Author: Joe Procopio

  Why? Why, Mr. CEO of AI overlord Anthropic, would you say that human software coders would be made irrelevant and then put a 12-month countdown on the arrival of the end of days? “What we are finding is that we’re 3 to 6 months from a world where AI is writing 90 percent of the code. And then in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said recently.

  Where was your PR hack, Dario? On a smoke break?

First of all, 99% of the code I push is written by AI. So it's damn close. Sometimes if it's a one or two line change, I just do it myself because it takes AI longer to return a response. That's about it.

Second, these media people tend to twist the words a lot to make it sound more insane. Dario didn't actually say software engineers will become irrelevant. He just said all code will "essentially" be written by AI. Software engineers just do other stuff that makes software work. I'd say Dario's prediction came true overall. I still have a job as a software engineer.

Lastly, I think the exponential is hard for people to see. 4 or 5 months ago, AI was generally just making some changes in a single file for me. Within a few months, it literally goes through my company's entire code base to add a new feature or fix a bug. So Joe, the author here, didn't see the exponential. I don't blame him. I didn't see it coming either. Human minds default to linear growth. There's some research around this.

Says a biased source selling AI code generators. He's also a liar because he knows many of us reject it due to principles, preferences, to stay mentally sharp, increased legal accountability for suppliers, or avoiding lawbreaking (eg copyrighted works in pretraining).

While I'd use legal AI's, I'll still be writing plenty of code by hand. Most or all if it in some projects. Double true if an inaccuracy or legal dispute would taint the outputs and maybe what they're mixed into.