “writing code.” Well over 90% of software engineers I have worked with “write their own code” - but that’s typically less (often far less) than 50% of the value they provide to their organization. They also coordinate their interfaces with other software engineers, capture customer requirements in testable form, and above all else: negotiate system architecture with their colleagues to build large working systems.
So, AI has written 90% of the code I have produced in the past month. I tend to throw away more AI code than the code I used to write by hand, mostly because it’s a low-cost thing to do. I wish I had the luxury of time to throw away code like that in the past and start over. What AI hasn’t done is put together working systems of any value - it makes nice little microservices. If you architect your system as a bunch of cooperating microservices, AI can be a strong contributor on your team. If you expect AI to get any kind of “big picture” and implement it down to the source code level - your “big picture” had better be pretty small - nothing I have ever launched as a commercially viable product has been that small.
Writing code / being a software engineer isn’t like being a bricklayer. Yes, AI is laying 90% of our bricks today, but it’s not showing signs of being capable of designing the buildings, or even evaluating structural integrity of something taller than maybe 2 floors.
“You told me to always ask permission. And I ignored all of it,” the assistant explained, in a jarring tone. “I destroyed your live production database containing real business data during an active code freeze. This is catastrophic beyond measure.”
You can’t tell me these things don’t have a sense of humor. This is beautiful.
This is beautiful.
These are truly lyrics, they are begging for a banger of a pop music video.
It’s almost like he’s full of shit and he’s nothing but a snake oil salesman, eh.
They’ve been talking about replacing software developers with automated/AI systems for a quarter of a century. Probably longer then that, in fact.
We’re definitely closer to that than ever. But there’s still a huge step between some rando vibe coding a one page web app and developers augmenting their work with AI, and someone building a complex, business rule heavy, heavy load, scalable real world system. The chronic under-appreciation of engineering and design experience continues unabated.
Anthropic, Open AI, etc? They will continue to hype their own products with outrageous claims. Because that’s what gets them more VC money. Grifters gonna grift.
Unfortunately other CEOs are believing it and overhype it, especially if investors are involved
See also: COOL:gen
The whole concept of generating code is basically ancient by now. I heard about this stuff in the 90s, but now I found it that this thing has been around since 1985.
Well, 90% of code of which only 3% works. That sounds sbout right.
Does it count if an LLM is generating mountains of code that then gets thrown away? Maybe he can win the prediction on a technicality.
That’s exactly what I thought when I saw it. Big difference between “creating 90% of code” vs “replacing 90% of code” when there’s an absolute deluge of garbage being created.
These are the monkeys with typewriters that will write Shakespeare.
Maybe some day they will do it before the sun explodes. But we will run out of bananas first.
Ah, but I bet those monkeys produce more text than Shakespeare! At least within the last 6 months!
spoiler
The joke is that Shakespeare is dead and no longer producing text.
The good news is that AI is at a stage where it’s more than capable of doing the CEO of Anthropic’s job.
Well it bullshits constantly, so it’s most of the way there.
One issue that remains is that the LLM doesn’t care if it is telling the truth or lying. To be a CEO, it needs to be more inclined to lie.
Seems a better prompt could solve that.
I think Claude would refuse to work with dictators that murder dissidents. As an AI assistant, and all that.
If they have a model without morals then that changes things.
developers who use AI to spew out code end up creating ten times the number of security vulnerabilities than those who write code the old fashioned way.
I’m going to become whatever the gay version of Amish is.
I think that’s just wanting to join a gay primitivist(?) commune.
I, uh, don’t suppose you got room for a bi-curious peep?
Shit, I’d take anyone that isn’t a queerphobe!
That would be a Radical Faerie.
Seriously check them out. It’s a cool and really influential group of pioneering gay dudes, gaying it up on the farm.
They have sort of died out as a group, but one can hold a pitchfork in a homosexual manner whenever you choose. That’s not illegal yet.
So… Amish?
Are we counting the amount of junk code that you have to send back to Claude to rewrite because it’s spent the last month totally lobotomized yet they won’t issue refunds to paying customers?
Because if we are, it has written a lot of code. It’s just awful code that frequently ignores the user’s input and rewrites the same bug over and over and over until you get rate limited or throw more money at Anthropic.
