Live data from Hacker News

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

anthropic.com

481–490 of 738 posts

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

#481

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…

Its in a weird space right now. These models are actually extremely good but they are far from an intelligence unto themselves. Truth is if someone told you they could build these things 5 years ago, you d write them a check for a trillion dollars. Problem is once we got them, we realized they are not all that. Its like a mecha suit in a universe, where mecha suits are abundant and cheap. Someone has to climb into th…

The problem is what they can do is rapidly expanding. Software development is becoming increasingly hands off.

If they get to the point where they're smart enough to make tasteful code decisions based on stakeholder input... we're cooked as a profession.

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

#482
post #473
post #40

Okay, so anthropic has amazing AI which supposedly writes most of their code and can continuously improve... meanwhile they have outages on a regular basis, and any kind of long-running work will now consistently hit 'API Error: Server is temporarily limiting requests'. Not sure of this is intentional to force a reduction of token usage, but at this point I need to build around these throttling limits and outages wit…

This is weird to me because i am using claude code 10+ hours/day 7 days a week, usually multiple sessions, and run into api errors maybe in 1 or 2 sessions per week. And about..2 major outages of 10-20min in the last month. Not terrible and nowhere near what you are reporting. Therefore I dont believe you, because you dont even couch this in terms of it being something that seems particular to you or your region. Obv…

[deleted]

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

#483
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its in a weird space right now. These models are actually extremely good but they are far from an intelligence unto themselves. Truth is if someone told you they could build these things 5 years ago, you d write them a check for a trillion dollars. Problem is once we got them, we realized they are not all that. Its like a mecha suit in a universe, where mecha suits are abundant and cheap. Someone has to climb into th…

I think we are learning in real-time what intelligence re. humans is as we go along. Humans only what they know, until they acquire more information about what's possible. The goal post narrative is stupid to begin with.

Humans have goal seeking behavior. LLMs don’t. You could maybe call the combination of LLMs and the RL-based harnesses somewhat “intelligent” in aggregate, but the problem is that it’s not “general” intelligence like these labs want to argue, since it’s by definition only good for the set of problems the RL part has been trained to solve, which is a subset of programming problems.

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

#486

This is the lowest quality discussion I've seen on HN in ages.

AI always does this in the public sphere and software is particularly susceptible because there's no key metric to measure productivity and people obviously have vested emotional interests in the technology failing. On the other side people are always keen to show off their alignment with the new hotness, be that OOP, Agile, Functional, Ruby, web tech, js frameworks, Rust or agentic work today. Somewhere in the middl…

It also doesn’t help that the middle of the road, realistic reaction to it is “it’s aight” and that’s just not a discussion worthy response.

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

#487

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 spent years in the early 2000s trying to get a computer to read unstructured PDFs and TIFF images (mainly invoices, either scanned or electronic). Limited success, we always had to get a human to look at them in the end.

We implemented that in about three days earlier this year, just by feeding the files to LLMs. And it's good enough to not need a human to check.

I get that this isn't a "Computer Science breakthrough" in the sense you mean, but it used to involve a lot of hard CS to try and solve, and now it doesn't.

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

#488
post #40

Okay, so anthropic has amazing AI which supposedly writes most of their code and can continuously improve... meanwhile they have outages on a regular basis, and any kind of long-running work will now consistently hit 'API Error: Server is temporarily limiting requests'. Not sure of this is intentional to force a reduction of token usage, but at this point I need to build around these throttling limits and outages wit…

Answers the question: how can Anthropic sell more Usage "Credits"

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

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> 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.

Yup. For me, this translates to "we are using Ink, the react-compatible TUI framework to build Claude Code"

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

#490

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…

Solved a bunch of Erdos problems.
Post reply on HN