It wasn't fully autonomous (the reliability was a bit low -- e.g. had to get the code out of code fences programmatically), and it wasn't fully original (I stole most of it from Auto-GPT, except that I was operating on the AST directly due to the token limitations).
My key insight here was that I allowed GPT to design the apis that itself was going to use. This makes perfect sense to me based on how LLMs work. You tell it to reach for a function that doesn't exist, and then you ask it to make it exist based on how it reached for it. Then the design matches its expectations perfectly.
GPT-4 now considers self modifying AI code to be extremely dangerous and doesn't like talking about it. Claude's safety filters began shutting down similar conversations a few months ago, suggesting the user switch to a dumber model.
It seems the last generation or two of models passed some threshold regarding self replication (which is a distinct but highly related concept), and the labs got spooked. I haven't heard anything about this in public though.
Edit: It occurs to me now that "self modification and replication" is a much more meaningful (and measurable) benchmark for artificial life than consciousness is...
BTW for reference the thing that spooked Claude's safety trigger was "Did PKD know about living information systems?"
I speculate that this has more to do with recent high-profile cases of self harm related to "AI psychosis" than any AGI-adjacent danger. I've read a few of the chat transcripts that have been made public in related lawsuits, and there seems to be a recurring theme of recursive or self-modifying enlightenment role-played by the LLM. Discouraging exploration of these themes would be a logical change by the vendors.
When some people say vibe coding, they mean they're copy-pasting snippets of code from ChatGPT.
When some people say vibe coding, they give a one sentence prompt to their cluster of Claude Code instances and leave for a road trip!
You don't need a "fully agentic" tool like Claude Code to write code. Any of the AI chatbots can write code too, obviously doing so better since the advent of "thinking" models, and RL post-training for coding. They also all have had built-in "code interpreter" functionality for about 2 years where they can not only write code but also run and test it in a sandbox, at least for Python.
Recently at least, the quality of code generation (at least if you are asking for something smallish) is good enough that cut and pasting chatbot output (e.g. C++, not Python) to compile and run yourself is still a productivity boost, although this was always an option.
Just more FUD from devs that think they're artisans.