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

67 points growbell_social | 1 comments | 13 Jul 25 20:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Amidst the nascent concerns of AI replacing software engineers, it seems a proxy for that might be the amount of code written at OpenAI by the various models they have.

If AI is a threat to software engineering, I wouldn't expect many software engineers to actively accelerate that trend. I personally don't view it as a threat, but some people (non engineers?) obviously do.

I'd be curious if any OpenAI engineers can share a rough estimate of their day to day composition of human generated code vs AI generated.

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notfried ◴[13 Jul 25 22:09 UTC] No.44554230[source]▶
Not OpenAI, but Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger said in response to a question of how much of Claude Code is written by Claude Code: "At this point, I would be shocked if it wasn't 95% plus. I'd have to ask Boris and the other tech leads on there."

[0] https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-cpo-heres-what...

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PostOnce ◴[13 Jul 25 22:28 UTC] No.44554351[source]▶
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?

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1. ebiester ◴[13 Jul 25 23:00 UTC] No.44554589[source]▶
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.