Dario Amodei: prediction

Transcript context

…By what metric? There’s one metric which is how many lines of code are written by AI. If you consider other productivity improvements in the history of software engineering, compilers write all the lines of software. There’s a difference between how many lines are written and how big the productivity improvement is. “We’re almost there” meaning… How big is the productivity improvement, not just how many lines are written by AI? I actually agree with you on this. I’ve made a series of predictions on code and software engineering. I think people have repeatedly misunderstood them. Let me lay out the spectrum. About eight or nine months ago, I said the AI model will be writing 90% of the lines of code in three to six months. That happened, at least at some places. It happened at Anthropic, happened with many people downstream using our models. But that’s actually a very weak criterion. People thought I was saying that we won’t need 90% of the software engineers. Those things are worlds apart. The spectrum is: 90% of code is written by the model, 100% of code is written by the model. That’s a big difference in productivity. 90% of the end-to-end SWE tasks — including things like compiling, setting up clusters and environments, testing features, writing memos — are done by the models. 100% of today’s SWE tasks are done by the models. Even when that happens, it doesn’t mean software engineers are out of a job. There are new higher-level things they can do, where they can manage. Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum. I wrote about it in “The Adolescence of Technology” where I went through this kind of spectrum with farming. I actually totally agree with you on that. These are very different benchmarks from each other, but we’re proceeding through them super fast. Part of your vision is that going from 90 to 100 is going to happen fast, and that it leads to huge productivity improvements. But what I notice is that even in greenfield projects people start with Claude Code or something, people report starting a lot of projects… Do we see in the world out there a renaissance of software, all these new features that wouldn’t exist otherwise? At least so far, it doesn’t seem like we see that. So that does make me wonder. Even if I never had to intervene with Claude Code, the world is complicated. Jobs are complicated. Closing the loop on self-contained systems, whether it’s just writing software or something, how much broader gains would we see just from that? Maybe that should dilute our estimation of the “country of geniuses”.…

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