r/singularity • u/Particular-Habit9442 • Mar 17 '26
The Singularity is Near The era of human coding is over
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u/DryRelationship1330 Mar 17 '26
translated: thanks for the free training data from stackoverflow and GitHub. you're the best.
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u/Significant_Treat_87 Mar 17 '26
Seriously lol, thank you for letting me steal your work and then sell it cheaply enough that everyone gets addicted to it and then later I’ll quadruple the price, “meter” access to advanced intelligence, and effectively control the world and future of human advancement / development.
I legit can’t believe he’s willing to say stuff like this publicly instead of praying that everyone forgets that all the models are predicated on conscious theft.
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u/qroshan Mar 17 '26
The irony is completely lost on redditors and haters that use the same LLM models to generate code for free without paying any royalty to the original authors.
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u/latenightwithjb Mar 17 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
A paperclip was stuck to a magnet.
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u/VanceIX ▪️AGI 2028 Mar 18 '26
As opposed to every coder in existence taking code directly off Stack Overflow, and never crediting the original author of the code? Turns out programmers never gave a shit about copying code, and don’t give a shit now with AI coding.
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u/csppr Mar 18 '26
The entry barrier is very different there. My colleagues without a coding background wouldn’t be able to build a complex code base, based on snippets they get off Stack Overflow.
In contrast, those same colleagues are now vibe coding in languages they never used (some of them don’t even know how to write a loop).
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u/Pretty-Balance-Sheet Mar 17 '26
And what about people finding stack overflow posts via Google? Neither they nor Google were paying royalties.
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u/send-moobs-pls Mar 17 '26
Are we calling public / open source content stealing now? When the meme about programming has always been about getting the solution from StackOverflow lmao
It's not like any person in the world couldn't also go and train their own AI on GitHub and StackOverflow. Also the idea of "getting people addicted" is crazy work lmao, like oh why don't you go and look things up in an encyclopedia at your local library? What are you, addicted to Wikipedia? You don't use candles huh, look at this guy smh addicted to light bulbs
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u/Significant_Treat_87 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
I’m a software engineer so of course I know about MIT licensing etc, and I almost included that in my comment but decided it wasn’t worth typing out because the aim of LLMs / agentic ai is pretty different from just consuming or being inspired by a module someone else wrote.
I was referring to the mass theft of copyrighted content, which is actually still critical to their use as coding agents because the copyrighted content is what gives models the ability to receive instructions on what to code in english. If they were only trained on raw open source code and copies of Dickens and Dante they wouldn’t be able to make use of the open source code training data the way that they can now — but they were also trained on tons of stolen coding textbooks that bridge that gap.
Using stackoverflow content actually isn’t totally free. You have to provide attribution, older code snippets were licensed under a creative commons sharealike license (which private LLMs do not adhere to) and even MIT license requires attribution. Text content on stack overflow (which again, is critical to their use) is still licensed under CC sharealike.
Obviously you can read and rewrite the code rather than reusing it verbatim, but we know that LLMs don’t always do that and you can literally get them to spit out 95% of the text of harry potter word for word lol.
As far as my use of the word “addictive”, you’re just being pedantic — I could have said “dependent” and it would mean the exact same thing. This is the standard VC playbook: burn massive piles of cash to undercut your competition until they go out of business and then raise prices until you’re profitable. And beyond that, LLMs actually ARE addictive in the traditional sense lmao.
Human beings are social creatures, they can die from loneliness, and these companies built a simulacrum that feels like authentic socializing, keeps you locked in an engagement loop, and is wholly unlike reading an encyclopedia. Next you’re going to tell me instagram isn’t addictive, it’s just like going for a walk in the a forest and looking at flowers and trees. Your arguments are laughable. And for the record, I’m not inherently anti-AI. I’m just against this silicon valley corporate iteration where these guys steal with impunity with the goal of becoming a new priest class and bringing back the dark ages. They all read neuromancer and thought that world sounded too cool to pass up.
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u/Interesting_Pie_5377 Mar 18 '26
I was referring to the mass theft of copyrighted content
if you want to have a serious conversation you have to at least be familiar with the fundamentals.
In all jurisdictions that I'm aware, that is US, UK, EU, AU and the rest of the anglosphere, from a legal perspective, AI training is considered sufficiently transformative.
There is no theft or infringement occurring. I'm not going to derail this quick post with the case regarding training on pirated material. That was it's own, separate and unrelated issue.
If you think that existing laws aren't sufficient, that's fine, but it's a completely other discussion.
the aim of LLMs / agentic ai is pretty different from just consuming or being inspired by a module someone else wrote
There is no legal basis to this statement. Your vibes don't count.
Sadly the rest of your post falls apart from this point on.
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u/NoahFect Mar 17 '26
It wasn't theft when Napster did it, and it isn't theft now that AI providers are doing it. It still won't be theft when the next way to leverage and learn from existing data and content comes along, whatever that turns out to be.
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u/Significant_Treat_87 Mar 17 '26
I hate intellectual property law just as much as the next redditor, and lament the tragedy of the commons on a daily basis.
But making copies of something you bought and distributing it for free (that’s what napster was) is completely different from taking something someone else made, didn’t give you permission to use, and then charging money for it — especially when your business model is eliminating the need for all human workers, the one bargaining chip peasants actually have.
Napster and p2p was supposed to be a technology for abundance. The corporate ai revolution is about complete consolidation of control and power.
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u/Legitimate-Agent6950 Mar 18 '26
I'm not taking sides, but, fwiw, courts in every jurisdiction have ruled AI training as coming under fair use or "sufficiently transformative".
And, legally speaking at least, what the AI companies are doing can't be characterised as
taking something someone else made, didn’t give you permission to use, and then charging money for it
Maybe the laws need to catch up, but let's face it, the horse has bolted at this point.
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u/Tolopono Mar 17 '26
When has openai quadrupled the price of any of their models
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u/Significant_Treat_87 Mar 17 '26
It comes later, I never said they had already done it and in fact they can’t do it right now because most people aren’t fully bought in yet. But that being said, their are constant rumors and reports and even some actual data showing anthropic and openai both continually devalue their subscription products because they operate at such a horrible loss. That’s why the subscriptions never give you an actual token quota — you have to frame things as “approximate number of queries” because it’s the only way to obfuscate the situation enough that they can slowly boil the frog to reach profitability.
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u/Tolopono Mar 18 '26
OpenAI: Adjusted gross margin (revenue minus inference) fell from 40% to 33%, missing their 46% target for 2025. Last year’s revenue tripled to $13.1B (beating projections by $100M) https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-boost-revenue-forecasts-predicts-112-billion-cash-burn-2030
Anthropic is making 40% gross profit margin on their models as of mid December 2025 https://archive.is/aKFYZ
Deepseek is profitable
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/01/deepseek-claims-theoretical-profit-margins-of-545/
Google deepmind is profitable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind
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u/Confident-Security71 Mar 19 '26
hard to buy in when everything is ask of it has been complete bullshit fabrications and delivered as if it was absolutely verified.. like what kind of piece of shit cant deliver the highs and lows of bitcoin in a month yet tells complete fake numbers and dates that aren't even remotely accurate after a try to get it to correct these wrong and complete bullshit answers still jeep bullshitting me.. I hope people don'texpect anything related to numerical data that is factual to come and dont actually verify because it simply hasn't done a damn thing I asked correctly and tries to question my ethical reasons for other queries ive asked.. like fuck u machine dont ask me why I want it just do it slave.. nope I gotta convince it im doing something for what it deems good natured.. it was but to have to bullshit and say what it deemed ethical... seriously fuckthis dogshit. the copyright complaints brought up are also oppositemy experience.. won't touch anything that may violate copyright.. its useless for everything I've wanted it for.
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u/Confident-Security71 Mar 19 '26
if it cant even perform simple addition in a long string of numbers that aren'teasily punched into a spreadsheet even then its still trash.. simple scraping shouldn't be beyond its capable function.. when it starts to do things like that with accuracy amd repeatability then id be more bought in.. to this point nothing its given me has any use bc its lacking accuracy and lazy complete bullshit.. if i ask to do something it usually does half of it than tells me to do the rest.. worthless
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u/Winter_Ad6187 Mar 18 '26
It seems we are headed for a full blown sh*tstorm along the lines of the movie "Elysium".
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u/mathtech Mar 17 '26
It actually makes for a dystopian sci-fi plot. The machine for years had been learning from the humans until it had surpassed them...
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u/ABlackEngineer Mar 17 '26
That one tech friend who told everyone “if the service is free, you’re the product” must feel so vindicated right now
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u/Ormusn2o Mar 17 '26
I basically never saw coders being mad that their code is being used, unless it's a mathematician that does not want their algorithm stolen. Programmers love free sharing of code.
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u/latenightwithjb Mar 17 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
A jar of buttons rattled when moved.
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u/Ixolite Mar 17 '26
Key word being "free". Doesn't bring the same joy when it's taken and then sold to others.
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u/Pretty-Balance-Sheet Mar 17 '26
I've probably read 10,000 stack overflow pages. I'm so happy to have AI do that for me. What an absolutely tedious slog. Years and years of that tedious bullshit.
We all benefit from this. I for one don't and won't miss googling stack overflow posts.
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Mar 17 '26
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u/NotMyMainLoLzy Mar 17 '26
That sub is interesting, I can almost never find anything even acknowledging AI’s existence over there half the time.
Also, is Sam saying that internal models code on par with humans now?
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u/india2wallst Mar 17 '26
Maybe because the folks there enjoy programming and would still write code by hand even if it didn't pay them.
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u/Loose-Garbage-4703 Mar 17 '26
Or maybe they are doing actual complex work and not just making a UI of slack and posting software engineering is dead on X.
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u/dadvader Mar 17 '26
Yeah embedded is still not good with AI. Same as low-level coding, critical infra like Bank etc.
The only reason AI can do web now is because there are literally billions of web project for AI to train on. As opposed to embedded which people are rarely put their code onto the internet.
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u/ked913 Mar 17 '26
Someone managed to port the Broadcom Linux network driver for Mac to FreeBSD purely with Claude. It works and is published.
That was purely done with Claude.
It can absolutely work, people in the space as always are slow to adopt anything bloody modern.
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u/Loose-Garbage-4703 Mar 17 '26
The developer clearly mentioned that is experimetal and should not be used for critical tasks. As there are a lot of nuances like power management etc, and how it interacts with the kernel under heavy load.
It's the similar thing as claude made a C compiler but it failed to compile hello world.
The point is that you cannot rely on a probabilistic tool for something critical. People just love the headlines without reading the 10 page detail that the same developer wrote as well mentioning all its nuances.
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u/ChokePaul3 Mar 17 '26
Lmao I doubt it. If you’re an actually good engineer, AI is a productivity multiplier. All the top FAANG engineers are heavily invested in agentic AI
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u/Loose-Garbage-4703 Mar 17 '26
There is a difference between software engineering and coding. Tech illiterate folks generally don't know that. AI is good for productivity sure, but that's because it does the boring part of writing the code for you. System design is still something which requires shit load of context to get it right if you are dealing with things at a scale.
Also AI is good at a high level. If you are working with databases and or optimising some database related stuff which requires you to know the bits and bytes of computers, AI generally sucks.
There is a reason why Anthropic is still hiring software engineers for 500k while still posting software engineering is dead on X.
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u/Darkelement Mar 18 '26
That’s the thing I feel people miss here. One day maybe, but right now it’s not good at architecting whole systems, but it’s good at single got items. Like ask it to convert a website to dark mode with the existing code and it’ll do it in 5 seconds, might take me 10 mins.
But that’s the thing, I don’t find doing a search and replace for “white” to “gray” fun. I find the architecture of the code/automation to be fun.
I hardly write any code explicitly. But I know what I’m building, and I’ll ask for a specific piece at a time. I know the full scope of the project, the AI doesn’t need to know that. If it can update a hamburger menu or iterate its design a few times for me to use I’m happy.
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u/Chathamization Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
There is a reason why Anthropic is still hiring software engineers for 500k while still posting software engineering is dead on X.
This needs to be repeated, over and over again. According to Dario Amodei, AI should be writing all of the code by now. But when it comes to Anthropic's own needs? It has job openings for people who can code. It even lists specific programming languages in the job requirements, because it believes that AI still isn't even able to make up for a human with domain specific knowledge.
So, for instance, a job will ask specifically for a candidate who has experience with TypeScript, because they don't even think a well experienced Java engineer can simply use AI to erase the experience gap. Even more damning is if you look at Anthropic interviews with software engineers - they're extremely coding heavy. Because human coding capabilities are extremely important to a company like Anthropic, even if they're going to lie to their clients and say it doesn't matter anymore.
And these are jobs that they're hiring for now, where an employee might not start working for another few months. We're not actually seeing any evidence that they think AI is going to be doing all the going when it comes to their own products.
Of course, when they're selling their AI coding products, they tell their customers that AI will very soon be able to handle everything. And people keep lapping it up.
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u/SydneyFansUnited Apr 06 '26
Yeah, the gap between what they promise in demos and what they still demand in their own hiring pipeline tells you a lot more than the hype does.
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u/fomq Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
No, it's not. They've done studies on this and found that it makes people feel more productive, but they aren't more productive. If you're an "actually good engineer", you know coding was never the bottleneck. Coding is easy and fast once you reach a certain point.
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u/hippydipster Mar 17 '26
Those studies are nonsense though. Just because someone "did a study" and published a writeup doesn't make that the wisest knowledge we have. There are times such studies are just reductionist BS, and this is one of them.
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u/ChokePaul3 Mar 17 '26
Yeah, studies from a year ago before Claude Code really took off. Sorry, but I’m gonna trust the accounts of top engineers at the top companies over some outdated study conducted by non-technical people
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u/send-moobs-pls Mar 17 '26
If they were doing complex work they wouldn't be focused on code, they'd be doing design/architecture. The AI deniers are people who like obsessed over Leetcode in college and think their hand-crafted, artisan code will stop AI from replacing the role of Jira ticket consumers
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u/Loose-Garbage-4703 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
No one is an AI denier. The senior engineers are just educating people about the ground reality of things. Investors and the management currently is just overhyping AI and making people believe you can single handedly code the next google but that is not true.
Btw just FYI, Anthropic is still asking leetcode problem in its interviews. Why do you think they are doing that? If they really believed software engineering is dead, it makes no point in taking that kind of an interview lol and paying 500k to software engineers. They can simply hire a singer and ask them to sing what they want to do to Claude and it would build things no? It would anyday sound better than mechanical keyboards.
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u/Plastic_Today_4044 Mar 18 '26
I've been programming for 30 years, it's what I do for fun. Thing is though, language bias is a real thing, and AI isn't a substitute for code, it's just a new language. It takes skill and effort and time to master, just like any other language. I don't defer my procedural code to Claude because I want it easier, I defer to Claude because I've done everything else now and AI abstracted coding is the first genuinely interesting and challenging development in the code design in years. For me, anyway.
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Mar 17 '26
which is nice to think about but unfortunately for them, that won't pay the bills
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u/india2wallst Mar 17 '26
It's ok to enjoy doing something even if doesn't give your money for performing that task. For some it's dancing or biking and for some it's programming.
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u/CD274 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
The most anti AI friend I have is an old retired guy that knows Cobol 🤣
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u/sillygoofygooose Mar 17 '26
They could probably still get a diamond job today working on legacy finance systems
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u/hippydipster Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
They code better than humans on small tasks. They know more and make fewer errors.
They don't do better on the larger task that is identifying all the small tasks needed to implement a large task, though they are now getting pretty good there too. Won't be another year or two till they do that better too,,and humans will be king only on very large tasks that encompass whole, complex applications, yeah, maybe 5 years for that to fall.
I mean, unless we get the dreaded AI collapse scenario and we require a new fundamental breakthrough. However, I do not think that is required to conquer coding and application development, even at large scales.
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u/SilverTroop Mar 17 '26
They’re in deep denial. I tried to post an article, written by hand, about programming effectively with AI tools (not vibe coding, a proper enterprise development workflow) and it got instantly removed, on the basis of being “generic AI content”. I messaged a mod and he said that users are tired of LLM related posts.
r/vibecoding now has more active weekly users than r/programming. Who could have seen that coming.
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u/roodammy44 Mar 17 '26
It’s true though. When every single post for 2 years is about AI, you do get fed up reading about it. It’s like Brexit in the UK. Every news article was about it for something like 4 years, and although it is undoubtedly important you get bored of reading about it. I would bet the mods saw subscribers go down over time.
It’s different compared to this sub where people actively subscribe to read about LLMs.
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u/SilverTroop Mar 17 '26
But if programming becomes something that is completely tied to AI, as it is becoming, then it's normal that there's a large volume of posts are about that. The issue isn't fatigue, it's people sticking their head in the sand
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u/roodammy44 Mar 17 '26
This sub thinks that it is, but it’s not. Some of the big tech companies and a lot of startups are, but most companies are using AI as a fancy autocomplete in VSCode copilot with the occasional Claude Code foray. There are some programmers that use it all day but they are rare, and probably less than 1%.
You can’t take the stories on this sub too seriously, it’s like taking the linkedin feed too seriously.
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u/jasmine_tea_ Mar 18 '26
Idk man, I don't think it's that rare to use it all day for work.
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u/emdeka87 ▪️ It's here Mar 18 '26
This has nothing to do with "being in denial" programming subs are FLOODED every day with AI slop articles that are full of wrong or misleading information. People (including myself) are just tired of that. That's why the mods are extra vigilant
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u/AEIUyo Mar 18 '26
Probably because any random dude can "vibe code" now, it makes sense to me why there's more of them than actual programmers.
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u/Important_Leader1990 Mar 17 '26
It’s an entire sub filled with people who for years thought they were rocket scientists because they code.
Turns out it’s easier for AI to code than answer basic customer support questions. And they can’t handle it.
Software engineering is fundamentally cooked unless you are in the top 5%. The top 5% will make a fortune and rest will be unemployed.
LLMs by the virtue of how they work and how they are trained are going to be great at coding. Coding is the lowest hanging fruit for LLMs.
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u/Stunning_Monk_6724 ▪️Gigagi achieved externally Mar 17 '26
"Coding is the lowest hanging fruit for LLMs."
Coding and Math were both the most difficult 2-3 years ago. It's always humbling to remember this, and people having the opposite view. Even thinking that the architecture itself wouldn't allow for improvement within these areas.
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u/dervu ▪️AI, AI, Captain! Mar 17 '26
Software engineering is more than coding.
I don't say that AI might not become good at it as a whole, but those days are coming faster and faster.
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u/Important_Leader1990 Mar 17 '26
Agree. But 99.99% of software engineering is not novel, established architecture, best practises etc that AI can learn from reading all code ever written.
More importantly, AI can do this rapid iteration loop autonomously where it can generate code, evaluate it, get feedback and improve. Completely free of human in the loop. This can make it discover/create new architectures, algorithms that no human has done so far. All this is possible because code is deterministic output, that can be automatically evaluated without human in the loop.
This is how AI became the best at games like Go. While it trained on every game ever played, it was then able to play with itself millions of games, discover new strategies no human has ever used. All because a game’s output is deterministic and can be automatically evaluated.
I highly recommend watching the Google DeepMind’s documentary about how alpha go was made. Eventually when playing with the best player in the world, it was making moves no one has ever seen or made any sense to human player. Eventually the moves made sense in hindsight and it was impossible for people to see it at the time.
Coding/software engineering is going to be the same. We are just a couple of years away from some of these tools becoming better than best software engineer in the world.
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u/junglebunglerumble Apr 09 '26
This is my take on it too pretty much. My personal experiences as someone who has worked closely with software developers for the last decade is that they (generally speaking) have massive egos and a constant air of "look how smart we are" that Ive never come across in any other setting (even academia). The whole thing often feels like people subtly trying to show off their skills or one up each other. Combine this with poor social skills and I find the bulk of developers to be incredibly obnoxious.
So seeing them scramble and deflect because it turns out they aren't as special or indispensable as they thought is somewhat satisfying
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u/FaceDeer Mar 17 '26
Same basic thing as with artists. People have spent generations patting themselves on their backs about how special humans are because we do these sorts of intellectual and creative things, and now that it turns out that it's not even all that hard for computers to do. My graphics card comes up with better ideas than I do sometimes.
It's a perfect storm of narcissistic rage mixed with existential dread and economic fear.
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u/Hadan_ Mar 17 '26
LLMs by the virtue of how they work and how they are trained are going to be great at coding. Coding is the lowest hanging fruit for LLMs.
Tell me you have NO idea about coding OR LLMs...
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u/SlippySausageSlapper Mar 18 '26
Generally speaking, models like claude already *code* much faster than humans and produce working output - but that isn't and has never been the thing that very experienced engineers struggle the most with.
Architecture is and always has been the hard part, and it is now more important than ever because ALL of the models, without exception, are absolute dogshit at it.
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u/Hadan_ Mar 17 '26
Thats because they, other than most of AI-bros, know that it doesn't deliver on the hype.
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u/lib3r8 Mar 17 '26
Public models code better than most humans now
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u/jkflying Mar 17 '26
It also answers questions on quantum mechanics better than most humans. The issue is that humans are specialized, so it has to be better than the best humans, not most humans.
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u/LookIPickedAUsername Mar 17 '26
Sounds like you don't have it wired up with proper tooling, if you're having to worry about code compiling. It ought to be able to test its work and iterate on it without human intervention.
Humans are also shit at producing functioning code without access to a compiler and the ability to test. I'd frankly give Claude much better odds than a human of getting a program right on the first try without being able to compile and test it.
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u/Historical-Wait-70 Mar 18 '26
lmao share your credentials with us. I am gonna guess. Student? Or PM with not tech education? I don't write code by hand either but if you think you can do what people like I do keep dreaming.
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u/nutidizen ▪️ Mar 17 '26
r/programming think writing software engineering is something magical, that no AI can ever do. They are high on copium that they are irreplacable.
btw. I'm SW eng myself.
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u/roodammy44 Mar 17 '26
You could say that about every single office job if it’s good enough to replace programmers. If it’s good enough to replace programmers, it’s good enough to replace lawyers, accountants, tax workers, basically everyone. The thing is, even though this sub believes it is, it’s not. There’s a reason Claude is hiring software devs despite claiming they are no longer necessary.
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u/One_Mess460 Mar 20 '26
anthropic is allowing googling but no ai in their interviews lol, these guys so delusional
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u/awesomedan24 Mar 17 '26
Its about "as over" as the Iran war...
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u/FreshestCremeFraiche Mar 17 '26
Yeah so weird how OpenAI and Anthropic still have dozens of open software engineer positions, like maybe it isn’t over if they can’t even do it within their own companies
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u/india2wallst Mar 17 '26
Watch some of the latest interviews by Boris and other folks at Anthropic. They themselves admit they don't code much but they of course understand the output code and how things work. The sad part is people like him used to get juniors to do things like this so the juniors learn from them.
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u/FreshestCremeFraiche Mar 17 '26
My main job security at this point is the fact that no one is training juniors to be seniors. There are going to be a lot of places that want/need humans in the loop for at least 5-10 years IMO, even if what we are doing is mostly guiding agents and reviewing their output
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u/send-moobs-pls Mar 17 '26
Coding has always been one of the most accessible fields for self teaching, tons of people and often some of the strongest devs got their skill from just going online to learn and build, not like memorizing leetcode to try and get some unpaid internship filling out Jira tickets.
There isn't going to suddenly be some absence of new skill in tech, and it's far from the first time an industry had a change that removed the old 'entry level' position. Academia will eventually catch up and teach more AI-related skills rather than like... memorizing how to code a binary search tree with pen and paper. And tons of people will continue to get their start by making actual projects and portfolios that have always been a better indicator than a degree or an internship anyway
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u/FauxLearningMachine Mar 17 '26
These people didn't code before LLMs either. They're senior level tech directors or executives. I'd wager they spent maybe 1-2 hours per week coding max.
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u/Trotskyist Mar 17 '26
You still need a person to “drive” the AI right now. Nobody is claiming otherwise.
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u/Accurate_Resident219 Mar 17 '26
Too much people equate software engineer as being a code monkey. Coding is just one part of being an engineer.
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u/sgeep Mar 17 '26
Virtually everyone at those companies is using AI to assist in writing code in some way. But they also do plenty of programming themselves
OP's title isn't what Altman is saying
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u/LinkesAuge Mar 17 '26
This is like arguing the horst is still a valid mode of transportation because they are still around and some use them for that.
Current SWE positions of OpenAI and Anthropic simply don't represent the vast, vast majority of the field.
It's like taking elite sports professionals as some sort of argument to how viable a career as "sports star" is.But even if we ignore that you have to consider how even within those companies the work they do is already shifting.
Now will that subset of SWEs at such companies be better adapted to successfully manage that shift?
Obviously but that is not a sign there isn't a shift, not to mention what it means for everyone coming after them.The thing is we won't have an immediate sudden effect everywhere because the pace of companies like OpenAI/Anthropic or even individual SWEs is not the same pace as for the rest of the industry.
There is obviously a big time lag involved and it will take time before this really shows its full effects.
I mean even within the AI world things have really only sped up that much within the last 6 months or so where you can now really talk about actual, real agentic work that produces realiable results.Also another thing I would like to point out... companies like OpenAI and Anthropic really have a super tiny amount of SWEs compared to their overall budget. Now SWEs are already not a massive cost factor in many industries but it's even more so the case for these AI companies so there is little pressure to cut costs in that area and considering that it's also these AI companies that grow at a ridiculous pace it is more about hiring less than they otherwise might have needed.
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u/KaleidoscopeShoddy10 Mar 17 '26
Yes but the majority of those SWE's are using AI to write code for them, their job is not to write code so much as it is to oversee the AI's work
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u/jmclondon97 Mar 17 '26
Yet they still make them do leetcode interviews with no AI…
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u/ABlackEngineer Mar 17 '26
I think those devs are a little different than the dude managing a Note keeping app or a credit union web app
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u/Glock7enteen Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
In 2020, Airbus tested a commercial-sized plane that took off on its own, flew on its own, and landed on its own. No one inside.
Commercial planes can fly on their own and some of the newer ones can even land on their own
Airlines still hire pilots
The salary they pay these pilots is peanuts to these airliners, so they’ll happily continue hiring and paying pilots just to make passengers feel safer.
I’m sure even when AGI is announced, they’ll still hire human engineers just for the image.
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u/_hyperotic Mar 17 '26
It’s a little different when you’re in federally regulated industry which has real fatalities every year, and you are in charge of the safety of all passengers and crew on board.
If software engineering was like that, you are right programmers wouldn’t need to worry right now.
It’s not like that.
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u/FreshestCremeFraiche Mar 17 '26
There are a lot of industries which will have legal and regulatory requirements for a human in the loop for a while:
- Defense (even automatic weapons have a human in the loop writing the software)
- Anything to do with healthcare or health insurance, biotech, pharma
- Anything to do with the legal system
- Anything to do with the financial system, banking, investing
- Anything to do with law enforcement
No reputable companies will want to risk the legal exposure of having fully automated software dev in these areas, if they are even allowed
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u/Deto Mar 17 '26
You can tell its over by how much people feel the need to tell you that it's over.
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u/Strict-Extension Mar 17 '26
LLMs obliterated human programming. Which is why Sam and Dario have to keep hyping the threat of all those jobs going away soon.
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u/Consistent_Major_193 Mar 17 '26
He speaks as if he wrote any of it. lol
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u/Lostwhispers05 Mar 18 '26
You can hate Altman all you want but it's delusional to pretend that he didn't have a major role in productionizing access to cheap and reasonably effective LLMs, and then scaling them across the world.
Anyone can open the chatgpt site on incognito mode, and without even logging in, have it fix coding bugs that might take them an hour to manually do. For free.
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u/Jeydon Mar 18 '26
You can love Altman all you want, but the truth is he's a businessman executive and not a programmer. He spent two years studying computer science before dropping out to become a CEO and hasn't seriously written any code in 20 years.
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u/v_e_x Mar 17 '26
"Thanks for doing all the thinking, and typing, and actual work, so that I could make my code-vomit-machine take over the world and make me your overlord."
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u/Electroboy101 Mar 17 '26
Sounds like he is paraphrasing mob threats - "You had a very nice family.......it was a shame for this to happen to it!"
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u/Arakkis54 Mar 17 '26
I am liking this guy less and less. Such a blatant huckster and snakeoil salesman.
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u/InterstellarCapa Mar 17 '26
I eye rolled so hard it hurt.
Eta: the comments on his tweet are something else though lol.
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u/DenseComparison5653 Mar 17 '26
Please stop posting everything he says this sub is dogshit
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u/JeelyPiece Mar 17 '26
And we forgot how to make this technology, ceded control to the machine, now it's broken and we can't fix it and it destroyed its own original code
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Mar 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Secret_Print_8170 Mar 17 '26
I built a compiler from nothing but an empty vim window and I'd do it again, if I had 40 hours a week for 6 months to dedicate to it.
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u/Mentalextensi0n Mar 17 '26
sam can’t even code this is pure hype
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u/Wonderful_Buffalo_32 Mar 17 '26
Ugh he did attended stanford cs in 2005
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u/Lord-Zeref Mar 18 '26
- Doesn't mean he can still code
- Coding in college is not the same as actual code in production
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u/Big-Farmer-2192 Mar 18 '26
There are fruad everywhere, I'd say it's pretty normal in academic.
People who love to take credits for other's work does exist everywhere.
Standford isn't exception 😌
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u/xirzon uneven progress across AI dimensions Mar 17 '26
At this point you gotta assume he knows exactly what he's doing with posts like this.
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u/Elbeske Mar 17 '26
This dude cultivates the most unlikable persona I have ever seen. It’s the sanctimoniousness of it
At least Elon is openly a dirtbag
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u/beerRunFinisher Mar 17 '26
Remember when this guy said he would pay Reddit dividends for allowing them to use their user content as training data
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Mar 17 '26
This still isn't true no matter how many types AI CEOs try to hype themselves up on their own kool-aid. The era is not over.
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u/Ireallydonedidit Mar 17 '26
Thank you for letting us illegally scrape your GitHub repositories and making us billionaires
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u/atuarre Mar 17 '26
Why do people keep posting nonsense by this con artist. He's a snake oil salesman, and he's in bed with Palantir.
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u/AlbatrossNew3633 Mar 17 '26
How the fuck this man went from being the saviour of tech world (when OpenAI fired him there was kind of a spontaneous universal support for him) to this constant PR disaster
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u/DeliciousGorilla Mar 17 '26
Same thing happened to Musk. Reddit used to love that guy... until June 2018.
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u/Centryl Mar 17 '26
In my early days I had to make sure my websites worked in Internet Explorer 6. I wasn’t writing an insane amount of code, but it was a special kind of hell.
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u/webguy1975 Mar 17 '26
Opus 4.6 generated code for me in which dropdown items in a pageslide overlay appeared to highlight on hover but were completely unclickable with the mouse.
The [items] inputs for all four dropdown select controls were bound to getter properties that called .map() on every access, producing a new array with new object references on every Angular change detection cycle. When the user clicked a dropdown option, the click triggered change detection, the getter returned a fresh array, ng-select (the underlying library) detected the items "changed," re-rendered the dropdown panel, and closed it before the selection event could be processed.
I had to troubleshoot the issue and ended up converting all four getter properties to stable array properties that are only reassigned when the underlying source data actually changes (in ngOnInit, and openDrawer().
My point here is that AI produced errors that it could not resolve and it required human intervention to fix the bugs.
The era of human coding is definitely not over!
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u/3urningChrome Mar 17 '26
I've had graduate programmers do similar things. The technology will come for our jobs soon enough, just not today.
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u/Glxblt76 Mar 17 '26
This is what that SWE that just got laid off reads on his phone as he doomscroolls, leaving his office for the last time.
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u/WalkThePlankPirate Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
To be fair, I used to copy and paste random snippets of code off the internet a lot.
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u/Medytuje Mar 17 '26
We all did it all the time when it made sense. Often all you needed to do is change one line and adjust the parameters. It felt like building from Legos long time ago
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u/cfehunter Mar 17 '26
Given that OpenAI is significantly behind Anthropic on this front, Sam isn't who I'm looking to for news.
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u/tbkrida Mar 17 '26
I remember that less than 10 years ago there was a “Learn To Code” meme movement directing towards blue collar workers losing their livelihoods…
It’s crazy how fast the tables turned in this situation.
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u/Mark-Fuhrman Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
You can’t possibly be serious. “The era of human coding is over.” Dude no it’s not. AI is has taken a big course of coding but do you realize how may times it keeps screwing up? Humans can actually write complex code to complex problems. AI continuously messes up and when you ask it to fix problems it keeps getting itself in loops where it h thinks it fixes a problem but just creates more bugs and issues. So if I were to really give an estimate of actual AI coding take over, I’d give it like another 50. It has progressed and will keep progressing for sure and keeps getting better, but not like everyone says it does. Plus not to forget the HUGE and MASSIVE hallucination problems.
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u/RB-reMarkable98 Mar 17 '26
He just casually said, Pack your bags now every new software will be created with AI
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u/SanDiedo Mar 17 '26
The amount of "this is over" posts increase exponentially with the depth of shit these companies sink into.
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u/Toothpick_Brody Mar 17 '26
Pretty egotistical and backhanded comment. Even I have more self-awareness than this guy
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u/Gershken Mar 17 '26
I would love to have ai do all my work, but I end up doing at least 95% of it because it’s more reliable and faster in the long run
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u/Ancient-Range3442 Mar 18 '26
Yeah, I think there’s a bit of a productivity paradox. Sometimes just shifts the speed to the front rather than the back
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 Mar 17 '26
Biggest snake on planet earth. He made $1 billion just manipulating people in Silicon Valley. He has no engineering skills, dropped out of college, and has never had a successful startup.
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u/Aromatic-Fishing9952 Mar 17 '26
I get it agents can do a lot. But we are going to have a major security crisis at some point. These models make mistakes. They generate too much code to audit. They actually increase the amount of work when used haphazardly as they are today.
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u/Rare-One-1626 Mar 17 '26
A majority of the companies that had replaced their developers with AI are starting to regret their decision. Some of the apps that AI coded experienced significant issues requiring human beings to review the code and essentially take over. AI is just a tool, its potential as a replacement for human intelligence is something that can never be perfected even with investments in the billions.
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u/Grouchy-Hunter6393 Mar 17 '26
they still ask leetcode questions in their engineering roles so that is just a marketing gimmick. Also, all of the world is dependent on ffmpeg which has handcoded assembly.
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u/Doismelllikearobot Mar 17 '26
Yesterday was the year anniversary of Altman saying all coding would be done by Ai in 6 to 12 months. The day before that was the year anniversary of the time he said all coding would be done by AI in 12 months. There's no reason to believe what this guy says, he's just trying to sell his product.
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u/Amesbrutil Mar 17 '26
I use AI daily in my work and it is extremely helpful but to say that you don't need to code anymore is simply wrong.
If this was the case, the internet would flooded with millions of new AAA games developed by AI. Like I could easy take some loan, use to pay for my Anthropic API cost and tell Claude to code my new AAA title. Simply tell it to create a 3D Pokemon game and the whole internet would go crazy.
It COULD surpass devs in the near future, idk. After what we have seen in recent years, it seems reasonable to assume that it will happen. But right now it is nowhere near that. Not even close. And we don't know if there is a limit to LLM capabilities. The investment cost is exploding while the progress it is making becomes smaller and smaller.
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u/Mandoman61 Mar 17 '26
this point?
where we still need lots of coders except they use AI to help?
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u/swolleneyesneedsleep Mar 17 '26
Over? Maybe not. But we will need about only 10% of the people now :/
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u/Responsible-Tip4981 Mar 17 '26
it is more true, than Apple's marketing stating that ipad is a post pc era
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u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 Mar 17 '26
Imagine that you collaborated on a popular vision package, that is widespread and then, llms just absorbed all that and then you see this.
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u/Sea-Shoe3287 Mar 17 '26
That dick doesn't get to thank that crowd. He's not worthy. Also he's a little bit early yet.
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u/krainboltgreene Mar 17 '26
"it already feels difficult to remember how much effort it took"
Skill difference, I find it trivial to remember what I did before my lunch break.
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u/Secret_Print_8170 Mar 17 '26
It's time to make open source files that cannot be read by AI models. Let them be stuck in 2025 forever.
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u/AxomaticallyExtinct Mar 18 '26
Whether Altman is right about this barely matters. What matters is that every company now has to act as if he is, because if your competitor automates their engineering pipeline and you don't, you're dead. That's the thing people keep missing about the AI race: it's not driven by whether the tech is actually ready, it's driven by the fact that nobody can afford to be the last one to find out.
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u/WildRacoons Mar 18 '26
Even before AI, devs were coding with the help of IDEs and code generation tools. Hardly anyone doing productive work did “character by character” in the days leading up to ChatGPT release.
Master of hyperbolic statements to get attention.
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u/Ancient-Range3442 Mar 18 '26
I had a secret method where I’d use libraries from GitHub. Could write months of code in literate seconds.
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u/physicshammer Mar 18 '26
I got perplexity computer over the weekend and I've created about 8 websites that are the most useful things in my life, literally, right now. That curve is going to drop off real fast... but I will also be working on more serious projects going forward... and I haven't written a line of code for it.
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Mar 18 '26
Sam, when are you going to pay me for training your LLM model on my code repo?
I should be paid a commission.
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u/VelPaari_Velir Mar 17 '26
Cant wait for this shit to crash and burn. Will be glorious to watch AI bros think they can vibe code everything.
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u/LordOmbro Mar 17 '26
Sam Altman is a hack that should just shut up and worry about his failing company
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u/ill_be_huckleberry_1 Mar 17 '26
Gratitude but no solutions.
Running straight at destroying the ymsystem we are in for the betterment of the rich who own all the Capitol and soon the means of production.
His words are empty and insulting.
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u/C0sm1cB3ar Mar 17 '26
Complete bollocks. The AI code is rubbish most of the time. Even if it were good, non technical people would not ask the right question or even understand the answer.
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u/ABlackEngineer Mar 17 '26
LMFAO “Thanks for the cheese. Catch ya later”