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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

#551

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

strix_varius wrote: post #437
mrandish wrote: post #164

> "A caveat: Lines of code is an imperfect measure" I'm pleased they at least included this. However, they address the caveat by 'rounding down' the estimated multiple of the gain. I'm not sure that is the correct adjustment, especially once we understand the range isn't limited to positive numbers. There's strong evidence the range of code productivity denominated in "lines of code" should include negative numbers,…

Exactly this. Just this week an engineer who seems to purely vibe everything submitted a +700ish LoC fix for what seemed like a pretty simple issue. Moreover it was a perf issue, which in my experience is not usually best fixed by adding more stuff. Today, I merged my fix, net -381 LoC. I'm using them too of course, they read and type and hunt for bugs and test faster than I can. But I'm using them as my tool, not be…

> But I'm using them as my tool, not being a tool using them.

Keep believing that

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

#552

Post by tancop »

overgard wrote: post #173

So, regardless of whether or not Anthropic CAN create a self improving AI.. does anyone else feel like they shouldn't be allowed to? Or it at least needs to be strictly supervised..? Like, I don't actually think Anthropic can make the singularity any time soon, but I think even AI boosters have to admit doing this is creating a society-wide danger for the benefit of a very very small number of already-rich people.

the danger comes from the fact anthropic is a for profit company and they could train it to benefit them instead of the public. if they go ahead with it they should get nationalized, their self improving ai analyzed for any hidden agenda and then released as open source.

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

#553

Post by ElProlactin »

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…

Because they're going after the biggest problem of all first: labor costs.

/s but not to a lot of people

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

#554

Post by kalaksi »

sebasv_ wrote: post #546
danparsonson wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For large changes that are not straightforward and include architectural decisions, I wouldn't trust Claude enough to not read most of the code myself. I'll have to read it to be able to understand it and ask about the decisions in detail anyway. And when I start to understand it, it's not uncommon to find out that the solution can be improved and simplified in many places, and after iterating, 25-30% of code disappears.

And trying to just hand-wave it to Claude, to somehow "improve it" or "simplify it", without detailed questions hasn't been very successful. It can work for some things, though.

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

#555

Post by socalgal2 »

ivraatiems wrote: post #466

Whether or not Anthropic is right about what AI can accomplish, whether these performance gains are real or not, their moral stance here is absolutely hideous to me. "We must blast forwards into making this dangerous thing because if we don't, someone else surely will," is a coward's argument. If you believe it is dangerous, you should be dedicating yourself to STOPPING others from making it, not making it first! The…

Good thing the USA didn't listen to you. We'd be under Nazi or USSR thumb if they got the bomb first

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

#556

Post by robbrown451 »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #542
robbrown451 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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"!

Heh, yeah that's a clever analogy as well. (and thanks!)

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

#558

Post by yalok »

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…

Could just be more tests? :) Which is good for code quality in general and reduces support burden, but doesn’t lead directly to more features

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

#559

Post by atq2119 »

chuckadams wrote: post #120
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…

AI generates code that mimics the existing code. If your code is terse and comment-free, then the agent’s code is too. The times I’ve seen Claude drift into a default “house style” it generated like 1 comment for every 10 LOC or so. It’s a far cry from the GPT-3 days that littered every line with the journals of Captain Obvious.

That is definitely not my experience using Claude Code with Opus. I work in a very sparsely commented code base, and the agent produces substantially more comments than the surrounding code.

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

#560

Post by aetch »

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?

You can use Claude for that
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