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by qsort 13 days ago
Look, I've never been someone who mindlessly hypes AI companies, as a matter of fact I think they have serious leadership problems across the board, but you people are straw-manning them so badly it actually makes me sympathize with them.

They aren't saying they have fully automated luxury AGI, they specifically list the ways models fall short of that bar and caution against people taking the 8x figure as the actual uplift number. At the same time they recognize that 80% of new code is now AI-authored, when two years ago those models were little more than toys. And frankly that checks out: if two years ago you told me we'd have something like Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 I would have rolled to disbelieve.

1 comments

> At the same time they recognize that 80% of new code is now Al-authored

I can setup a loop that will write a trillion lines of code automatically, how much of it is actually useful? Or are we back to counting LoC because there's no other metric for these systems that anyone can rely on?

It's 80% of new code they shipped that is AI authored.

Would you ship pointless code?

I do tend to agree though, it could be that AI solves problems with more code than a human would. What you need to measure is the value the code brings and how much of that is done by AI, hard to get an objective measure of that though.

> Would you ship pointless code?

I wouldn't, no. I don't see evidence that the engineers at Anthropic are similarly cautious however. They describe Claude Code as "basically a game engine" when it's literally a TUI app, and it eats memory for no apparent reason. I fully believe that Anthropic would ship pointless and garbage code. Especially if it's being written by LLM.

I could write a bash script that copies a codebase repeatedly in the pre-AI past as well, but I didn't do that because I wasn't stupid. More than 80% of my code is now AI-generated, and trust me I'm still not stupid. It was 0% only a year ago.

Who says LoC is the only metric we should rely on? A software product should first and foremost meet user requirements, functionality and performance. Judging from the sensational rise of Anthropic's user base and revenue I think we can safely says they're in that ball pack.