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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: 0.224s | 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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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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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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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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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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owebmaster ◴[14 Jul 25 02:41 UTC] No.44555941[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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anilgulecha ◴[14 Jul 25 04:22 UTC] No.44556433[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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1. owebmaster ◴[14 Jul 25 10:38 UTC] No.44558454[source]▶
Your examples are a far cry from Wordpress and will probably not exist in 5 years.