Maybe. The reality of software engineering is that there's a lot of mediocre developers on the market and a lot of mediocre code being written; that's part of the industry, and the jobs of engineers working with other engineers and/or LLMs is that of quality control, through e.g. static analysis, code reviews, teaching, studying, etc.

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input_sh a day ago | parent [-]

And those mediocre engineers put their work online, as do top-tier developers. In fact, I would say that the scale is likely tilted towards mediocre engineers putting more stuff online than really good ones.

So statistically speaking, when the "AI" consumes all of that as its training data and returns the most likely answer when prompted, what percentage of developers will it be better than?

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simonw 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's not how modern LLMs are built. The days of dumping everything on the internet into the training data and crossing your fingers are long past.

Anthropic and OpenAI spent most of 2025 focusing almost expensively on improving the coding abilities of their models, through reinforcement learning combined with additional expert curation of training data.

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input_sh 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Silly old me, how could've I forgotten about such drastic improvements between say Sonnet 3.7 and Sonnet 4.6. It's 500x better now!

Thank you for teaching me, AI understander. You're definitely not detached from reality one bit. It's me, obviously.

	▲	simonw 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Have you seen how many people are talking about the November 2025 inflection point, where the models ticked over from being good at running coding agents to being really good at it?

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wartywhoa23 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These people also prefer plastic averaged-out images of AI girls to real ones.

The Average is their top-tier.

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jasomill 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In other words, there's probably a market for a model trained on a curated collection of high-quality code.

	▲	simonw 12 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That is what we have today - it's why Opus 4.5+ and GPT-5.2+ are so much better at driving coding agents than previous models were.
	▲	kelipso 19 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Doubt it”s sustainable. These big models keep improving at a fast pace and any progress like this made in a niche would likely get caught up to very quickly.