Presentation: The Ladder is Missing Rungs: Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle

Alasdair Allan: Not 5 years ago, but 12 months ago now, almost to the day in fact, someone else stood up at an entirely different conference in New York, and during their talk they said this. They said that within 12 months AI will write essentially all of the code. I'd expect some of you in here today still write code, or at least some of you run teams that still write code by hand, like savages. The person who said this was Dario Amodei, the co-inventor of RLHF, the training technique behind virtually every modern AI, and the co-founder of Anthropic. He said that within 3 to 6 months, AI will be writing 90% of all the code, and within 12 months, virtually entirely all of it. At the six-month mark Amodei claimed vindication saying that 90% figure was absolutely true, at least within Anthropic. Twelve months on, almost to the day, and that's not exactly what happened, is it? A detailed analysis by Redwood Research concluded that the 90% number he quoted was misleading. If you count only code committed to repositories, it was closer to 50%, which, at least to me, is still a pretty shocking number.…