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When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

anthropic.com

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Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#321

Post by pizlonator »

brokencode wrote: post #315
pizlonator wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That goes straight to my point: then why hasn’t the miracle of automated coding led to breakthroughs outside of automated coding? If the only breakthrough is automated coding with no outside consequence then it’s just masturbation

Probably because AI coding has only worked at all for a couple years and has only gotten good in like the last year? The rate of improvement has been fast. Maybe it’ll plateau soon, or maybe we’ll have LLMs improving themselves rapidly. At this point it’s too early to say. I don’t remember where I heard it, but there’s a saying that people overestimate how much can be accomplished in a year and underestimate how much…

Yeah, this is a good point.

But the clock is ticking.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#322

Post by maplethorpe »

drtz wrote: post #293
pizlonator wrote: post #282

What I can’t get over is that there have been exactly zero software breakthroughs since vibe coding started, other than vibe coding itself. Claude is amazing, that’s true. But if it was as amazing as this article implies, I’d expect some breakthrough outside of AI itself. Rewriting a Zig program in unsafe Rust? Not a breakthrough. Finding a bunch of security vulns? Maybe that’s sort of a breakthrough though it’s unde…

Maybe I'm looking through rose colored glasses, but software that writes itself seems like a pretty big breakthrough to me.

It's pretty crazy that a company like Anthropic no longer needs to hire Software Engineers, because their software engineers itself. If that's not a break through I don't know what is!

edit: it looks like I was wrong and they're still hiring many software engineers. Not completely sure why that is just yet.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#323

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

luke5441 wrote: post #314
HardCodedBias wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM+Harness mostly helps with execution. These are new products (generally) and that's a different class of problem. It is possible that since LLM+harness helps with execution then we should see more experiments.

Even then we should be able to see things that previously were not possible because they took too much effort. For example NPCs in games that have complexity that previously was not possible. Good games often push the boundaries a bit, so should be a good example. Of course now we can start arguing that there isn't a lot of investment into gaming currently, because it all goes into AI. Too bad.

we're still at least 3 years too early for that. games usually are in a 5+ year dev cycle, so even if AI made gamedev 2x faster, we're still not at the point where the first opus 4.5 games are out

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#324

Post by revlsas »

pizlonator wrote: post #282

What I can’t get over is that there have been exactly zero software breakthroughs since vibe coding started, other than vibe coding itself. Claude is amazing, that’s true. But if it was as amazing as this article implies, I’d expect some breakthrough outside of AI itself. Rewriting a Zig program in unsafe Rust? Not a breakthrough. Finding a bunch of security vulns? Maybe that’s sort of a breakthrough though it’s unde…

openAI has how many employees and the chatGPT app has 1 billion MAU

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#325

Post by hungryhobbit »

comex wrote: post #304
replwoacause wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell does it need to be so complex? People have been making TUIs for decades. Did we need a small game engine to run claude code?

It doesn’t need to be that complex, but it can be that complex without being slow. Claude Code’s interface is extremely simple. It has tons and tons of headroom to tack on performance overhead without it being noticeable at all. You just have to not do dumb things like redraw the entire UI every time a spinner spins.

"We made our app chew up so many unnecessary resources that we can use even more resources in the future, and no one will notice" is not the strongest engineering idea I've ever heard.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#326

Post by bdamm »

pizlonator wrote: post #313
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massive productivity gains.

Yeah. To play devils advocate, computers didn’t translate to massive productivity gains until long after businesses adopted them. There was that quote from ’87: "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics" Maybe we’re seeing something like that right now with AI? Who knows man

This is absolutely the right vision imo.

Personally, I'm seeing massive improvements to my workflow and the quality of the product I'm shipping. I'm using AI to crank out far more tests than I used to be able to write, and I am using AI to analyze results with far more fidelity and speed than I could ever have done myself. That means I have more quality time.

But this will change, because the meaning of software development will change to expect, nay to require AI use. I've heard this is already happening at e.g. Google. The expectation of what can be achieved by tinkerers and by professionals will change. The expectation of what it means to interact with software via your own agents will change and will become commonplace. Apple still hasn't figured out the local agent on the iPhone, but they will. 2027 is not going to feel at all like 2025.

But is any of that a fundamental change? It sure feels fundamental to me, but maybe that's because my everyday has totally changed, but the product I am responsible for has not. Yet. The product I am responsible for operates in critical infrastructure where I personally hope AI never has deep roots, but maybe that's just me. I don't think using AI to build a system that is offline from any AI is the same as depending on an AI to make realtime decisions for critical infrastructure.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#327

Post by z3c0 »

pizlonator wrote: post #270
toephu2 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have iterm2 open right now with Claude in a long session and it's only using 500MB of memory.

Only 500MB! you are confirming their point even as you contradict the specifics

And highlighting a disconnect in the developer community. Some of us are okay with unnecessary overhead for quick results. I always felt gross dealing with Electron apps, but they're popular for a reason.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#328

Post by tikimcfee »

javcasas wrote: post #203
munificent wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who maintains a roguelike with a terminal-like UI that: 1. Maintains an internal representation of what the game thinks is on screen. 2. Runs the game for one frame which updates that representation. 3. Generates a diff to see how that differs from what's actually on screen. 4. Executes the minimum set of draw calls to get the screen to match the internal representation. It's really not that hard. It's a f…

Sure. For a videogame. > -> rasterizes them to a 2d screen Also you forgot "render to a framebuffer, then parse the framebuffer back to chars". Anyway, I'm off to construct the new `ls` command. It will render the list of files to a mesh of billions of polygons in a GPU with advanced shaders, 16x oversampling, HDR and all the graphic acronyms I don't understand, then read the resulting image, find the nearest charact…

lol... I know you meant this comically, but you just called me out and it's glorious: https://glyph3d.dev

I built a truly glyph based instanced quad system to render millions of characters in space at once.

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#329

Post by dom96 »

airstrike wrote: post #112
f311a wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infrastructure is a much harder problem. They can't even improve Claude Code, which eats 1GB+ of RAM. Meanwhile, my editor only consumes 80MB of RAM.

This might explain it, in the opposite way it was meant to: https://fxtwitter.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427 > Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine".

> https://fxtwitter.com

What is this?

Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

#330

Post by pizlonator »

conception wrote: post #320
pizlonator wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then where is the big new non toy project created since vibe coding became a thing, that couldn’t have been created without ai?

I make one (small) almost every day. Admittedly the reason that couldn’t be done is because it would take time that I don’t have but 1000% every day something is written by AI that I use that would not exist if AI didn’t exist. I don’t publish them - but they’re put into use in production and they provide a tangible benefit that would not exist otherwise.

I do this too.

I especially love how making a nicely styled website these days is a matter of describing what it looks like and waiting 10-15 minutes. There are other examples

But the OP is claiming 10x productivity improvements along some metrics. If that was even slightly true under even a generous interpretation of what it might mean, I’d expect an actual breakthrough, not the ability to churn out little things

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