I feel that you can see quite strongly the truth in “writing code was never the point” when you encounter inevitably at every company the guy who has been around forever but doesn’t seem to be working particularly hard. Their value is (was) no longer in writing code at a furious pace all day. It was having a coherent, intelligible and communicable theory of the software system the company is founded on.
I propose this thought experiment: put all living mathematicians in a very long bus. This bus crashes and they all tragically lose their lives. Can we really say mathematics simply marches onwards with AI alone? Let’s say Anthropic needs a new research result to improve Claude. Are we really already at the point where we burn tokens ad infinitum and arrive at the end of scientific progress in some timely fashion?
I actually have a rather dim view of the "writing code was never the point" line. Not because it's objectively wrong, but because I see it as something we're mostly telling ourselves to feel better about the status quo. Ability to write good code has been highly celebrated (and remunerated) for decades. As it is becoming less relevant, we immediately backtrack and start lionizing the parts where we can still be useful instead. Consider the counterfactual - AI continued to be terrible at writing code, but weirdly better at humans at product decisions, architecture etc. In this universe, saying "coding was never the point" would not be popular.
It also find little solace in it aside from 'well this version of GPT isn't taking your job'. AI labs certainly have no intention for the higher level skills to stay in the human-only domain. The veteran developer with the coherent theory of a large stack is immensely valuable today. But they also don't survive if a company can drop a few coders' salaries on rewriting that stack from scratch - faster, fewer bugs, more coherent, able to react to changing business requirements with more agility etc. I am not saying this is where we are, but I think there is a reasonably good chance this is where our road is leading us.
The counterfactual does not sound appealing in the least. That's basically, AI tells human coders what to do, tells us to re-do our architecture when they don't like it, and generally removes all control and initiative from us. But we get to write a for-loop by ourselves? That's our victory?
Maybe it's just me, but imagining that counterfactual reinforces that "writing code was never the point." At least, for me, I enjoyed writing code because it allowed me to design the architecture rather than having some architect lead or engineering manager above me decide.
Yeah I agree. I used Fable 5.1 again and my token 30% suddenly gone.
I usually develop with superpowers planing. And 30% is disappeared with only planning.
I turned back to Opus directly
Yes, I think this project is a good example of how complex domains aren't simply solvable just by pointing ever more intelligence at the system, even when the code is all open source and the issues are all well defined. I say this as a contributor!
I used to find internet slang very piercing and illuminating. I felt I was able to describe certain things which were difficult or impossible to convey with AFK language. But now that this way of speaking has become normalized outside of the internet, I find it’s lost this piercing quality, and just makes me confused. If only this cloud in the sky would move away!
From 1990 to 2025, the number of people in extreme poverty dropped from around 2.3 billion to roughly 831 million. I think we're making fast enough progress here to warrant public companies going to space on their own dime and volition.
I don't think there's much value in college anymore outside of as a class signifier, and most schools are signifying that you are not in the right social class.
College is the last and only place most kids (United States) will ever be academically challenged. It would be scary to live in a world where this is not available.
The high rate of college degrees is a historical anomaly, and of course it's a sham. Most are not truly intellectually challenged in some deep formative ways who get some easy BA diploma to then do some generic administrative MS Office point and click job. It's just due to education inflation, where now everyone is pushed though high school regardless of what they know, so it lost its signaling value. In a sane world, tertiary education would be much smaller, for those who actually need it and have aptitude. It would avoid wasting so many years.
I don't think that's true at all, although the roles which falsify it are generally invisible to or (as you can see downthread) looked down upon in Internet discourse. You do well at your local state school, you join whichever company's hiring near you as a low-level analyst, and with a bit of luck and hard work maybe you make it to Senior Manager of Regional Operations by the time your second kid is born. This is a valuable career path which many people are happy with and proud of.
100% agree. If the models are so capable that they're advancing math, it doesn't seem like a stretch to expect they should be able to determine with "doing math research" entails and the best way to use their capabilities towards that end. Why do we need to hand hold the models by telling them to do parallel research, keep threads independent, etc.
Because they're not aware of what user wants, and they need to know what expectation is, if it finds out it's a famous open problem it may think informing the user and not trying is best option as average user may not prefer it spending hours when success isn't guaranteed, by telling it to use it's available tools and not stop at partial progress, use subagents for various independent approaches it's allowing LLM to know what it should do and what counts as success. These things do great when goal is well defined.
I propose this thought experiment: put all living mathematicians in a very long bus. This bus crashes and they all tragically lose their lives. Can we really say mathematics simply marches onwards with AI alone? Let’s say Anthropic needs a new research result to improve Claude. Are we really already at the point where we burn tokens ad infinitum and arrive at the end of scientific progress in some timely fashion?
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