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.
As someone who did new hire training for about five years, this is not what I'd call promising.
Agreed, however, the difference between a new hire who requires a desk and a parking space and a laptop and a lunch break and salary and benefits and is likely to "pursue other opportunities" after a few months or years, might turn around and sue the company for who knows what, and an AI assistant with a $20/mo subscription fee is enormous.
Would I be happy with new-hire code out of a $80K/yr headcount, did I have a choice?
If I get that same code, faster, for 1% of the cost?
The theory is that the new hire gets better over time as they learn the ins and outs of your business and your workplace style. And they're commanding an $80k/year salary because they need to live in a country that demands an $80k/year cost of living, not because they're generating $80k/year of value in a given pay period.
Maybe you get code a bit faster and even a bit cheaper (for now - those teaser rates never last long term). But who is going to be reviewing it in another five or ten years? Your best people will keep moving to other companies or retiring. Your worst people will stick around slapping the AI feed bar and stuffing your codebase with janky nonsense fewer and fewer people will know how to fix.
Long term, its a death sentence.
It always amazes me how few people get this. Have they only ever made terrible hires?
The way that a company makes big profits is by hiring fresh graduates and giving them a cushy life while they grow into good SWEs. By the time you're paying $200k for a senior software engineer, they're generating far more than that in value. And you only had to invest a couple years and some chump change.
But now businesses only think in the short-term and so paying $10k for a month of giving Anthropic access to our code base sounds like a bargain.
Agreed... however:
The practice is that over half of them move on to "other opportunities" within a couple of years, even if you give them good salary, benefits and working conditions.
Not in the US. In the US they're commanding $80k/yr because of supply and demand, it has very little to do with cost of living. I suppose when you get supply so high / demand so low, you eventually hit a floor where cost of living comes into play, but in many high supply / low demand fields that doesn't happen until $30k/yr or even lower... Case in point: starting salaries for engineers in the U.S. were around $30-40k/yr up until the .com boom, at which point software engineering capable college graduates ramped up to $70k/yr in less than a year, due to demand outstripping supply.
Our codebase had plenty of janky nonsense before AI came around. Just ask anyone: their code is great, but everyone else's code is a bunch of janky nonsense. I actually have some hope that AI generated code may improve to a point where it becomes at least more intelligible to everyone than those other programmers' janky nonsense. In the past few months I have actually seen Anthropic/Claude's code output improve significantly toward this goal.
Definitely is, the pipeline should continue to be filled and dismissing seasoned talent is a mistake. However, I suspect everyone in the pipeline would benefit from learning to work with the new tools, at least the "new tools" in a year or so, the stuff I saw coming out of AI a year ago? Not really worthwhile at that time, but today it is showing promise - at least at the microservice level.
In my experience (coming from O&G IT) there's a somewhat tight knit circle of contractors and businesses tied to specific applications. And you just cycle through this network over time.
I've got a number of coworkers who are ex-contractors and a contractor lead who used to be my boss. We all work on the same software for the same company either directly or indirectly. You might move to command a higher salary, but you're all leveraging the same accrued expertise.
If you cut off that circuit of employment, the quality of the project will not improve over time.
You'll need to explain why all the overseas contractors are getting paid so much less, in that case.
Again, we're all working on the same projects for the same people with comparable skills. But I get paid 3x my Indian counterpart to be in the correct timezone and command enough fluent English language skills to deal with my bosses directly.
But then the boom busted and those salaries deflated down to the $50k range.
I had coworkers who would pin for the Y2K era, when they were making $200k in the mid 90s to do remedial code clean up. But that was a very shortly lived phenomen. All that work would have been outsourced overseas in the modern day.
Speeding up the rate of coding and volume of code makes that problem much worse.
I've watched businesses lose clients - I even watched a client go bankrupt - from bad coding decisions.
If you can make it work, more power to you. But it's a dangerous game I see a few other businesses executing without caution or comparable results.
That new hire might eat resources, but they actually learn from their mistakes and gain experience. If you can't hold on to them once they have experience, that's a you problem. Be more capitalist and compete for their supply of talent; if you are not willing to pay for the real human, then you can have a shitty AI that will never grow beyond a 'new hire.'
The future problem, though, is that without the experience of being a junior dev, where do you think senior devs come from? Can't fix crappy code if all you know how to do is engineer prompts to a new hire.
"For want of a nail," no one knew how to do anything in 2030. Doctors were AI, Programmers were AI, Artists were AI, Teachers were AI, Students were AI, Politicians were AI. Humanity suffered and the world suffocated under the energy requirements of doing everything poorly.
I work at a large multi-national corp with competitive salaries, benefits, excellent working conditions, advancement opportunities, etc. I still have watched promising junior engineers hit the door just when they were starting to be truly valuable contributors.
So, my perspective on this is that : over the past 12 months, AI has advanced more quickly than all the interns and new hires I have worked with over the past 3 decades. It may plateau here in a few months, even if it does it's already better than half of the 2 year experienced software engineers I have worked with, at least at writing code based on natural language specs provided to it.
And I absolutely agree, the junior dev pipeline needs to stay full, because writing code is less than half of the job. Knowing what code needs writing is a huge part of it, crafting implementable and testable requirements, learning the business and what is important to the business, that has always been more than half of my job when I had the title "Software Engineer".
While I sympathize, the energy argument is a pretty big red herring. What's the energy cost of a human software engineer? They have a home that has to be built, maintained, powered, etc. Same for their transportation which is often a privately owned automobile, driving on roads that have to be built and maintained. They have to eat, they need air conditioning, medical care, dental care, clothes, they have children who need to spend 20 years in school, they take vacations on cruise ships or involving trans-oceanic jet travel... add up all that energy and divide it by their productive output writing code for their work... if AI starts helping them write that code even 2x faster, the energy consumed by AI is going to be trivial compared to the energy consumed by the software engineer per unit of code produced, even if producing code is only 20% of their total job.
I would say the same goes for Doctors, Teachers, Politicians, etc. AI is not going to replace 100% of any job, but it may be dramatically accelerating 30% or more of many of them, and that increase in productivity / efficiency / accuracy is going to pay off in terms of fewer ProfessionX required to meet demands and/or ProfessionX simply serving the world better than they used to.
My sister in law was a medical transcriptionist - made good money, for a while. Then doctors replaced her with automatic transcriptionists, essentially the doctors quit outsourcing their typing work to humans and started trusting machines to do it for them. All in all, the doctors are actually doing more work now than they did before when they had human transcriptionists they could trust, because now they are have the AI transcription that they need to check more closely for mistakes than they did their human transcriptionists, but the cost differential is just too big to ignore. That's a job that was "eliminated" by automation, at least 90% or more in the last 20 years. But, it was really a "doctor accessory" job, we still have doctors, even though they are using AI assistants now...
New hires are often worse than useless. The effort that experienced developers spend assisting them is more than it would take those developers to do the work themselves.
Yes, this is the cost of training, and it is high, but also necessary if you are going to maintain a high level of capability in house.
Management loves the idea of outsourcing, my experience of outsourcing is that the ultimate costs are far higher than in house training.