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Comment by Gregkion | Hacker News Reader

Yes lets not control Open Weights etc.

But come one don't repeat stuff like this:

"Remember this man has been saying software development will be solved in “6-12 months” forever now."

Don't downplay if people get timelines a little bit wrong. No one could even imagine a system writing and analysing code just a few years back.

These people are trying to handle something very unique. And while they have access to information we do not have, even more peple are absolutly oblivouse that AI/AGI is a real risk to their lives (job loss etc.)

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I can't take that software line seriously. While it's not 'solved' (if it ever could be, given it is a human endeavor), the degree to which software development has been transformed in the last 6-12mo is absolutely astounding. If we weren't so quick to adapt to new realities and find flaws, it would scarcely be believable.

He also didn't say it would be "solved". He said in 2025 it would be writing almost all the code "in 12 months", but that it would also still need programmers to guide and manage it at that point. People always leave off the end of his quote.

Edit: Boris Cherny, the lead of Claude Code did say on a podcast that programming seemed "largely solved" "for the kind of programming I do" (writing harnesses I presume). Maybe that's what they were confusing it for.

> He also didn't say it would be "solved". He said in 2025 it would be writing almost all the code "in 12 months", but that it would also still need programmers to guide and manage it at that point. People always leave off the end of his quote.

And this is actually, scarily, true...

It's crazy to me that people will misquote him then claim AI hasn't complete changed software development. Even just the last 6 months. Like look around! It would literally have been magic 5 years ago!

I think this is the definition of a polarising topic. It's very hard to hold a sensible middle ground without everyone wanting to take it to extremes of either "AI is just useless autocomplete" or "AI has solved software engineering".

… and on the other hand, it feels like everything I use has become way buggier and unstable in a similar time frame. Websites, apps, iOS, the only exception is offline open source tools which run locally. (And to be fair, many of those have slower development cycles and I am likely using older versions.) This is just my experience, so inherently anecdotal, but it really feels pervasive across a ton of different things.

Obvious bugs and low quality software are nothing new, but something feels new about it. Occam’s razor says LLM coding is a likely culprit, but it could also be management style encouraging this sort of carelessness from the top down.

I sorta remember him saying “all white collar work will be solved in 24 months.”

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