A broken clock right twice a day.

He was too optimistic about the timing maybe, but he was right about the trend.

Broken clock doesn't apply here

That's sort of like saying Elon was right about Tesla not going out of business 10 years ago, so therefore we should take his flying car claims seriously...

I can't find where the article you linked supports your statement.

Yes indeed, and Microsoft Outlook's incredible and resilient authentication backend demonstrates how fantastic this development has been for predictability, security, and understanding codebases.

I can also write 90% of my code by holding down `Ctrl-v`.

The phrase "AI is writing 90 percent of code" doesn't mean what it did when he first invoked it. I'm producing 200-300% more code than I used to, but only like 10% more value to my customers. It's mostly internal tooling to monitor things that were left unmonitored before.

> but only like 10% more value to my customers

that’s funny, my customers are completely different than they are a year ago

people that would have never paid for coding because it was too expensive and risky are now getting their MVPs validated, earning and investing into more

Interesting anecdote. If I read between the lines, you lowered your prices and now more people are interested in hiring your services. You may also spend more time marketing and talking to clients and less time on programming.

No, prices went up. Its all about post sales now with software that isn’t entirely self serve. “Forward deployed engineering” to integrate a white label version of some AI powered system into the client’s systems

> No, prices went up.

> It wasn’t economically viable and would have taken too long so they didn’t

These two statements are contradictory. Your prices for the same service you used to provide are now lower than what they used to be. So it's now economically viable for new customers to buy your service.

the concept of economic viability includes their risk, time to market, not just upfront cost

time to market has dropped from 6 months to 2 weeks

validating an idea has dropped from 6 months to 1 month

I do not think he was right about AI writing 90% of all code and we've seen that the effectiveness of coding agents has been very much exaggerated. This seems like more of the same to me but for mental health and medical research.

For sure more code is AI generated and coding agents are useful. But not nearly to the ludicrous extent this man has been predicting.

I agree when supplied with a broader context that he also said coding would be "solved" by now.

Sure LLM is good to develop a feature but in 90% of cases in my career the problems I was working on weren't just coding and in that part, LLMs can't do everything.

It's also important to know that a typical dev spends 400-1000$ on API tokens that aren't still profitable for them.

Sure AI's useful and it will reduce the demand for software engs. to a point, but it won't eliminate them. At least I hope. Same with other fields... let's hope?

Let's be frank. If a professional programmer is not using AI to write code at work, it's almost certainly because his employer isn't willing to pay the AI bill.

My previous company has a huge department where LLM coding is banned. The rationale is they work on really important industry secrets, as well as deal with customer's data. The risk is too high that something gets leaked.

The engineers bought the Kool-Aid.

The reality is: The company is bleeding money, and SW isn't their product (they're a HW company). They don't want to pay the bill.

You’re saying that you think less than 90% of all core today is being written by LLMs?

I guess it depends on how you look at it, since AI tooling can generate so much code. There are a lot of project on GitHub that are heavy on AI tooling use but are they really being used? If we count them, that does inflate the amount of total code in existence.

In terms of code out there, in the world doing actual work, I'm skeptical that the amount of AI generated code is as high as 90%. In terms of model generating production code without human interaction (i.e. wholly replacing the software developer) I think we've fallen far short of his prediction.

I think AI writes 250% of my code actually. I write 10% and delete 160%.

But he also has a vested interest in hyping up the future capabilities of Anthropic's models. Maybe the prediction is founded in some sort of evidence that the CEO of Anthropic has. Just as likely, his company is starting its IPO and they need to raise money to keep the money furnace going.

There’s an abundance of machine readable training data for coding, not sure the same can be said for biological systems like the human body. Yes we have machine readable information on what we know, but that still isn’t everything we need to know about the nature of the human body to the point this can be entirely done by some statistical model.

[delayed]

Do you honestly think tech workers actually like this outcome? The entire industry is immiserated and constantly told they have to be sacrificed to birth the machine god.

Maybe Dario's claim should instead be "AI will be responsible for 95% of all suggested cancer drugs in 2 years" and none of us would have any reason to doubt it. In fact, I'm sure he can make that happen in a month.