That S1 is gonna make for a fun read. It'll make Adam Neumann blush.
Is the claim that coding agents can't be profitable?
This is always the pitch for money-losing IPOs. Occasionally, it is true.
Their margins are negative and every increase in usage results in more cost. They have a whole leaderboard of people who pay $20 a month and then use $60,000 of compute.
If you tell me to click the link, I did, but backed out because I thought you'd actually be willing to break it down here instead. I could also ask Claude about it I guess.
$60K in a month was unusual (and possibly exaggerated); amounts in the $Ks were not. For which people would pay $200 on their Max plan.
Since that bonanza period Anthropic seem to have reined things in, largely through (obnoxiously tight) weekly consumption limits for their subscription plans.
It’s a strange feeling to be talking about this as if it were ancient history, when it was only a few months ago… strange times.
I think it was also back in March, not a year ago
>"I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.
>Amodei said software developers would still have a role to play in the near term. This is because humans will have to feed the AI models with design features and conditions, he said.
>"But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems. And then, we will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can. And I think that will happen in every industry," Amodei said.
I think it's a silly and poorly defined claim.
edit: sorry you mostly included it paraphrased; it does a disservice (I understand it’s largely the media’s fault) to cut that full quote short though. I’m trying to specifically address someone claiming this person said 90% of developers would be replaced in a year over a year ago, which is beyond misleading
edit to put the full quote higher:
> "and in 12 months, we might be in a world where the ai is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify what are the conditions of what you're doing. What is the overall design decision. How we collaborate with other code that has been written. How do we have some common sense with whether this is a secure design or an insecure design. So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer has to do, then I think human productivity will actually be enhanced"
> "and in 12 months, we might be in a world where the ai is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify what are the conditions of what you're doing. What is the overall design decision. How we collaborate with other code that has been written. How do we have some common sense with whether this is a secure design or an insecure design. So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer has to do, then I think human productivity will actually be enhanced"
from https://www.youtube.com/live/esCSpbDPJik?si=kYt9oSD5bZxNE-Mn
(sorry have been responding quickly on my phone between things; misquotes like this annoy the fuck out of me)
This idea that “AI writes 90% of our code” means you don’t need developers seems to spring from a belief that there is a fixed amount of software to produce, so if AI is doing 90% of it then you only need 10% of the developers. So far, the world’s appetite for software is insatiable and every time we get more productive, we use the same amount of effort to build more software than before.
The point at which Anthropic will stop hiring developers is when AI meets or exceeds the capabilities of the best human developers. Then they can just buy more servers instead of hiring developers. But nobody is claiming AI is capable of that so far, so of course they are going to capitalise on their productivity gains by hiring more developers.
> AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months
I'm not an LLM luddite, they are useful tools, but people with vested interests make a lot of claims that if they were true would result in a situation where we should already be seeing the signs of a giant software renaissance... and I just haven't seen that. Like, at all.
I see a lot more blogging and influncer peddling about how AI is going to change everything than I do any actual signs of AI changing much of anything.
That's the hype being sold. So where's the software...?
And again, I'm not anti-LLM. But I still think the hype around them is far, far greater than their real impact.
> The two things aren’t contradictory at all, in fact one strongly implies the other. If AI is writing 90% of your code, that means the total contribution of a developer is 10× the code they would write without AI. This means you get way more value per developer, so why wouldn’t you keep hiring developers?
Let's review the original claim:
> AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months
Notice that the original claim does not say "developers will remain the same amount, they will just be 10x more effective". It says the opposite of what you claim it says. The word "replace" very clearly implies loss of job.
> > AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months
That’s not the original claim though; that’s a misrepresentative paraphrase of the original claim, which was that AI will be writing 90% of the code with a developer driving it.
I kind of get it, especially if you are stuck on some shitty enterprise AI offering from 2024.
But overall it’s rather silly and immature.
In the AI coding and tooling space everything seems to be constantly changing: which models, what workflows, what tools are in favor are all in flux. My hesitancy to dive in and regularly include AI tooling in my own programming workflow is largely about that. I'd rather wait until the dust has settled some.
also FWIW I think healthy skepticism is great; but developers outright denying this technology will be useful going forward are in for a rude awakening IMO
It's not, even by his own citing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWs71LtxpTE
He said that this applies to "many teams" rather than "uniformly across the whole company".