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.
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.
To be fair.
You could’ve asked some of those coworkers the same thing 5 years ago.
All they would’ve mumbled was "Something , something…Stack overflow… Found a package that does everything BUT… "
And delivered equal garbage.
yes, but it’s way more energy efficient to produce that garbage.
I hate that argument.
It is even more energy efficient to write your code on paper. So we should stop using computers entirely. /s
We’re talking here about garbage code that we don’t want. If the choice is “let me commit bad code that causes problems or else I will quit using computers”… is this a dilemma for you?
is the garbage per hour higher though?
don’t know, i do neither. but i think the time that users take for manual copying and adjusting from a quick web server’s response may level out the time an LLM takes.
no, gernally the package would still be better than whatever the junior did, or the AI does now
I like to think there’s a bit of a difference between copying something from stackoverflow and not being able to read what you just pasted from stackoverflow.
Sure, you can be lazy and just paste something and trust that it works, but if someone asks you to read that code and know what it’s doing, you should be able to read it. Being able to read code is literally what you’re paid for.
The difference you’re talking about is making an attempt to understand versus blindly copying, not using AI versus stackoverflow
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.