> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do.
Is pivoting from 50% elimination to actually expanding work not a drastic enough?
Do you think AI has eliminated writing code? I still write code every day. The AI is more a thing I ask questions and it gives me right answers about 40% of the time.
Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.
Then you are dead wrong. Anyone who gives a shit about doing a good job is still writing code.
> I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.
Sounds to me like "wrote their code using AI only".
And from the creator of Redis, antirez: https://antirez.com/news/158
> It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.
There's a big difference between "not writing any code by hand" (which still might involve lots of non-manual-coding effort!), and "vibecoding", and as I understand this thread was about the former.
edit: yes, I'm a software developer, and if I have a change in mind larger than 2 lines I've been using Claude Code (with English input) rather than a text editor to do it, since about January.
"Write a function that will <do a thing the code does in 3 places>, put it in utils, and refactor the 3 locations that need to do that thing to use that function instead." (and then hundreds more prompts like that)
vs.
"Write an app that lets you trade crypto"
Just totally different activities.
Literally all HN talks about is AI these days, and it is very, very clear that plenty of people are still writing lots of code, many finding AI makes them slower and causes more problems, and many making the reverse claims. There is always a rich mix of opinions and experiences here.
You would have to believe that literally everyone on HN is a bot (and also everyone on Reddit, Twitter, astralcodexten, or anywhere else online) to discount all these differing opinions in favor of "everyone I personally know" .
Programmers still write code. They have enough expertise from actually programming to understand that the untouched output from AI is not good enough to be professionally responsible for.
I'm talking about legit programmers which are around 90% imho. Out of those programmers 65-70% no longer write code.
There's nothing that I can't tell Claude Opus or GPT 5.5 to do for me instead.
At work, where I don't have cheap AI subscriptions, access to the SOTA, and where code needs to follow conventions more strictly, I still have to write the code by hand often.