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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

#541

Post by munificent »

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…

My roguelike's "graphics" are a simulated terminal, so it's a 2D grid of colored characters. It's essentially a TUI, just like Claude Code, except instead of rendering to a real terminal using ANSI escapes, I render to a web canvas using... something probably more complex than what Claude has to do. It's still not hard.

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

#542

Post by octoberfranklin »

robbrown451 wrote: post #401
overgard wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about nukes is you can at least make an argument for why it'd be important to be the first country to have them. With AI, you create super intelligence and you're probably just the first one it takes out. There's no reason to think a super intelligence would be totally fine being a slave to apes. Cynicism with these companies is highly warranted though. It's not doomerism to look at their actions and conclu…

" There's no reason to think a super intelligence would be totally fine being a slave to apes." Sure there is. Intelligence doesn't give us our selfish motivations, natural selection does. We have similar motivations to C elegans, that has all of 302 neurons. Stay alive and have sex. Honeybees don't though. They are about halfway between humans and C elegans when it comes to cognitive power. But they are not selfish…

Kinda lame that people are downvoting this.

I've had the same perspective for quite a while now, but hadn't been able to phrase it this cleverly.

Our neocortex is, by any definition, vastly more "intelligent" than the rest of our brain. Yet it doesn't attack the cerebellum. In fact, it takes orders from the older "lizard brain"!

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

#543

Post by yuhmahp »

jameson wrote: post #535

I don't quite understand the intent of such article other than to promote themselves given an odd timing that the company is planning on going public, so I can only conclude that this is just part of the IPO roadshow. LLMs certainly have made significant changes to our lives, but I haven't yet to see any extraordinary improvement it brought to me which makes me skeptical about their claims. _if_ it solves many of our…

Agree with your point about the timing, but drawing anticipation before going ahead and solving these disease can be a good smoke test, would be beneficial even if there's an IPO or not

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

#544

Post by fc417fc802 »

skydhash wrote: post #459
fc417fc802 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the much more plausible explanation is that the word rasterize was misused there. They are generating and diffing text data which has been a standard approach to drawing a TUI since the dawn of computing. It is not even remotely resource intensive.

> They are generating and diffing text data which has been a standard approach to drawing a TUI since the dawn of computing. It is not even remotely resource intensive No one has ever done that. Even top[0], which does full screen refresh, clear the screen (if necessary) and write the new information (the period is in seconds, not ms). No need to diff. That would be like diffing a file, just to find which bytes to up…

I don't understand why you would make such a confident negative claim rather than ask for an example or otherwise engage in discussion. Particularly given that you replied to a comment elsewhere in this very thread that links to a real world example of exactly such an implementation! [0] See in particular this part of the source. [1]

I agree that most programs don't bother to do that but please recall that my claim was merely that what Claude Code is claimed to be doing with regards to diffing is a well established and long standing optimization. The important point being that it is neither expensive, novel, or particularly complex thus not an excuse for poor performance.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405259

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/c29071587c64efb30...

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

#545

Post by est »

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…

> exactly zero software breakthroughs since vibe coding started, other than vibe coding itself

Generative AI is meant to be a mimic - Richard Sutton

https://x.com/RichardSSutton/status/2061216087744946656

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

#546

Post by sebasv_ »

danparsonson wrote: post #495
CamperBob2 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I declined to review it, stating that I couldn't possibly vet 40k lines of code Gee, that sounds like a job for Claude if there ever was one.

And how would you verify that the review was accurate?

Same way that I would trust your review to be accurate. Because the reviewer has built a reputation for correctness.

Its not Claude doing the review. Its a human doing the review, but using Claude to do the reading. Its still on the human to ask the right questions to Claude.

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

#547

Post by triyambakam »

fg137 wrote: post #273
malfist wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my co-workers just asked me to review his pull request that was all AI generated. 600 files were touched, over 40k lines of code added. I'm sure he thought that was a crowning achievement, proof that AI can enable 10X developers, after all, what engineer could write 40k lines of code in a week? I declined to review it, stating that I couldn't possibly vet 40k lines of code, and wouldn't put my reputation on th…

Same here. A co-worker touched a few hundred files in a PR and asked us to review. They merged it directly to main when nobody approved it. (The repo was not set up to enforce PR approval.) I don't personally use that feature, and I couldn't care less at this point. If our customers are frustrated by the bugs, at least my name is not on it.

The challenge is that you may not have customers, and thus a job, if that continues

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

#548

Post by snthpy »

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…

Just imagine the productivity gains from using LLMs to rewrite Kotlin codebases in Java!

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

#549

Post by altmanaltman »

danparsonson wrote: post #495
CamperBob2 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I declined to review it, stating that I couldn't possibly vet 40k lines of code Gee, that sounds like a job for Claude if there ever was one.

And how would you verify that the review was accurate?

Claude to the rescue

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

#550

Post by est »

javcasas wrote: post #215
andriy_koval wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that gigabyte is occupied by useful information: traces/memory?

Nope. Used to render on the terminal like a game engine. https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427

> render on the terminal like a game engine

All those CPU to render this effect

https://x.com/cyrilXBT/status/2060617507615207904

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