Maybe I'm looking through rose colored glasses, but software that writes itself seems like a pretty big breakthrough to me.

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pizlonator 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That goes straight to my point: then why hasn’t the miracle of automated coding led to breakthroughs outside of automated coding?

If the only breakthrough is automated coding with no outside consequence then it’s just masturbation

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brokencode 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Probably because AI coding has only worked at all for a couple years and has only gotten good in like the last year?

The rate of improvement has been fast. Maybe it’ll plateau soon, or maybe we’ll have LLMs improving themselves rapidly. At this point it’s too early to say.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but there’s a saying that people overestimate how much can be accomplished in a year and underestimate how much can be accomplished in 10 years.

If we get to 2030 and still people are wondering where the breakthrough is, then I think I’d be agreeing with your skepticism. But I just think it’s too early to judge that yet.

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pizlonator 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, this is a good point.

But the clock is ticking.

	▲	Quarrelsome 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		on what? Who the fuck would go full transparency of what's in their black box in this hostile culture of AI hatred? None of us can put a number on what code we've used in our services that was written by humans and long may it last.

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AussieWog93 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

N=1, but Claude etc. have made a huge difference to my life personally.

Built a bunch of software tools to streamline my small ecommerce business - while also running it - and things have turned around from "losing money and ready to pull the plug" to "looking at our best financial year on record" in the span of about 8 months.

I could imagine it wouldn't make a huge difference to the life of someone deeply entrenched in a traditional tech role, trying to get an extra 9 of reliability in a service or roll out a new carefully planned and QA'd feature.

But for tech-adjacent people, it gives us something "good enough", instantly, and basically for free.

That doesn't include the other things I've got it to do (gave Claude SSH access and got it to successfully debug a hang on my Ubuntu server, chucked Codex in a folder full of financial data and got it to find every piece of misclassified payroll transaction data)

Genuinely the biggest breakthrough for "casual" tech users since Excel.

	▲	bombcar 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The joke used to be “be nice or I’ll replace you with a small shell script” - Claude lets you actually get those scripts written which often aren’t replacing anyone but are automating away part of the daily hassles.

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therealdrag0 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

What is your bar even? automated coding has changed the game already.

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fdsajfkldsfklds 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Strictly speaking, it's modifying itself. Although it would be an interesting challenge - can an llm create a new llm from scratch?

	▲	arm32 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, it probably can't during our lifetime at least—but it can sure modify itself to avoid antivirus detection, which is _just swell_.

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brazukadev 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which is funny because people have been using LISP for that since 1960.

	▲	wild_egg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Which is what makes putting an LLM inside a lisp so much fun

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maplethorpe 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's pretty crazy that a company like Anthropic no longer needs to hire Software Engineers, because their software engineers itself. If that's not a break through I don't know what is!

edit: it looks like I was wrong and they're still hiring many software engineers. Not completely sure why that is just yet.