Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 69 posts

Re: Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

#31

I think this is the wrong question. The right question is how much human code can a human push now vs prior to AI. Everything we've done in coding has been assisted. Prior to this current generation of web applications, we had the advent of concepts like Object Orientated Programming and prior to that even C was a massive move up from Assembly and punch cards. AI has written a lot of code. AI has written very little…

> Software engineers are pushing a magnitude more code and producing more functional utility and solving more bugs than ever before Citation needed

More programmers than ever before makes this implicitly true.

It’s not as clever as the author hoped.

Re: Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

#32

> If AI is a threat to software engineering, I wouldn't expect many software engineers to actively accelerate that trend. This is a naive take. Throughout history things have been automated with the help of professions who were being automated away.

I don't disagree it's a naive take, and I would love to read about some examples where this happened. I haven't seen too many industries be automated away first hand, and I'm sure there are historic examples. I wouldn't expect the lamp lighters to have been championing the rise of electric lamps. Maybe they did though because it meant they could work less hours.

It's everywhere.

One example is probably blacksmiths. Before, each larger village used to have one. Nowadays, this is not the case any more as people order replacement parts for whatever metal piece that broke in your car, house, etc. The metal molding happens in factories instead. But in order you still need to have people who know how to mold metals. The early folks for this profession were blacksmiths. Nowadays you would not call them any more. But it's definitely been "engineers with AI".

Same goes for industrialized food. The huge industrial bakeries still employ people who know how to bake bread, but they can do 1000x more than they could do if they had to knead the dough on their own, separate it, form little pieces of bread, order it nicely on a tray, etc.

Now it's a machine doing most pieces of work, but they still have folks who design new bread products, adjust machines, know what to change in the formula if one particular product from one particular supplier is not available in the quantities needed, etc. A lot of the skills needed aligns enough with the traditional job of a baker that these factories employ actual bakers.

As for software, whenever I use AI tools, I don't really feel that they help me save time much. But it's entirely possible that this is going to change in the future. They are only going to get better. And of course a lot of people say it's useful for them, so it already affects folks. Just because something is not useful to me doesn't mean it's not going to be useful to anybody.

Re: Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

#33

> If AI is a threat to software engineering, I wouldn't expect many software engineers to actively accelerate that trend. There are two strong forces at play. Employees generally want to put in the least amount of effort possible and go home at 5. Employers want to save money and pay for fewer employees. AI creates a strong symbiosis here and both sides are focused on a short term win.

not just employees, founders as well :) as a serial founder, I find AI exciting because after my 3rd company, thinking of my 4th was quite exhausting but AI has re-invigorated by ambition to start another company.

Re: Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Employees generally want to put in the least amount of effort possible and go home at 5. Really? In my experience coding engineers are coders because they enjoy the challenge. they like building things, breaking things and rebuilding things. Its the white-collar 9-5 office workers that churn out power-point and word documents that want to do as little as possible.

Sometime very soon we’ll cross a threshold where most people can do most of their coding through a tool like Claude and be more productive. It will feel like coding still, breaking and building things, but they will get more done in the same time. Everyone will switch.

I'm already building whole projects now with AI -- not a single line of code by myself.

I love it, I've coded for 25 years and I don't need to write another line ever again, I just want to build cool things as fast as possible.

Re: Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are likely lying: https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance > During take-home assessments Complete these without Claude unless we indicate otherwise. We’d like to assess your unique skills and strengths. We'll be clear when AI is allowed (example: "You may use Claude for this coding challenge"). > During live interviews This is all you–no AI assistance unless we indicate otherwise. We’re curious to see ho…

That's not evidence of anything to do with their hired developers. Interview practices have never reflected on-the-job practices

95% of Claude Code was actually written on a whiteboard!

Re: Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software engineers are pushing a magnitude more code and producing more functional utility and solving more bugs than ever before Citation needed

More programmers than ever before makes this implicitly true. It’s not as clever as the author hoped.

From my personal account, I started with PHP and Perl (high school and college) and then graduated to Ruby on Rails (early dev career) and now its Python and JS.

I would say Ruby on Rails was a 10x on raw PHP in terms of feature specs per hour and AI is a 10x on Ruby on Rails (and its derivatives).

We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.

Re: Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

#37

> If AI is a threat to software engineering, I wouldn't expect many software engineers to actively accelerate that trend. There are two strong forces at play. Employees generally want to put in the least amount of effort possible and go home at 5. Employers want to save money and pay for fewer employees. AI creates a strong symbiosis here and both sides are focused on a short term win.

>Employees generally want to put in the least amount of effort possible and go home at 5. Really? In my experience coding engineers are coders because they enjoy the challenge. they like building things, breaking things and rebuilding things. Its the white-collar 9-5 office workers that churn out power-point and word documents that want to do as little as possible.

If you work at a startup, sometimes you have to do extremely mundane and boring things unrelated to your expertise (“wear many hats”). AI is especially useful in those cases so you can quickly go back to working on things you enjoy.

Re: Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More programmers than ever before makes this implicitly true. It’s not as clever as the author hoped.

From my personal account, I started with PHP and Perl (high school and college) and then graduated to Ruby on Rails (early dev career) and now its Python and JS. I would say Ruby on Rails was a 10x on raw PHP in terms of feature specs per hour and AI is a 10x on Ruby on Rails (and its derivatives). We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a…

> We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.

Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

#40
post #5

Not OpenAI, but Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger said in response to a question of how much of Claude Code is written by Claude Code: "At this point, I would be shocked if it wasn't 95% plus. I'd have to ask Boris and the other tech leads on there." [0] https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-cpo-heres-what...

Weasel words. No different than Nadella claiming 50%. When you drill in you find out the real claims distill into something like "95% of the code, in some of the projects, was written by humans who sometimes use AI in their coding tasks." If they don't produce data, show the study or other compelling examples, don't believe the claims; it's just marketing and marketing can never be trusted because marketing is inhere…

It could be true, the primary issue here is that it's the wrong metric. I mean you could write 100% of your code with AI if you were basically telling it exactly what to write...

If we assume it isn't a lie, then given current AI capabilities we should assume that AI isn't being used in a maximally efficient way.

However, developer efficiency isn't the only metric a company like Anthropic would care about, after all they're trying to build the best coding assistant with Claude Code. So for them understanding the failure cases, and the prompting need to recover from those failures is likely more important than just lines of code their developers are producing per hour.

So my guess (assuming the claim is true) is that Anthropic are forcing their employees to use Claude Code to write as much code as possible to collect data on how to improve it.

Post reply on HN