This just can't be sustainable. 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. 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 (The stories of your life and others is the collection the story is in. Many of them are very relevant to modern AI actually).
Unless something dramatic changes and it'll become cheap to "constantly re-educate" the models to learn the new fundamental facts about the system (ideally with a small lag of maybe a few days like with humans) I see no reason to think that LLMs can have a profound understanding of how business systems work of a remotely comparable quality to humans. Just adding the context about the system already reduces it's capacity significantly according to what I can tell. Not having large context helps somewhat at a cost of having to explain lots of task-relevant things to LLM over and over again...
> The agents only have to be better than we are and we’re not very good. Same argument as self-driving.
Self-driving requires less holistic thinking than imagining, building, and evolving large scale systems. It requires abilities that LLMs do not have. It requires non-symbolic reasoning, intuition, etc. that are beyond LLMs.
Imagine a country where no one can drive, and all transportation relies on a few AI monopolies.
If you don’t pay them, you can walk by feet.
If they ban you, you can walk by feet.
If their infrastructure is damaged, no one and nothing will be able to move.
I'm reminded of the visual novel "Root Double -Before Crime * After Days-" where one guy in town having a manual petrol-powered car instead of using robotaxis is a significant plot point.
You're more than welcome to wake up in a country that is 100% dependent (in all spheres of life and economy!) on a few monopolies. I'm not sure that thing will be a country anymore.
BTW, when (not if, but when) a war happens, they will become very nice targets to render this exact country completely disabled.
I can easily imagine, say, Russia destroying a few datacenters not with nuclear missiles, but with some relatively trivial local ground-based FPV attack or whatever.
And voila. No cargo moved, no code changes or fixes, no medical diagnosis made,etc.
A whole country is disabled.
There was a book I read maybe 10-15 years ago about a world where governments Essentially dissolved and in place there was nothing but mega corp monopoloys - Jennifer Government was the name ( if you ever played the MUD Nation States yk)
I thought that was an interesting idea, but not something that could ever happen..
> 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.
It is all entirely advertising. Anything they say. Of course they want all companies to require their engineers to not think anymore and just press accept on their software. It's how they make money. Most c suite is absolutely deluded enough to believe them too.
They are offering a cure to the defining contradiction of capitalism: The tension between capital wanting maximal self-reproduction and labor wanting a fair wage and a good life.
Anthropics pitch is to finally redeem capitalism by getting rid of those annoying workers and their annoying demands - that is why C-Suites are so excited about it, that is why its talked about in messianic language.
Hard agree. Why else are they writing manifestos and talking about the antichrist...
To the poster below who thinks anthropic is in this to destroy capitalism(lmao rofl), I guess maybe if you are interested in fuedal societies run by people who currently bomb schools, have chatbots and finely tuned recommendation engines designed to make children commit suicide but only after extracting as much capital as possible beforehand, try to sway elections in foreign countries, theottle the Internet so dictators can win wars, etc. Yea sure man they are all definitely interested in making the world better for everyone by also automating one of the few middle class jobs available in a country which has no manufacturing to fall back on. Super normal timeline.
It is even worse than feudalism.
Their “utopia” doesn’t need an economy nor does it need a population.
Feudalism indeed relied on its population and on its primitive economy.
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.
It's easy for AI to make somebody 100x more productive if they were insanely unproductive in the first place. In the workplace this is unlikely, but in hobby spaces I believe it. Lots of hobbyists using AI to program micros/etc that, in the past, would have been beyond their capabilities without extensive study first.
Consider for instance the bicycle youtuber Berm Peak, who's been using AI to reverse engineer and hack shitty ebikes. This kind of work is outside his expertise, so the relative lift he gets is massive.
I think a lot of "unproductive" people who use AI to "100x their output" in things they're not good at delude themselves into thinking they're being productive. You see people post vibe coded "projects" on places like linkedin where no one will ever use or look at it, and it doesn't even serve as a learning project. Or people who used to hate writing now posting complete slop blog posts 3 times a week which no one will ever read.
If it gets the job done, that's what matters. Linkedin shitters were never going to do anything interesting in the first place, look at what actual hobbyists are making instead. People complained about Berm Peak using an LLM to code up a new user interface and control software for an ebike, but it worked so the complainers can be ignored.
Exactly. Generative AI, so far, has clearly lead to increases in activity. I still have yet to see more than a handful of projects in which it has actually led to productivity and that's usually because the pilot still spent significant time on ensuring quality was high and that the outcomes actually align with what a business needs. In these cases, the boost is not 100x, it's a much more modest 2x-3x at most.
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
I mean, your productivity gains are relative to your starting point in some way.
If you are already an advanced company filled with skilled people, you may not see the gains that a mid-tier company filled with mediocre seat warmers would see when their "best and brightest" start adopting AI to replace said seat warmers.
“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.
Well anthropic says you are wrong and wants juniors to disappear into another trade. This absolutely wouldn't be a coordinated effort to deskill Americans and force companies to helplessly accept whatever LLM code is generated without human review. Most certainly not. They wouldn't target regulated industries that require certain work praxis like biotechnology and lobby heavily with the military and government to change laws around this. Definitely not!
What would Anthropic gain by wanting juniors to disappear into another trade? Obviously their goal is to turn a profit meaning they need to be more efficient and they seem to believe that will come from senior engineers. They have the supply for it, why hire juniors when seniors are dying to working in your shop
Uh complete market capture for an entire industry that costs billions of dollars a year. They have been claiming software engineer was solved for years now.
If everyone does it, no one monitors it anymore, and quality degrades the only way out is more tokens.
Bingo. From day one what these companies have really been after is not "intelligence" but rather mass production and the concomitant quality expectation and behavioral shifts that go with it.
All they really need to do is convince enough people to adopt lower expectations and accept worse software products. At that point, mission accomplished. They've annihilated the source of value originally provided by people who actually know how to do things.
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 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
Where I work we make real hardware and software that are used by real people doing real jobs every day. We use AI but in that environment someone who made Jackobriens comment would be seen as an idiot, someone who doesn't have a clue how to build software with real users that has to work with few bugs and be maintainable.
But there are so many people who make statements like his that maybe we should assume that some of them are not idiots or bots. If he's not an idiot it means that he's working in an environment where that kind of statement is paying off. So it could be, for example, that he doesn't really have profitable customers. His main 'customers' are investors who are clueless, or who know that they are clueless but don't care because they are going to move it on to a greater fool anyway. Or that because there aren't any customers, the only thing they can measure is 'productivity' in terms of 'number of unused, unprofitable and unsustainable features'
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.
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
> Anthropic reportedly screens job candidates with a culture interview testing whether they would put the company's mission ahead of their future wealth. One applicant was asked how they would feel if a safety decision sent Anthropic's stock to zero.
C-suite are there to protect the owners so they don't get in trouble if their company breaks the law. That makes them the most important position. Being a good manager is just a bonus.
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.
I would love to see productivity effects in revenues/profits and risk (how much more revenue/profit per head, for example) - in the end commits etc. aren't quite enough.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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...
I think you're right in your comparison and that's way we'll soon see mass layoffs of software engineers. Software can now be produced with less people than before but I don't think there's market for more software.
Historically, more efficient technology has led to a greater demand. It began with more efficient steam engines that required less coal for the same amount of work. That didn’t lead to a reduction in demand for coal, instead the acceleration in demand for coal changed the world.
However you measure it, in LOC or in MB or in ops per second, demand for more software always seems insatiable. This trend will likely continue up until software can be produced with zero humans at all. But I can’t see that happening unless we invent actual real artificial intelligence.
A counterexample that I can think of is agriculture. In the past almost everybody worked in it, now there are barely any farmers (relative to the overall population) producing much more food than before.
no, i'd be more convinced if positions drop for tier 4 companies where everything is a mess. Companies like Anthropic have every incentive to build their system around AI accessibility and understanding.
Because of fears of AI, and people watching these indicators as hawks, the exact opposite will happen, they will try delaying this as much as possible to delay the backlash until it's too late.
Elon already stopped talking about job loses and doom, and tries to talk only about the positive.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
This just can't be sustainable. 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. 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 (The stories of your life and others is the collection the story is in. Many of them are very relevant to modern AI actually).
The agents only have to be better than we are and we’re not very good. Same argument as self-driving.
Don’t fear change.
Unless something dramatic changes and it'll become cheap to "constantly re-educate" the models to learn the new fundamental facts about the system (ideally with a small lag of maybe a few days like with humans) I see no reason to think that LLMs can have a profound understanding of how business systems work of a remotely comparable quality to humans. Just adding the context about the system already reduces it's capacity significantly according to what I can tell. Not having large context helps somewhat at a cost of having to explain lots of task-relevant things to LLM over and over again...
Online / continual learning will solve this problem. Test time training has already proven to be effective.
> The agents only have to be better than we are and we’re not very good. Same argument as self-driving.
Self-driving requires less holistic thinking than imagining, building, and evolving large scale systems. It requires abilities that LLMs do not have. It requires non-symbolic reasoning, intuition, etc. that are beyond LLMs.
Intuition is just system 1 thinking. Nothing that doesn't already exist.
> Intuition is just system 1 thinking. Nothing that doesn't already exist.
Intuition exists outside the human brain?
Imagine a country where no one can drive, and all transportation relies on a few AI monopolies.
If you don’t pay them, you can walk by feet. If they ban you, you can walk by feet. If their infrastructure is damaged, no one and nothing will be able to move.
Get your own compute, require and force openweights and right to compute. Make sure NV and AMD keep making prosumer hardware that can run Kimi k3
I'm reminded of the visual novel "Root Double -Before Crime * After Days-" where one guy in town having a manual petrol-powered car instead of using robotaxis is a significant plot point.
Battlestar Galactica also relies on a pre-computerised starship as being the only hope for humanity.
You’re more than welcome to keep writing code by hand. It’s not illegal… wouldn’t recommend it though.
Good point about infra, but that’s already the case with Cloudflare, GitHub, aws, etc
You're more than welcome to wake up in a country that is 100% dependent (in all spheres of life and economy!) on a few monopolies. I'm not sure that thing will be a country anymore.
BTW, when (not if, but when) a war happens, they will become very nice targets to render this exact country completely disabled.
Your last point is the one that I find most compelling.
Humans are autonomous, distributed, and adaptable. In a package that weighs ~150 lbs, with very low energy requirements.
You literally cannot wipe them out without a sustained and incredibly expensive ground campaign, and even then it's not likely.
AI in a data center on the other hand... So easily disabled.
I can easily imagine, say, Russia destroying a few datacenters not with nuclear missiles, but with some relatively trivial local ground-based FPV attack or whatever.
And voila. No cargo moved, no code changes or fixes, no medical diagnosis made,etc. A whole country is disabled.
There was a book I read maybe 10-15 years ago about a world where governments Essentially dissolved and in place there was nothing but mega corp monopoloys - Jennifer Government was the name ( if you ever played the MUD Nation States yk)
I thought that was an interesting idea, but not something that could ever happen..
> 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.
The issue with this kind of report is that you inevitably end up thinking "They would say that, would they".
There simply is no way to separate what’s reporting and what’s advertising.
It is all entirely advertising. Anything they say. Of course they want all companies to require their engineers to not think anymore and just press accept on their software. It's how they make money. Most c suite is absolutely deluded enough to believe them too.
Not just deluded. Ideologically committed.
They are offering a cure to the defining contradiction of capitalism: The tension between capital wanting maximal self-reproduction and labor wanting a fair wage and a good life.
Anthropics pitch is to finally redeem capitalism by getting rid of those annoying workers and their annoying demands - that is why C-Suites are so excited about it, that is why its talked about in messianic language.
Hard agree. Why else are they writing manifestos and talking about the antichrist...
To the poster below who thinks anthropic is in this to destroy capitalism(lmao rofl), I guess maybe if you are interested in fuedal societies run by people who currently bomb schools, have chatbots and finely tuned recommendation engines designed to make children commit suicide but only after extracting as much capital as possible beforehand, try to sway elections in foreign countries, theottle the Internet so dictators can win wars, etc. Yea sure man they are all definitely interested in making the world better for everyone by also automating one of the few middle class jobs available in a country which has no manufacturing to fall back on. Super normal timeline.
They are offering something that will destroy capitalism.
Indeed. And cement its end-stage, techno-feudalism, where capitalists are elevated to lords and labor is demoted to serfs dependent on handouts.
Unless we somehow manage public control of AI, in which case we could hope for a Star Trek style technological utopia.
Rosa Luxemburgs word's have never rung truer - Socialism or Barbarism!
It is even worse than feudalism. Their “utopia” doesn’t need an economy nor does it need a population. Feudalism indeed relied on its population and on its primitive economy.
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.
It's easy for AI to make somebody 100x more productive if they were insanely unproductive in the first place. In the workplace this is unlikely, but in hobby spaces I believe it. Lots of hobbyists using AI to program micros/etc that, in the past, would have been beyond their capabilities without extensive study first.
Consider for instance the bicycle youtuber Berm Peak, who's been using AI to reverse engineer and hack shitty ebikes. This kind of work is outside his expertise, so the relative lift he gets is massive.
I think a lot of "unproductive" people who use AI to "100x their output" in things they're not good at delude themselves into thinking they're being productive. You see people post vibe coded "projects" on places like linkedin where no one will ever use or look at it, and it doesn't even serve as a learning project. Or people who used to hate writing now posting complete slop blog posts 3 times a week which no one will ever read.
If it gets the job done, that's what matters. Linkedin shitters were never going to do anything interesting in the first place, look at what actual hobbyists are making instead. People complained about Berm Peak using an LLM to code up a new user interface and control software for an ebike, but it worked so the complainers can be ignored.
Exactly. Generative AI, so far, has clearly lead to increases in activity. I still have yet to see more than a handful of projects in which it has actually led to productivity and that's usually because the pilot still spent significant time on ensuring quality was high and that the outcomes actually align with what a business needs. In these cases, the boost is not 100x, it's a much more modest 2x-3x at most.
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
I mean, your productivity gains are relative to your starting point in some way.
If you are already an advanced company filled with skilled people, you may not see the gains that a mid-tier company filled with mediocre seat warmers would see when their "best and brightest" start adopting AI to replace said seat warmers.
Yeah it’s all hype marketing before the bubble pops
Loathe this company and everything they put out.
The only change in employment at Anthropic I’m interested in hearing about is their leaders going to jail
Glad I'm not alone.
“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.
Well anthropic says you are wrong and wants juniors to disappear into another trade. This absolutely wouldn't be a coordinated effort to deskill Americans and force companies to helplessly accept whatever LLM code is generated without human review. Most certainly not. They wouldn't target regulated industries that require certain work praxis like biotechnology and lobby heavily with the military and government to change laws around this. Definitely not!
What would Anthropic gain by wanting juniors to disappear into another trade? Obviously their goal is to turn a profit meaning they need to be more efficient and they seem to believe that will come from senior engineers. They have the supply for it, why hire juniors when seniors are dying to working in your shop
I suspect it will be more difficult to increase the price to above actual cost if there is capacity for alternatives.
Uh complete market capture for an entire industry that costs billions of dollars a year. They have been claiming software engineer was solved for years now.
If everyone does it, no one monitors it anymore, and quality degrades the only way out is more tokens.
Bingo. From day one what these companies have really been after is not "intelligence" but rather mass production and the concomitant quality expectation and behavioral shifts that go with it.
All they really need to do is convince enough people to adopt lower expectations and accept worse software products. At that point, mission accomplished. They've annihilated the source of value originally provided by people who actually know how to do things.
Is the goal obviously to turn a profit?
I mean real profit, not "adjusted profit."
More paying users. They want more paying users.
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 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 feel like knowing when to say no or call an agents bluff is another useful skill
> I’ve recently worked with senior engineers who are terrible at wielding agents, and recent grad engineers who multiple themselves 100x
Wow, so you worked with recent grads who are producing 100x the slop? No wonder Anthropic doesn't hire junior engineers.
Lol exactly what I thought when I read it.
"People with no taste or experience mass generating code by copying tickets into Claude and pressing accept is the best!" Ohhhhkie dokie broskie
Where I work we make real hardware and software that are used by real people doing real jobs every day. We use AI but in that environment someone who made Jackobriens comment would be seen as an idiot, someone who doesn't have a clue how to build software with real users that has to work with few bugs and be maintainable.
But there are so many people who make statements like his that maybe we should assume that some of them are not idiots or bots. If he's not an idiot it means that he's working in an environment where that kind of statement is paying off. So it could be, for example, that he doesn't really have profitable customers. His main 'customers' are investors who are clueless, or who know that they are clueless but don't care because they are going to move it on to a greater fool anyway. Or that because there aren't any customers, the only thing they can measure is 'productivity' in terms of 'number of unused, unprofitable and unsustainable features'
As obvious as it seems to say, with no new juniors there will be no new seniors.
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.
How does one develop strong judgement without strong technical knowledge?
This doesn’t seem like a real problem for companies since they could start up internship programs if they need to.
They probably assume they won't need seniors either by the time that's a problem
"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!"
Thanks for reminding me to rewatch Event Horizon for the N-th time.
Not Back to the Future? In Event Horizon they weren't going to need eyes to see. Whatever, I'm going to rewatch both!
If we can believe Zager and Evans, it's the year 4545 when the need for eyes dwindles.
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
Automating away the tedious parts of your work is something sysadmins and programmers have been doing for a long time. For example see:
https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/
If they said that to me I'd assume they mean because the company will run out of cash and collapse.
That too
> Anthropic reportedly screens job candidates with a culture interview testing whether they would put the company's mission ahead of their future wealth. One applicant was asked how they would feel if a safety decision sent Anthropic's stock to zero.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/anthropic-...
As obvious as it seems to say, if AI becomes smarter than humans in 3 years, this will not be the problem.
A Company with only C level executives.
Even they can be replaced. They probably won’t even be last to go.
C-suite are there to protect the owners so they don't get in trouble if their company breaks the law. That makes them the most important position. Being a good manager is just a bonus.
Isn't there a Golgafrincham Ark for that?
The parent comment didn't require a load-bearing "if".
If that will ever be a problem (it will not), they have enough money and clout to take seniors from other companies.
One should keep in mind that whatever anthropic discovers there is a discovery made by a company with an infinite cash and hype faucet.
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.
> by a company with an infinite cash and hype faucet
I think you left a tiny bit out: the smartest model in the world
probably irrelevant detail
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.
OK, I bothered looking them up. They are all economists it seems. Go figure.
Lazy argument on multiple fronts. For starters Dario was a software engineer
Most comments are lazy.
“Anthropic bad because automation of labour”
“Claude bad because it hallucinated that one time”
“This is a marketing post to hype up ipo numbers”
I would love to see productivity effects in revenues/profits and risk (how much more revenue/profit per head, for example) - in the end commits etc. aren't quite enough.
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.
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?
Recently claude on vscode got blanked for whole day, Fixed after the update on next day
Because software engineering is solved. These aren't bugs according to boris. Implemented as designed.
VSCode is being vibe coded and it's noticeable, they don't have proper QA before release.
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.
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?
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!”.
Ah, the classic economists and GDP joke.
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...
I think you're right in your comparison and that's way we'll soon see mass layoffs of software engineers. Software can now be produced with less people than before but I don't think there's market for more software.
Historically, more efficient technology has led to a greater demand. It began with more efficient steam engines that required less coal for the same amount of work. That didn’t lead to a reduction in demand for coal, instead the acceleration in demand for coal changed the world.
However you measure it, in LOC or in MB or in ops per second, demand for more software always seems insatiable. This trend will likely continue up until software can be produced with zero humans at all. But I can’t see that happening unless we invent actual real artificial intelligence.
A counterexample that I can think of is agriculture. In the past almost everybody worked in it, now there are barely any farmers (relative to the overall population) producing much more food than before.
At some point AI labs will start benchmarking their latest models by the number of humans they still have working in their companies.
I've wondering if a potential leading indicator for AGI could be a large drop off in open positions from a frontier lab.
no, i'd be more convinced if positions drop for tier 4 companies where everything is a mess. Companies like Anthropic have every incentive to build their system around AI accessibility and understanding.
Yeah I think it is the main indicator for many people, including myself.
Obviously it would need to be sustained for a reasonable amount of time while also showing at least stable finances.
Because of fears of AI, and people watching these indicators as hawks, the exact opposite will happen, they will try delaying this as much as possible to delay the backlash until it's too late.
Elon already stopped talking about job loses and doom, and tries to talk only about the positive.
> 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.
> 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.
That verification gate will be automated as well.
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
how we will get next generation seniors, if no body hire juniors and freshers?
The plan is to make the AI a little better so that it can do to the seniors what it did to the juniors.
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.
Because they think Claude will eventually replace all engineers.
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?
Is it just me that wonders if everyone having "an army of Claudes" is an unsustainable token burn for anyone not affiliated with a Frontier Lab?
Not if firing / not hiring a software engineer is worth 100-300 thousand dollar in tokens.
yea but you have much more leverage over humans than you do over some company who spends it's time trying to see how it can squeeze it's customers.
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.
I hope they understand that those "essays" are long past due date of being remotely interesting.
it was interesting in the beginning when there was technical substance, but now its just techno-bros vision of deep thoughts
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.
> 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).