> We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research—in collaboration with many others—and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. Interesting - they're commiting…
When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
621–630 of 738 posts
Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
#6222026: Working hard to make that recursive self-improvement a reality! Any minute now...
Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you stop others from making and training a program?
By threatening to nuke their datacenters and chip fabs, for instance.
You can tell what kind of discussion this is by the fact that this question has to be asked.
Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or: Anthropic genuinely believes the future scenarios they outline are realistic possibilities, and they want more people to take them seriously.
I find this version unlikely, since companies very rarely genuinely believe what they preach in PR campaigns. It's always some sales and marketting dudes and gals trying to polish up something as something more than it is. Which is very annoying. We can now choose between Anthropic being the one exception to this, while having huuuuge incentive to hype up their product, or we just write it off as more marketting fluf…
Likewise, people don't as easily blame ilya for 'hyping things up' when he said these things.
Also talk about incentives, there are also incentives to lower their valuation. If you wanna be vigilant against social engineering i'd be wary of that too.
These are moot anyway though cause the article isnt even making any super strong claim. If you read it it's no big deal
Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
#625Earlier 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…
Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or: Anthropic genuinely believes the future scenarios they outline are realistic possibilities, and they want more people to take them seriously.
I find this version unlikely, since companies very rarely genuinely believe what they preach in PR campaigns. It's always some sales and marketting dudes and gals trying to polish up something as something more than it is. Which is very annoying. We can now choose between Anthropic being the one exception to this, while having huuuuge incentive to hype up their product, or we just write it off as more marketting fluf…
Whether they are right of wrong is another matter, but their claims also don’t seem too far out of the realm of possibility to me.
Coding agents have fundamentally changed my day-to-day job. In the last year, my work has shifted from me writing all of my code, to me writing very little code and spending most of my time on understanding problems better and setting direction, and reviewing, verifying, and polishing the output of coding agents. It has been quite a drastic change.
It is not that outlandish to suggest that coding agents could continue to improve at such a drastic rate over the next year. And the implications of that could be quite large! Even just the implications of more white-collar workers adopting tools like Cowork seems potentially very large, with tools that already exist today. It seems sensible to at least consider this as a possibility.
Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
#627>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…
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…
They went to HR who said I am more senior and I should act as a mentor (they had my same work title and were probably making 4x more due to being in USA) and I just no longer reviewed anything from them until I changed jobs.
Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#629>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…
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…
'Please split this PR into smaller ones'. I would even sketch which groups/phases would make sense, perhaps with the help of AI.
Re: When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement
#630Now, I have encountered many times, when I asked AI to implement a function for me for which I was 100% sure a good implementation already existed in the form of an npm package, it had the tendency to go ahead and implement it on its own. Now, I usually trust battle tested implementations to be more robust, but if the AI does this (which I think is not an unique observation), you can easily balloon per engineer line generation (as can you with reduced oversight), so as always, these high level benchmarks are to be taken with a grain of salt.