Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?

TFA says "How Anthropic uses AI to write 90-95% of code for some products and the surprising new bottlenecks this creates".

for some products.

If it were 95% of anything useful, Anthropic would not still have >1000 employees, and the rest of the economy would be collapsing, and governments would be taking some kind of action.

Yet none of that appears to be happening. Why?

I don't doubt it, especially when you have an organization that is focused on building the most effective tooling possible. I'd imagine that they use AI even when it isn't the most optimal, because they are trying to build experiences that will allow everyone else to do the same.

So let's take it on face value and say 95% is written by AI. When you free one bottleneck you expose the next. You still need developers to review it to make sure it's doing the right thing. You still need developers to be able to translate the business context into instructions that make the right product. You have to engage with the product. You need to architect the system - the context windows mean that the tasks can't just be handed off to AI.

So, The role of the programmer changes - you still need technical competence, but to serve the judgement calls of "what is right for the product?" Perhaps there's a world where developers and product management merges, but I think we will still need the people.

Been using claude code almost daily for over a month. It is the smartest junior developer I've ever seen; it can spew high-quality advanced code and with the same confidence, spew utter garbage or over-engineered crap; it can confidently tell you a task is done and passing tests, with glaring bugs in it; it can happily introduce security bugs if it's a shurtcut to finish something. And sometimes, will just tell you "not gonna do it, it takes too much time, so here's a todo comment". In short, it requires constant supervision and careful code review - you still need experienced developers for this.

> If it were 95% of anything useful, Anthropic would not still have >1000 employees

I think firing people does not come as a logical conclusion of 95% of code being written by Claude Code. There is a big difference between AI autonomously writing code and developers just finding it easier to prompt changes rather than typing them manually.

In one case, you have an automated software engineer, and may be able to reduce your headcount. In the other, developers may just be slightly more productive or even just enjoy writing code using AI more, but the coding is still very much driven by the developers themselves. I think right now Claude Code shows signs of (1) for simple cases, but mostly falls into the (2) bucket.

Anthropic should have a check for CC, that runs “rg ‘todo’” after every turn. Then tells Claude to fix it if not.