Why would you omit “in 6 months” part?

[0] Anthropic's CEO says that in 3 to 6 months, AI will be writing 90% of the code software developers were in charge of. https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...

That prediction (or at least that article) was written in March, and Opus 4.5 was released in November. For my team at least, that was pretty much the point at which 90% of our code became machine written. So that would mean he was only off by 2 months. Maybe 4 or 5 months at most for the point where it became true for basically the entire software industry.

I’m not saying he’ll be right about this one, not it’s a not ridiculous to claim he want fundamentally right about code.

90% of the codebase I work in is still not written by machines, so ... he's still wrong?

The rest of the computing world has had machines generating code since the 1940s when the first assembly languages, and thus assemblers, were created. What sees you cling to the raw bits and bytes still, rapidly approaching a century later? Amish?

How about your competition? What percentage of their code are they still hand-authoring?

They, like us, are in a sector where quality of results matters very much. My id wants it to be very low, my superego wants it to be very high.

Are we counting code that’s pre-2025?

Writing means new code, not old code.

And if you've been looking at Github's blog posts on their exponential contribution growth for the past 6 months, it's obviously come true this year.

No, he's not wrong. Answering your question with a 'yes' is like a bicyclist claiming that people can't move at 60+ miles an hour in a car.

The small percentage of people who use AI produce vast quantities of code (the average lifespan of which is a matter of days).

You're just obsolete. That's all.

Because he was slightly optimistic but he was able to see what's coming.

and if you think off by 1-2 years is a big deal I am not sure what to say.

That's... pretty much how it's played out.

90% of the code will be written by ai in 6 months.

Hmm. People making fun of the idea that 90% of code can be written by machine.

Now you come and nitpick about if it is 89% or 7 months instead of 6. Lmao.

If AI can get any of those in even 20 years, that's still a big win.

The pessimistic attitude here is revolting.

And no, nobody is forcing you to buy anthropic shares if you think they are full of shit. Anyone complaining is either don't have money to buy it or just jealous of other people buying it and price going up than the ones they hold.

Lines of code have always been a liability not an asset. If I get a PR +500, -800, that achieves the goal set out, and one that is +8300, -1200, which one is better? SOTA LLMs tend to produce the latter and the people least capable of noticing this as something bad are the ones producing the most code. So maybe even _if_ - show me sources - 90% of code is LLM produced, I'm certain it doesn't do 90% of the work.

That doesn't mirror my experience whatsoever

Pre LLM a 500/800 loc pr was already on the longer side, with ~200-300 being optimal.

Those were however frequently being optimized by LLM to the 500-800 loc range.

But opus 5.5 does not produce 8k new loc refactorings without you forcing it to.

By, or with the help of?

90% by LOC, or by semantic meaning/value?

yeah, sure we will nitpick the meaning now, on a personal level I stopped writing code manually at least 7 month ago.

its helping me convert my ideas to code, which is not too far from the meaning implied, because things don't happen on their own, there should be a trigger, in this case, I am the trigger, AI is the producer

You already wrote in one language that was translated to at least one other language before being sent to hardware. Has that changed?

I started coding at 8 years old, 28 years ago, been doing it since.

Switching over to mostly LLM generated code and it's been mentioned many times in my circle and family that they can still tell the projects are blatantly something I would do, what it would look like, and how my projects usually work in terms of UI/UX.

I get basically the same outcome as spending a week on something by hand, in minutes. I'm getting more work done than ever, and not losing focus on projects after they get to that last 10% that needs done that nobody wants to do.

I've always been a lone wolf coder and have joked forever that all I need is just another version of me that I can feed the ideas and how to build them, because I'm the only one that will do it exactly how I want. Now I have that, and so much stress in my life has vanished.

Anecdotal of course, but those that want to be salty can be salty. I did my time coding by hand, now I'm still getting it done while keeping up with the times and having a blast doing it.

This is a pretty good question. Maybe LLMs are just, in some sense, ~10x worse at DRY than humans.

Or, I mean, in my code at least I can directly say that any line I write results in 4 lines generated by macros. So, I guess my projects were already 80% written by computers in some sense. If I was using an LLM would I have skipped the macros entirely?

I’ve always been in favor of doing this sort of measurement by flop instead of loc, but, then we’d have to give all the credit to compute libraries.

Pretty sure he made this prediction in context where it was interpreted as "90% of software engineers will be replaced by AI".

So re-interpreting it now as "Software engineers will be using AI for 90% of their code" seems like a pretty major retcon.

[delayed]

Coding is his area of expertise, his claims there are inherently on much stronger grounds.

I don't think it's impossible that he's right. I'm ultimately buying Anthropic stock regardless of this discussion. But I would not take it particularly seriously if the CEO of Moderna took a break from their amazing work applying mRNA vaccines to diseases, and told the world that soon mRNA will solve climate change.

I think few know that Amodei was a biologist who has been researching cancer biomarkers at Stanford.

I dont think anything qualifies you to claim you've invented a god-technology that will cure all diseases with no added labor costs - something that has never happened before. But even if I did, that qualification wouldn't be part of an undergraduate biology education.

I indeed did not know that, but I don't think it quite contradicts my point either. Many of the perspectives Marcus quotes are consistent with the idea that Claude might be amazing at finding cancer biomarkers.

I can maybe believe that AI is writing 90% of the code within the AI labs using models rest of us cannot fathom. Although they stills seem to be hiring developers, so it is difficult to believe in real strongly.

But across the wide world of software? Everyone I see is just using AI as a compiler. They are still writing the code.

(Yes, compilers also write code, but I don't think that was the intent of the message. 90% of the software has been written by AI since we discovered the optimizing compiler if that was the intent.)