They are pretty up front about that when they hire from what I was told by someone who went through it: that you have to “be okay” with your job not exisiting in the next couple of years
The future seniors won’t be people defined by strong technical knowledge. They’ll be the ones with “autonomy and judgment” as Anthropic puts it (read: highly social; good at climbing the corporate ladder; strong educational/professional pedigree).
These people won’t necessarily need to be trained in CS, because in 10 years no one will need to know what a data structure is. So they can come from other fields (law, business) or just from other roles within the company.
Note this is basically how it already works in every non-technical field where there’s no clear definable “skill” on which to evaluate people.
Not for those that call themselves Software Engineers, without a proper engineering degree validated by the respective country Engineering Order, possibly with a professional title exam.
Since we are talking about bridges, cars and ships, that is.
It's 2026 and people still believe in measuring productivity by lines of code^W^W^Wnumber of commits? Amazing.
Two vibecoders are walking down a forest path.
One of them spots a Zig codebase and challenges the other: “I'll give you $100 to convert this codebase to Rust!”. They accept and after spending $1000 worth of tokens on a thousand commits the codebase is now in Rust.
On the way back, the second vibecoder spots the same codebase again, and challenges back: “I'll give you $100 to convert this codebase to Zig!”. Another gajillion tokens later, the codebase is now in Zig.
Walking a little more, one vibecoder (in a moment of unusual clarity) asks the other: “It feels like we just did this for nothing”. “No”, the other responds, ”we just increased our company productivity by two thousand commits per day!”.
Where I work, PR counts are a major metric come perf reviews. Surprise, surprise every team has a pointless migration going on. The number of promotions though...
“Junior” is the wrong distinction to make. I’ve recently worked with senior engineers who are terrible at wielding agents, and recent grad engineers who multiple themselves 100x. The main way I look for software engineers now are:
- Deep curiosity and ability to absorb new information quickly
- Evidence of ability to wield and coordinate agents to the max
- Ability to clearly communicate ideas
You have these skills, you can conquer the software world.
If LLM's are supposed to get smarter, wouldn't they be able to wield agents for you? Seems like a skill with a short shelf life. In my day to day work i just use claude and it seems to spin up agents as it sees fit so I'm not sure why people need to coordinate agents to the max? If there is one thing i've seen in software engineering over many years is that sometimes software engineers prefer using flashy stuff even though it doesn't have that much benefits but they evangelize this stuff like it does. "Oh you don't use micro services and X,Y,Z for your crud app?", "Oh you use VS code and not vi?" "Why don't you maintain a data platform for your small scale data that can fit in postgres" so on and so forth.
Valid overall, but text editors like vi (or emacs or whatever else you prefer in the category) really do have major benefits and are definitely not being chosen to be "flashy". Skilled users choose one that resonates with them, and practice using it specifically. Traditional mouse-oriented editors just don't deliver that UX. It's not at all like choosing a bloated or over-engineered project architecture.
I've used vi and emacs and the number of their users that really 10x everyone else is vanishingly small. A large percentage of their userbases are people who wished they were the 10x but were much slower (or at best equal to) than the average Jetbrains tool users.
> If there is one thing i've seen in software engineering over many years is that sometimes software engineers prefer using flashy stuff even though it doesn't have that much benefits
We used to call this RDD - Resume Driven Development.
I’ve hired quite a bit over the last 10 years. Curiosity is the absolute number one thing I look for, whether for a fresh grad or a principal/staff+
The difference between a junior and a senior is still very real. With agents, knowing what to ask them to do (or not do) is bordering on more important than it ever was. A curious junior might still go down rabbit holes for things that a person who had done this before. That’s what makes them a junior. Not everything we _can_ do we _should_ do
I’d hate to be on a team with 100x junior output, yikes. Do you think seniority comes from being old or from being mentored into best practices and flexibility of pattern-matching?
There are talented and objectively nice software engineers working for Meta, Palantir, Flock, you name it. I knew some of them, warning about moving to the US at the early 2020s. They did not understand, just oblivious, happy about the comp, and that they could fulfill their "america" childhood dreams, mostly gathered from movies they watched on the 6th floor of scrappy socialist block building. They tend to complain about workplace tensions, high pressure... but evil things? No that's someone elses doing.
As if Anthropic was a model of successful company...
They are nowhere near profitable, have terribly bad products riddled with bugs (9,000+ open reports on Claude Code), and have no moat. Why would anyone listen to how they work internally?
For what it’s worth though, if your project can work on open source models or other models in general then you have the ability to vote with your feet and you still have leverage.
It does provide a useful ceiling, at least. If even Anthropic is seeing only a 2-4x revenue multiplier from AI adoption, I’m intensely skeptical of the people who run around saying they produce 10x or 100x more valuable output because they’re really good at building a software factory or whatever.
There is effectively no value in statements like these.
There is no measurement. Think about how much of a difference empirical science made in such a short amount of time. Or think about how it is impossible to optimize software without measurement etc.
Also there is the AI companies’ atrocious reliability even if you trust the measurements
You're missing the obvious. Time. There are highly talented developers who have the technical ability but had no time in the past to do these things because of real life obligations besides their job. Many are producing 10x more valuable output now. Also you're missing that Anthropic as a leading frontier lab isn't a good comparison for almost any metric for any other company in the world. It defies any principles companies usually have like unlimited talent supply.
To wit, I'm not producing 100x or even 10x more valuable output, I'm producting <infinity>x output now. I've gone from "no time/will to push through personal projects" to actively working on 5 in parallel, just because I only have to do the broad design and UX development now.
am i the only one who read this and thought 'no shit.' obviously agent hours outnumber human hours? most people operate multiple agents and function as AI nannies now. big deal.
also 'lines of code' or any other output based metric in the age of infinite slop is not a flex/indicator of usefulness or value.
and yes, everyone spends all their time reading Claude output. that doesn't mean better work is getting done, or progress is being made. i've been reviewing and fixing claude slop at work for at least a year. if anything companies/products are getting more homogonized and bloated. thanks anthropic, you are going to save the world
Without senior developers having a deep understanding of the problems underlying the systems, they'll have little to distinguish themselves from non-skilled management poltroons, who are themselves even more replaceable by agents. But the alignment problem will become even more severe.
Software do have lot of variables, real world edge cases and unknowns, I don't think 100% automated agentic development is a good things. I know you wrote it sarcastically.
This just can't be sustainable. Every increasing agent activity can only move to the point where it's literally impossible for humans to have a collective awareness of how the systems that support our lives actually work. How does anyone think this is going to end well? If as humans we loose control of vital systems, when they stop working one day (and they so easily could unless the agents are perfect and 100pct aligned with the general good of humanity (how do we even define that)) we could find ourselves without the ability to run healthcare systems and power grids, that have evolved so much such complexity that no human can intervene to fix them. I do believe that you can create feed back loops where probabilistic agents can be used to create deterministic checks and balances, and solve real problems for good. But it's a wild west at the moment and that is not what's happening in so many companies, and the solutions are not yet on the horizon. Even if the 'agents can handle it' ... where does that leave us? Unable to run our societies without puting everything through frontier LLMs? I just finished a very short story by Ted Chiang - 'The evolution of Human science' it starts at the point where it's 25 years since humans contributed a scientific paper because 'meta humans' now handle all research, and communicate digitally such that humans can only get a low fidelity report of what the agents actually know, and the endeavour to understand has become like a best effort archeological like hobby for interested humans. The story assumes that the 'meta humans' will always act in humans best interests. I believe it's from 2002, it's incredibly precient.
> Ever increasing agent activity can only move to the point where it's literally impossible for humans to have a collective awareness of how the systems that support our lives actually work
That's the point, they are setting up the economy to be run by agents and they trust that it is possible. Step 1. Teach AI human knowledge (2022-2023). Step 2. Make AI agentic (2025). Step 3. Start autonomous research and create own corpus of knowledge (2026).
Step 3 will keep compounding (as we are witnessing) and most people will be left behind. I'm not against a revolution, I'm all for it.
No one's at the wheel. It's fair (to a degree) for companies to push for short term gain, but the legislative counterbalance that is supposed to care for long term effects no longer exists.
It's not only AI. Betting is on the rise, adults and minors are being hooked by dopamine loops, social networks are causing well measured negative effects, children's educational scores are sinking worldwide, appliance manufacturers engage in surveillance...
You have to remember that an American consensus in it's current condition is really just a consensus among the corporate interests that have captured the government.
> Ever increasing agent activity can only move to the point where it's literally impossible for humans to have a collective awareness of how the systems that support our lives actually work.
fwiw, i think literally all largish corporations have been like that pre AI too?
i can gurantee you that nobody understands how the whole system works at all of my last workplaces either...
people just know their small part and hope for the best - so from a devils advocate pov, its already been proved that its sustasinable.
now wherever its _worth it_ is another question. large employers are - on average - incredibly wasteful with their resources. not to anthropics degree, but still.
if youre boostrapping, and VC token subventions go away... i suspect it'd be not worth it to develop like that. But i guess we will find out in a few month to 1-2 years
I think the difference is whether agent availability in the future is guaranteed. I agree that no one had the whole picture before, but at least theoretically you could replace x employees with another workforce who in time could be expected to match the understanding and output of the original workforce. With agents, if capability is consolidated with a single organisation and that organisation changes it's terms of business, you cannot replace the army of AGI-agents with a human workforce. It's a single and total point of failure.
Humans having understanding of the system went out the window hundreds of years ago at the latest. The "Renaissance man" era is long gone. I know you said "collective understanding", but that's not a real thing. Humans aren't borg. Our entire lives have been spent in systems we can only understand in piecemeal if at all.
Do you good understanding of where your food comes from?
How about the dollar you earned, spent, invested? Do you know how it works?
How about the clothes you wear?
This is just a tiny subset of the enormous complexity we're immersed in, and no individual or collective has a complete understanding of it. If you do, you're truly an outlier and GP's point still stands.
Some individual has an understanding of each of those areas. Why does one individual need to know the entire food chain? The discussion point is about each specific area.
Even for the COBOL based systems someone understands it well enough at the conceptual and business level. And when there's no one to the company migrates and modernizes.
You are conflating the subject matter expert who understands one area well and others not so well with a general newbie who understands nothing well
You can solve problems empirically, but you can never guarantee you've hit all the edge cases the original code did. That's fine for non-mission critical systems, but would you be ok with your passenger jet onboard systems having been rebuilt from empirical observations?
That's a funny example, given that the Wright brothers were overwhelmingly empirical compared to their competitors and succeeded as a result, because the foundation of aerodynamics was fundamentally flawed at the time. In a real sense, those systems were built from empirical observations, and most human systematizing happens post-hoc.
Two other stories in this vein: "The Machine Stops" (1909) by E.M. Forster and "Pump Six" (2008) by Paolo Bacigalupi. Very different milieus, but both deal with decadent, hedonistic futures where humanity coasts on legacy systems engineered by long-dead experts until they begin to break down and no one alive knows how to fix them.
Your hypothetical assumes that AI will suddenly vanish in its entirety, and we are left picking up the pieces.
Yet even without AI, humanity's most complex creations are not understandable by mere single humans, or even groups of them.
For example, the US Healthcare Insurance system runs on the collective power of humans (and likely an increasing bit of AI), but no one human can understand the system as a whole.
Wow, that sounds like an AI hellscape! Constant pressure to use AI agents to be more productive. That pressure requires an amount of attention that wears you out so quickly just to stay competitive that you need to build bespoke tools to orchestrate your agentic workflows. But the amount of output from that is too much too, so you need to build meta-orchestrators to orchestrate your orchestrators.
And all of this is then somehow classified as responsible development of AI, by people who claim AI could eradicate humanity, and that RSI will be our downfall. How exactly is outsourcing your work on agents to agents not RSI at this point? Why are these people still allowed to operate again?
> A financial manager built a purchase request review agent
> An executive assistant, who built a personal assistant agent for scheduling and email triage
Really? We should build our own agents for everything? Sounds a bit token-spendy.
Also, as far as I can make out, the paper was not written by AI (nor even with AI assistance?). You'd think they'd make a song and dance about it if it was. Maybe AI can't do this sort of thing yet (or ever).
See the YouTube talks on Visual Studio roadmap, is all about AI.
Even the sessions about IDE tooltips, were in fact about how to give CoPilot prompts about Visual Studio features, instead of how to use them ourselves.
.NET is also getting the AI treatment, see all the AI stuff that they are pushing on Blazor and Aspire.
I'm surprised this is not much more talked about these days. The hiring bar is going to increase so much in the next few years (already happening), and together with more layoffs driven by big tech, things aren't looking good.
Anyhropic is not a good example for anything. Their scale and growth is way beyond what like 99% of companies experiece. Their optimization formula is different.
They're celebrating elimination of junior work while offering no explanation for how future senior staff are trained, and measuring output by code volume. Lol who wrote this, can't wait to see how this plays out, if you asked even a junior they could have told you that's a terrible idea.
It really is the most misanthropic company, isn't it? But strategically is all this fearmongering about SWEs becoming obsolete even the right move for Anthropic?
Say that it is borderline true (it's not, but let's pretend). Then companies can lay off 90 devs for every 100, and buy the remaining 10 devs Claude subscriptions. Isn't it better if they keep all 100 and buy everyone a Claude sub?
So shouldn't Anthropic actually be pushing the narrative that Claude doesn't replace devs but actually makes them vastly better at their jobs and so every company, big and small, should buy every dev the highest tier Claude enterprise subscription?
A lot of it is directed at senior management who are wetting themselves at the prospect of being able to fire those irritating, demanding, highly paid developers.
Said by a company that’s increasingly desperate to convince you that there’s serious business value in using their product. The challenge is those without that conflict of interests don’t seem to agree there’s a lot of ROI.
In other news, Turkey farmers encourage you to buy more turkey for Thanksgiving.
Authors of this article: Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff, Peter McCrory
I'm too lazy to bother looking up each of their credentials. Are any of them software engineers? Do they know anything about creating, maintaining, and evolving software?
I do know that Anthropic's CEO isn't a software engineer, so it would be hard for him to evaluate their claims with any deep insight from experience.
Who cares how employment is changing at your startup? You're like an influencer on TikTok marching shit from your bedroom, pretending to have a fabulous and glamorous life. Minewhile, you are insecure, incompetent in the craft of software engineering, but play the social media influencer game because you have zero substance.
> As AI agents diffused through the company, Anthropic began producing more code per person
Anyone who has been in software for a while should hear alarm bells going off when they read this. Every line of code is a liability, not a trophy. This is what happens when people who don't know and don't care to learn about the existing body of knowledge in a discipline "reinvent" it.
Give it another year or two and Anthropic will be writing all about how they lowered LOC and got agents to be more conservative about generating new code and introduced a "verification gate" for every new line produced.
Or perhaps code becomes just another disposable artifact just like compiler-generated machine code, so understanding or maintaining it will be unnecessary.
> perhaps code becomes just another disposable artifact just like compiler-generated machine code, so understanding or maintaining it will be unnecessary.
The compiler development teams make sure that the output of the compiler is correct according to the source code input, preserving semantics and issuing errors for incorrect statements.
LLM is kind of a nondeterministic compiler. You'll want to test the hell out of the resulting code, not only to catch flaws in the prompt but also those introduced by the LLM. I'm bearish on programming but extremely bullish on testing (disclaimer: I'm a programmer).
> You'll want to test the hell out of the resulting code, not only to catch flaws in the prompt but also those introduced by the LLM.
Imagine worrying about gcc or the python interpreter that much. No wonder they use the label "reverse centaur" for LLM usage. You must think carefully before coming up with a prompt, then review the code carefully for correctness. Double the stress for no reason. Or is it just going with the vibes and slinging slop?
No, with given of defined inputs and condition, you can mathematically show a part of section bug-free, i can't remember the detail, but back then we were using mathlab polyspace to prove that.
That means knowing how output looklike with given input is important.
Obviously LLMs are, and will always be harder to "prove" correct than a compiler. However it's the correctness of the resulting software that matters, right? Coincidentally, LLMs can also help a lot with automated testing and static verification, so maybe the resulting SW won't be more bug-ridden than before LLMs.
The trend in most industries has always been towards producing more code with some bugs rather than less code that's nearly flawless. Given that, I'm pretty confident that soon I'll not even read code anymore and become a "tester" instead.
I believe that is true, but more of it is still a liability. Good code tends to be simple. Bad code tends to be verbose, and verbose code tends to be bad. As someone who has been extremely prolific both before and after AI in terms of output, and who monitors the output of LLMs (including anthropic’s best models) I know that they are usually generating a bunch of junk. It will do what you ask but it’s largely terrible. Yes, you can mitigate that with a bunch of adversarial agents, but it’s still not great. Every line of code can potentially be a security hole or cause other problems.
> Anthropic has been hiring for a smaller share of junior technical positions.
I don't wanna be the guy calling out the lie or slop but when did Anthropic hire in the last two years for junior roles? OAI and Anthropic could literally hire seamlessly the best of the best worldwide for every job they advertise without having the need to think about the poor juniors.
they actually did hire a bunch of juniors I’d worked with at the same company/startup. The mess those guys left behind before leaving was unfathomable (pre-cc, chatgpt/cursor vibecoded horseshit work).
actually, to me, it was one of the first signs of what’s favored and praised in the AI space (companies building models, doing ai research). an accelerationist mindset: do things to save the day and demonstrate some progress. no one cares much about what comes next, the human aspect, or the headaches you inflict upon your coworkers.
anthropic hiring those guys is not surprising at all, especially given their vibecode-oriented workflows disguised as next-gen product engineering (which is educated vibecoding adorned with some superficial engineering ethos).
they hired some seniors too. one of them went to work on claude code because he cared a lot about the craft and the product. (how ironic right!?)
soon after, they started talking crazy cult stuff like “the software problem is solved” and “this is probably the last job i (can) have (as a software engineer, product developer).” he also told a friend who applied to their team, “better hurry up, we might become jobless in 6 months” (this was almost a year ago :S).
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 7.6 ms ] threadhttps://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/
These people won’t necessarily need to be trained in CS, because in 10 years no one will need to know what a data structure is. So they can come from other fields (law, business) or just from other roles within the company.
Note this is basically how it already works in every non-technical field where there’s no clear definable “skill” on which to evaluate people.
The point is that judgment won’t be needed on technical aspects. It will be more soft decisions like how to manage the agents.
Maybe this is the bottom and things only get better from here. I’m hopeful.
Software, surprisingly, is a technical skill. Stop comparing it with poetry, sales or dancing.
Since we are talking about bridges, cars and ships, that is.
Two vibecoders are walking down a forest path.
One of them spots a Zig codebase and challenges the other: “I'll give you $100 to convert this codebase to Rust!”. They accept and after spending $1000 worth of tokens on a thousand commits the codebase is now in Rust.
On the way back, the second vibecoder spots the same codebase again, and challenges back: “I'll give you $100 to convert this codebase to Zig!”. Another gajillion tokens later, the codebase is now in Zig.
Walking a little more, one vibecoder (in a moment of unusual clarity) asks the other: “It feels like we just did this for nothing”. “No”, the other responds, ”we just increased our company productivity by two thousand commits per day!”.
- Deep curiosity and ability to absorb new information quickly - Evidence of ability to wield and coordinate agents to the max - Ability to clearly communicate ideas
You have these skills, you can conquer the software world.
I've used vi and emacs and the number of their users that really 10x everyone else is vanishingly small. A large percentage of their userbases are people who wished they were the 10x but were much slower (or at best equal to) than the average Jetbrains tool users.
I have seen multiple cases that proves otherwise, some new programmers try to learn Vi because "All the cool haxxer on youtube use it"
We used to call this RDD - Resume Driven Development.
The difference between a junior and a senior is still very real. With agents, knowing what to ask them to do (or not do) is bordering on more important than it ever was. A curious junior might still go down rabbit holes for things that a person who had done this before. That’s what makes them a junior. Not everything we _can_ do we _should_ do
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They are nowhere near profitable, have terribly bad products riddled with bugs (9,000+ open reports on Claude Code), and have no moat. Why would anyone listen to how they work internally?
There simply is no way to separate what’s reporting and what’s advertising.
There is no measurement. Think about how much of a difference empirical science made in such a short amount of time. Or think about how it is impossible to optimize software without measurement etc.
Also there is the AI companies’ atrocious reliability even if you trust the measurements
The company is literally trying to sell itself via an IPO ... every single word they say is advertising.
So while some stuff may transfer over as a general thing, a lot will probably not.
Still interesting, of course, but to be consumed with a mountain of salt.
I think you left a tiny bit out: the smartest model in the world
probably irrelevant detail
also 'lines of code' or any other output based metric in the age of infinite slop is not a flex/indicator of usefulness or value.
and yes, everyone spends all their time reading Claude output. that doesn't mean better work is getting done, or progress is being made. i've been reviewing and fixing claude slop at work for at least a year. if anything companies/products are getting more homogonized and bloated. thanks anthropic, you are going to save the world
That's the point, they are setting up the economy to be run by agents and they trust that it is possible. Step 1. Teach AI human knowledge (2022-2023). Step 2. Make AI agentic (2025). Step 3. Start autonomous research and create own corpus of knowledge (2026).
Step 3 will keep compounding (as we are witnessing) and most people will be left behind. I'm not against a revolution, I'm all for it.
It's not only AI. Betting is on the rise, adults and minors are being hooked by dopamine loops, social networks are causing well measured negative effects, children's educational scores are sinking worldwide, appliance manufacturers engage in surveillance...
It truly feels like the wild west.
In the US. When the inevitable legislations start popping up worldwide, don't be surprised when somehow the American consensus will be to do nothing.
fwiw, i think literally all largish corporations have been like that pre AI too? i can gurantee you that nobody understands how the whole system works at all of my last workplaces either...
people just know their small part and hope for the best - so from a devils advocate pov, its already been proved that its sustasinable. now wherever its _worth it_ is another question. large employers are - on average - incredibly wasteful with their resources. not to anthropics degree, but still.
if youre boostrapping, and VC token subventions go away... i suspect it'd be not worth it to develop like that. But i guess we will find out in a few month to 1-2 years
How about the dollar you earned, spent, invested? Do you know how it works?
How about the clothes you wear?
This is just a tiny subset of the enormous complexity we're immersed in, and no individual or collective has a complete understanding of it. If you do, you're truly an outlier and GP's point still stands.
Even for the COBOL based systems someone understands it well enough at the conceptual and business level. And when there's no one to the company migrates and modernizes.
You are conflating the subject matter expert who understands one area well and others not so well with a general newbie who understands nothing well
I don't think it is. @squidmaster specifically noted, 'The "Renaissance man" era is long gone.'
Yet even without AI, humanity's most complex creations are not understandable by mere single humans, or even groups of them.
For example, the US Healthcare Insurance system runs on the collective power of humans (and likely an increasing bit of AI), but no one human can understand the system as a whole.
And all of this is then somehow classified as responsible development of AI, by people who claim AI could eradicate humanity, and that RSI will be our downfall. How exactly is outsourcing your work on agents to agents not RSI at this point? Why are these people still allowed to operate again?
> An executive assistant, who built a personal assistant agent for scheduling and email triage
Really? We should build our own agents for everything? Sounds a bit token-spendy.
Also, as far as I can make out, the paper was not written by AI (nor even with AI assistance?). You'd think they'd make a song and dance about it if it was. Maybe AI can't do this sort of thing yet (or ever).
See the YouTube talks on Visual Studio roadmap, is all about AI.
Even the sessions about IDE tooltips, were in fact about how to give CoPilot prompts about Visual Studio features, instead of how to use them ourselves.
.NET is also getting the AI treatment, see all the AI stuff that they are pushing on Blazor and Aspire.
Anyhropic is not a good example for anything. Their scale and growth is way beyond what like 99% of companies experiece. Their optimization formula is different.
Say that it is borderline true (it's not, but let's pretend). Then companies can lay off 90 devs for every 100, and buy the remaining 10 devs Claude subscriptions. Isn't it better if they keep all 100 and buy everyone a Claude sub?
So shouldn't Anthropic actually be pushing the narrative that Claude doesn't replace devs but actually makes them vastly better at their jobs and so every company, big and small, should buy every dev the highest tier Claude enterprise subscription?
In other news, Turkey farmers encourage you to buy more turkey for Thanksgiving.
I'm too lazy to bother looking up each of their credentials. Are any of them software engineers? Do they know anything about creating, maintaining, and evolving software?
I do know that Anthropic's CEO isn't a software engineer, so it would be hard for him to evaluate their claims with any deep insight from experience.
Anyone who has been in software for a while should hear alarm bells going off when they read this. Every line of code is a liability, not a trophy. This is what happens when people who don't know and don't care to learn about the existing body of knowledge in a discipline "reinvent" it.
Give it another year or two and Anthropic will be writing all about how they lowered LOC and got agents to be more conservative about generating new code and introduced a "verification gate" for every new line produced.
The compiler development teams make sure that the output of the compiler is correct according to the source code input, preserving semantics and issuing errors for incorrect statements.
Who is doing that for LLM prompts?
Imagine worrying about gcc or the python interpreter that much. No wonder they use the label "reverse centaur" for LLM usage. You must think carefully before coming up with a prompt, then review the code carefully for correctness. Double the stress for no reason. Or is it just going with the vibes and slinging slop?
That means knowing how output looklike with given input is important.
The trend in most industries has always been towards producing more code with some bugs rather than less code that's nearly flawless. Given that, I'm pretty confident that soon I'll not even read code anymore and become a "tester" instead.
I don't wanna be the guy calling out the lie or slop but when did Anthropic hire in the last two years for junior roles? OAI and Anthropic could literally hire seamlessly the best of the best worldwide for every job they advertise without having the need to think about the poor juniors.
actually, to me, it was one of the first signs of what’s favored and praised in the AI space (companies building models, doing ai research). an accelerationist mindset: do things to save the day and demonstrate some progress. no one cares much about what comes next, the human aspect, or the headaches you inflict upon your coworkers.
anthropic hiring those guys is not surprising at all, especially given their vibecode-oriented workflows disguised as next-gen product engineering (which is educated vibecoding adorned with some superficial engineering ethos).
they hired some seniors too. one of them went to work on claude code because he cared a lot about the craft and the product. (how ironic right!?)
soon after, they started talking crazy cult stuff like “the software problem is solved” and “this is probably the last job i (can) have (as a software engineer, product developer).” he also told a friend who applied to their team, “better hurry up, we might become jobless in 6 months” (this was almost a year ago :S).