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

67 points growbell_social | 10 comments | 13 Jul 25 20:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.56s | source | bottom

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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charlesju ◴[14 Jul 25 00:25 UTC] No.44555121[source]▶
I think this is the wrong question.

The right question is how much human code can a human push now vs prior to AI.

Everything we've done in coding has been assisted.

Prior to this current generation of web applications, we had the advent of concepts like Object Orientated Programming and prior to that even C was a massive move up from Assembly and punch cards.

AI has written a lot of code. AI has written very little high velocity production code by itself (ie. for people with no coding background).

In Ruby on Rails, the concept of fast coding has been around for over 20 years, look up this concept of Scaffolding: https://www.rubyguides.com/2020/03/rails-scaffolding/

So to answer your question,

1. AI has pushed a lot of code 2. AI has pushed almost no code without the oversight of human software engineers 3. Software engineers are pushing a magnitude more code and producing more functional utility and solving more bugs than ever before

I don't know what the future holds, but I do think that this is not a new trend to use software to help humans build faster, and I don't think software has the ability to fully replace humans (yet).

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1. fugalfervor ◴[14 Jul 25 00:40 UTC] No.44555236[source]▶
> Software engineers are pushing a magnitude more code and producing more functional utility and solving more bugs than ever before

Citation needed

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2. ythiscoyness ◴[14 Jul 25 01:33 UTC] No.44555573[source]▶
More programmers than ever before makes this implicitly true.

It’s not as clever as the author hoped.

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3. charlesju ◴[14 Jul 25 01:51 UTC] No.44555696[source]▶
From my personal account, I started with PHP and Perl (high school and college) and then graduated to Ruby on Rails (early dev career) and now its Python and JS.

I would say Ruby on Rails was a 10x on raw PHP in terms of feature specs per hour and AI is a 10x on Ruby on Rails (and its derivatives).

We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.

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4. owebmaster ◴[14 Jul 25 02:41 UTC] No.44555941{3}[source]▶
> We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.

Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.

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5. moomoo11 ◴[14 Jul 25 04:12 UTC] No.44556390[source]▶
I'm pushing like 30-50% more code per week since using AI, and I'm only really using Cursor.
6. anilgulecha ◴[14 Jul 25 04:22 UTC] No.44556433{4}[source]▶
> project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago

This specific point is patently untrue. loveable/v0/etc excel at creating CMSes / UIs for content in hours.

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7. edanm ◴[14 Jul 25 09:18 UTC] No.44557947{4}[source]▶
> Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.

Roll to disbelieve on this one. There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy. I'm not even talking React/Next or whatever - this was before RoR, before Django (or at least very early versions of both).

I think it's pretty impossible to look around and not notice that technical advances have improved a lot of things in the world - why does it sound credible that programming itself hasn't improved at all in twenty years? Even look at languages like C++ today compared to 20 years ago, they're massively different - do you think all those changes to the languages are neutral or negative in terms of productivity?

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8. owebmaster ◴[14 Jul 25 10:38 UTC] No.44558454{5}[source]▶
Your examples are a far cry from Wordpress and will probably not exist in 5 years.
9. owebmaster ◴[14 Jul 25 10:41 UTC] No.44558474{5}[source]▶
Quality does not change as fast :)) Actually, most of the times, when things go faster, the quality drops as fast.

> There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy

Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community. This 90% part can't be automated by AI or fast-tracked using RoR, Django or whatever. So much that none of the hundreds of wordpress alternatives created in the past 2 decades got any closer to replace it.

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10. edanm ◴[14 Jul 25 10:49 UTC] No.44558539{6}[source]▶
> Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community.

I completely agree. I just didn't think we were talking about that aspect, just how long it takes to actually build the code of WordPress.

You might be saying that making the technical-building aspects of most technical products go faster won't necessarily have as big an impact as many programmers believe. Programming isn't the core of most products to the degree most programmers think, and instead the core of most products/companies is more about product thinking, sales & marketing, etc. I agree with this sentiment a lot.

That aside, I think there's no question it's faster to program in Python or C++ right now, than it was 20 years ago. Things really have improved on the programming language front (and related libraries, and other advances).