They were right, it's hit 100% at a number of large tech companies. (They missed their initial prediction of 90% 6 months ago, because the models then available publicly weren't capable enough.)
The transition is pretty complete at e.g. Google and Meta, IIUC. Definitely whoever builds the AI tools you're using every day isn't writing code by hand.
I'm literally looking at Claude in the other window telling me that the bug we're working on is a "Clear-cut case", telling me to remove a "raise if this is called on this object" guard from a method, because "the data is frozen at that point" and is effectively proposing a solution that both completely misses the point (we should be calling a different method that's safe) AND potentially mutates the frozen data.
We're 41k tokens in, we have an .md file that describes the situation and Claude has just edited the .md file with a couple of lines describing the purpose of the guards.
I don't understand, are other people working with a different Opus 4.6 than I am?
No, that matches my experience pretty well. Yesterday Claude implemented some functionality I asked for in entirely the wrong component, and then did it again after I clarified. If I'd been coding on my own, the clock time to a complete solution would probably have been lower - but then I would have had to be coding, instead of reviewing other people's PRs.
A careful observer would note from when I'm posting this, of course, that this is perhaps not the only thing I get up to while Claude is busy. But I really do review PRs in a much more timely manner now. (There's people who insist that there's no need to review Claude-generated code, and to be frank I think they're the same people who used to insist that their 2000 line PRs should be reviewed and merged within a day.)
I really just don't believe it. I have not met anyone in tech who writes zero code now. The idea that no one at Google writes any code is such a huge claim it requires extraordinary evidence. Which none ever gets presented.
I'm surprised to hear that. One of us is in a bubble, and I'm genuinely not sure who. I have not met anyone in tech (including multiple people at Google) who does still write code. I've been recreationally interested in AI for a long time, which is a potential source of skew I suppose, but I do not and most people in my circles do not work on anything directly related to AI.
Statistically, knowing multiple people at Google is, IMO, a pretty good sign you're in a bubble. Unless you know a few thousand other software developers.
Anecdotally me and my colleagues haven’t written a substantial line of code since January and this isn’t a mag7; I would be very surprised if mag7 were writing anything by hand unless it’s a custom DSL.
At many of the best tech companies, the conventional wisdom has always been that there's a huge backlog of stuff to be done. They don't want to deliver 100% of their roadmap with 50% of their employees, they want to deliver 200% of their roadmap with 100% of their employees. (And the speedup is not as high as these numbers imply for many kinds of performance, security, or correctness-critical software.)
Some companies like Block, Oracle, and Atlassian have indeed been laying people off.
Google has done nothing but destroy value with many of its ‘bets’. Your roadmap stuff is irrelevant - if you don’t have value creating projects in the pipeline and/or labour is augmented you should be laying off - period. Sundar’s job is to maximise the stock price.
So once again - nonsense. Now stop spreading crap that clearly fills people with fear. I can tell you have no understanding of corporate finance and how the management of tech firms actually think these things through.
I'm spreading what people involved in management of tech firms have told me. Perhaps they were lying, but to me it seems consistent with what I observe in the news and in my personal capacity.
I'm also not quite sure your alternate theory is self-consistent. If Google has been frequently destroying value, and companies invariably lay people off when their projects aren't producing value, doesn't that mean they should have already been laying people off?
The only ones I'm seeing act like there should be no expectation of losing aircraft in a war are social media figures who always want to bloviate about something.
Oh man. I am running computations on my server that involve computing geodesic distances with the heat method. The job turns out to be a L3 cache thrasher, leaving my cpus underutilized for multi worker jobs .... 208mb instead of my 25 per socket sounds amazing
When I talk to peers and they respond in that way, it is definitely a signal. If I do ask an insightful question, acknowledgment of it can be useful. The problem with LLMs is that they always say it. They don't choose when it IS really appropriate, they just do it over and over, like your biggest fan would. Syncophacy is the worst.
This kind of amateur analysis is not worth being front page of HN. Its not that it doesn't make a few good points, but overall, it just isn't high grade strategic analysis because it lacks a lot of information by the post's own admission.
Nah it's good. It shows exactly how far you can get with just a modest understanding of what strategy actually is at the level of nation states plus publicly available facts from the news.
Especially in the heavily jingoistic american context, where all of the focus is implicitly on the military means and technology and execution, but people have lost sight of, maybe can not even state plainly, what the point of a military is, what considerations are part of deciding to use it to accomplish a goal.
If you're going to accomplish a strategic goal with a military action, that goal had better be achievable through military action and this one plainly isn't. A historian can see it, a blogger can see it, a programmer can see it. Why wasn't it seen by people whose job is ostensibly to see it?
It doesn't even consider potential primary objectives, especially when viewed alongside the recent actions in Venezuela:
1. If US was to replace Iran as the one to control exports of oil through the strait, then thos would gain huge leverage on China via control of energy exports from Iran, Middle East more generally, as they have already done in Venezuela.
2. Making it clear that partnership with Russia and China will not provide security, which was shown to be worthless. This counters “The East is rising and the West is declining”, a go-to Xi Jinping line.
4. Securing South America for near-shoring production, decoupling of supply chains from China. Iran, China, and Russia have lots of
5. Disrupting Iranian ability to support Russia against Ukraine via manufacturing of drones in Iran and in Venezuela.
Whether these points are actually part of the strategy, I do not know, but they have been raised by others in the space, and seemed absent in the article.
If I understand correctly, I see all your points as potential rewards.
These rewards are useful to the US if they accomplish regime change to a friendly regime or at least military occupation of a good strip of land.
The article is about how these two preconditions for obtaining the rewards are unlikely to be fulfilled and, at the same time, non-accomplishment might achieve the opposite:
- Iran (and by necessity, other Gulf states if they want to export oil) align more with China
- US-partnership will not provide security (Arab states, South Korea and other allies are now less secure and the US can't protect them)
- US and allies are in a worse position to secure South America
Huge risk with little chances of a reward. That's the article.
Modifying the rewards does not change the game unless the probability of obtaining them increases or that of the risks decreases.
A good analysis, although many will find its praise of the Trump Administration's foreign policy hard to accept, given Trump's dangerous autocratic tendencies and his Administration's incompetence in domestic governance...but the Pentagon has long been clear eyed and prepared for different geopolitical scenarios, and found a receptive administration at a time of clearly heightened geopolitical struggles. Honestly, the biggest weakness here is the assumption that many of these strategies began with Trump, when in fact many were emerging under Biden...by this, what I mean, is that it has less to do with politics and the current President, and more about the long term planners and strategists coming to clear concensuses on how to proceed
