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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

#331

Post by orliesaurus »

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".

when they announced /pet mode or whatever - that was really the end of the line for me.

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

#332

Post by sutterd »

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…

I am doing a solo project that is pretty big, meaning it is not something I could vibe code. I can do alot with AI that I could never do on my own, but I am not seeing several mulitples improvement in my productivity. I spend so much time doing what I call "AI wrangling", trying to get it to do what I want. Claude is writing all the javscript and python code, but ultimately I am programming in English. What is good is that it is effectively a very high level computer language, where the agent can implement a lot of underlying code with a short English description, often. But many other times it takes a lot of work to get what you want.

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

#333

Post by mapBasketWand »

Aperocky wrote: post #249
javcasas wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then > -> layouts elements > -> rasterizes them to a 2d screen > -> diffs that against the previous screen > -> finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw Yup. Overengineering.

It's product bloat. It's not recognizing that they are just one building block that should do one thing well, like tmux. You don't need a computer display on your fridge for the same reason, but Anthropic think you do. You should see virtual ice getting created and they should correspond to the actual ice behind the door - think of how amazing that is! And it's not even completely a bad idea. make it claude-code-reac…

I love the idea of installing high resolution cameras in the fridge to monitor the ice maker to feed into a vision model that renders digital ice to the exact position of the real ice on the fridge’s giant screen

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

#334

Post by oblio »

llbbdd wrote: post #170
matthewdgreen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The messed up scrolling behavior I keep getting in Claude Code is definitely due to their code.

There is a setting that fixes this, I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head

I've tried about 6 of those "settings" and hacks since November 2025 and not much luck.

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

#335

Post by yoyohello13 »

wild_egg wrote: post #289
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…

What does a breakthrough look like?

How about a Windows file browser that opens in less than 5 seconds.

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

#336

Post by wnmurphy »

Theodores wrote: post #247
SimianSci wrote: post #41

Anthropic is looking to IPO here soon. A key aspect of this is to prove profitability. Shifting their focus from Training new models to instead serving inference, they would greatly reduce their spend. In fact this is something being reported on that they are already doing, which is the reason for their first ever profitable quarter. Its awfully convenient that the company which has greatly reduced its spend on train…

Honest question: Is anyone here looking to put their own money into the Anthropic, OpenAI or SpaceX IPOs? Maybe it is my poverty mindset that is holding me back, however, I can't imagine becoming an investor in any of the AI 'startups'. There are plenty of pundits able to advise others on where to put their money, and sometimes there is everyone and their dog advising you to get into Bitcoin, gold or some other schem…

I'm considering Anthropic. I think they will be one of the survivors if/when the AI bubble bursts.

I was dubious about SpaceX (orbital data centers need to solve for extreme radiation and error-correction during training), but then I remembered that xAI is actively working on virtualizing white collar workers ("Macrohard").

In my opinion, this is the only TAM that justifies $1T in data center investment, because the consumer market for ChatGPT-style AI is saturated. There's a lot of enterprise TAM available for AI, but I think what these companies training frontier models are really after is selling a product that allows companies to eliminate the cost of white collar salaries.

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

#338

Post by Aperocky »

mapBasketWand wrote: post #333
Aperocky wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's product bloat. It's not recognizing that they are just one building block that should do one thing well, like tmux. You don't need a computer display on your fridge for the same reason, but Anthropic think you do. You should see virtual ice getting created and they should correspond to the actual ice behind the door - think of how amazing that is! And it's not even completely a bad idea. make it claude-code-reac…

I love the idea of installing high resolution cameras in the fridge to monitor the ice maker to feed into a vision model that renders digital ice to the exact position of the real ice on the fridge’s giant screen

See this is the kind of things I hope I'd be doing when I'm retired, but not when I'm shopping.

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

#339

Post by overgard »

torben-friis wrote: post #36

>A caveat: Lines of code is an imperfect measure, as it measures quantity over quality. So 8× lines of code/engineer/day in the second quarter of 2026 is almost certainly an overstatement of the true productivity gain. Nonetheless, it indicates an acceleration. At Anthropic, we don’t reward people for how many lines of code they write; rather, team members are producing more code simply because they’re using AI syste…

I just watched copilot today turn a 8 line fix into 500 lines, so, yeah, verbosity is a big side effect

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

#340

Post by deathanatos »

z3c0 wrote: post #327
pizlonator wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But each day now that overhead becomes more costly as AI drives up the very cost per byte of RAM.
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