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.
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.
If you're talking about India / China working for US firms, it's supply and demand again. Indian and Chinese contractors provide a certain kind of value, while domestic US direct employees provide a different kind of value - as you say: ease of communication, time zone, etc. The Indians and Chinese have very high supply numbers, if they ask for more salary they'll just be passed over for equivalent people who will do it for less. US software engineers with decades of experience are in shorter supply, and higher demand by many US firms, so...
Of course there's also a huge amount of inertia in the system, which I believe is a very good thing for stability.
And that was a very uneven thing, but yes: starting salaries on the open market did deflate after .com busted. Luckly, I was in a niche where most engineers were retained after the boom and inertia kept our salaries high.
$200K for remedial code cleanup should be a transient phenomenon, when national median household income hovers around $50-60K. With good architecture and specification development, AI can do your remedial code cleanup now, but you need that architecture and specification skill...
I interviewed with a shop in a University town that had a mean 6 month turnover rate for programmers, and they paid the fresh-out of school kids about 1/3 my previous salary. We were exploring the idea of me working for them for 1/2 my previous salary, basically until I found a better fit. Ultimately they decided not to hire me with the stated reason not being that my salary demands were too high, but that I'd just find something better and leave them. Well.... my "find a new job in this town" period runs 3-6 months even when I have no job at all, how can you lose anything when you burn through new programmers every 6 months or less? I believe the real answer was that they were afraid I might break their culture, start retaining programmers and building up a sustained team like in the places I came from, and they were making plenty of money doing things the way they had been doing them for 10 years so far...
From my perspective, I can do what needs doing without AI. Our whole team can, and nobody is downsizing us or demanding accelerated schedules. We are getting demands to keep the schedules the same while all kinds of new data privacy and cybersecurity documentation demands are being piled on top. We're even getting teams in India who are allegedly helping us to fulfill those new demands, and I suppose when the paperwork in those areas is less than perfect we can "retrain" India instead of bringing the pain home here. Meanwhile, if AI can help to accelerate our normal work, there's plenty of opportunity for exploratory development of new concepts that's both more fun for the team and potentially profitable for the company. If AI turns out to be a bust, most engineers on this core team have been supporting similar products for 10-20 years... we handled it without AI before...