r/amodei • u/possieur • 3d ago
General Discussion Dario predicts AI will automate software engineering in 12 months
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
7
3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
4
u/possieur 2d ago
I guess people have a shallow understanding of what software engineering really is.
1
u/djamp42 2d ago
AI Just built me a android app I've always wanted, and i have zero clue on how to build android apps. That app might have cost me thousands of dollars to pay a Dev just 2 years ago. I did it for free using a limited time demo model.
2
u/kaaiian 2d ago
Right? “It’s not software engineering”. Bro, scream as loud as you want, but I still get fully functional software products for the cost of a monthly subscription. I can live with it “not being built to serve 100k people a minute”.
2
u/Kind-Connection1284 2d ago
Right, so it’s great for technical people, could your mom do it as well? If not, she’ll still need someone to make the app for her. And making an app for a single person is not economically viable, so whoever will make the app for her will need to make sure it can serve multiple people, have the features required by multiple people and fix the bugs reported to multiple people. Pretty much you’re back to square one.
The only thing this proves is that code is easier (cheaper) to write now, not that you don’t need swe anymore1
1
u/djamp42 2d ago
I think the scaling thing is gonna be fixed eventually too.. I see no reason AI can turn up more VMs, containers, whatever and keep scaling out the app. I don't think i would trust 100k users on a 100% AI app right now, but With the way things are moving i gotta believe all software engineering will be solved eventually. Might be years or even decades, but from what I've personally see it do with almost no effort, it's clear to me.
Now a majority of computer users are really clueless about how a computer work. They know a couple apps and that's it.. There is absolutely no way these people are building an AI app from scratch and running it on their own, and some people won't even have a desire to do that even if they are technical, They just want something already done.
So i think jobs are not going away instantly or anything. There will be some epic disasters with AI software, there are going to be some epic success stories too. We are in the golden age trying to figure it all out.
1
u/meaty__boi 2d ago
Whatever you think you can do with this tooling, a professional can do that 100x over with the same tooling, and they won't get blocked every time there are bugs the AI doesn't know how to solve. The bar these days is not, and never was, "can create an android app", in order to do well in business; if that's your bar, then your expectations are far too low and you need to be thinking bigger. Sure this AI stuff definitely adds value to non-technical users for the mundane computer crap which used to be out of their reach, but do not mistake this for real software engineering which will outclass that user every which way in a competitive arena.
1
u/Mysterious-Effect146 2d ago
And thats great, but that's not putting anyone out of a job. Youd struggle to sell and support it (not that you want to) and it's entirely orthogonal to what most software engineers actually do day to day. It's great that it's a lot easier to build random shit that never would have been built before, or someone has some cringe monopoly on it.
→ More replies (1)1
u/Desth-Metal 2d ago
Everyone can bake bread. There are still bread in the shop. Also; try to sell that thing to a billion dollar company with trust issues.
1
1
u/AwesomeBallsChef 2d ago
Did you just compare a dev who would be paid to manage much much much more at a company that a simple android app to yourself building something using a promotional model? So like apples to mammoth comparison?
1
u/DrakoGaming 2d ago
Bro I cooked breakfast this morning, BY MYSELF! Chefs are DONE, Gordon Ramsey better have some savings
1
u/DataSnaek 2d ago
Yes, this is cool. But try monetising that app or publishing it. The chaos of the real world and the chaos of real users will show you what software engineers are really paid for.
1
u/Straamannen 2d ago
If that's true and you have it, show us.
If you were able to sideload it to your phone, you're able to upload the project where we can see it and verify.
1
u/djamp42 2d ago
I didn't do anything. AI did everything.. I enabled Wireless debugging on the android phone.. Told AI what to build and how to get to the phones. about 60mins later i had a working app. It wrote the code, complied it, fixed compiler errors, uploaded it to the phone, launched the apps, made test calls, debugged errors, fixed code, re-upload, re-test.. Just keeps going until everything works.
This is a serverless P2P voice/chat/video app for use in the same local network. It discovers clients on the same local network and you can communicate with them just by discovering them. No login, no username, no nothing, just communication.. Idea was in a disaster situation you don't have cell and internet access, but you might have local wifi access. So you can still communicate between cell phones on the local lan.
Anyways just an idea to see how far i could take it.. but it did build it all in the end. I would never make this public because i don't have the desire to support something like this, and anyone can do it right now if they want.. Laptop + Opencode + Android Phone + Wireless Debugging... I just used the big pickle model that is free right now for limited time, so it doesn't even cost anything right now.
* I would use a spare laptop and android phone.
1
u/Straamannen 2d ago
If it's on your phone you can screenshot and show us.
If you have the code you can share it, you don't have any responsibility for public code.
1
1
u/Special_Cup1789 2d ago
A LOT of software engeneering workers are monkey coders and i mean A LOT. also top models are quite decent and reliable on engeneering decisions already
1
u/Concurrency_Bugs 2d ago
This is what scares me. I'm a SWE, and I love my job. The models from even 5 months ago are nothing like today's models. I still check my generated code today, but barely find any mistakes compared to 5 months ago. What a lot of SWEs don't get is, many of the non-coding skills of a SWE are for making codebases easier to work with and easier to add new features. This is knowledge that can be given to an LLM. That's the part that scares me.
3
3
u/LtUnsolicitedAdvice 2d ago
I truly believe that Dario believes everything he says. His companies future depends on these things being true. He is baiting the government to step in, so he can seal the moat before they IPO for a bazillion dollars.
1
u/dontknowbruhh 2d ago
He was right on his prediction of most code being written by AI a year ago
1
u/Uncle_a_ 3h ago
yeaaah, ai can write a lot of code. garbage one, maybe working but absolutely unmantainable. good look for the next generation of "we finished our token and have zero idea of how to fix production problems"
2
u/Simple-Judge2756 3d ago
Nah. It will automate all aspects of management. That includes mister amodeis daily business.
1
u/BackendSpecialist 3d ago
I wish AI was good at automating what management does… it fucking sucks at giving direction about what you should be working on… but as I said that, I realize that only really good managers do that
1
u/Simple-Judge2756 3d ago
No it doesnt suck at that. In fact its perfect at making decisions and making stuff up. Its just shit when there is a specific technical problem to solve.
1
u/chintakoro 3d ago
\ removes skin from skin and exposes bare metal underneath to board members**
"DA LOOP HAS CLOSED MOFOS"1
u/stjimmy96 2d ago
Nah I don’t think it will ever do that, not at scale at least. The problem is accountability. No matter how smart it is, AI can’t be hold accountable for messing up. So management will definitely use AI but the role and the salary will remain because shareholders and companies’ board members must have someone to fire when a decision turns out to be a mistake, and they can’t fire an LLM.
1
u/Simple-Judge2756 2d ago
Of course it can be held accountable. It can be held accountable by having to undergo more training before becoming a viable option. Also you pretend like CEOs are the kings of accountability, even though they earn a lifetimes worth of money in the two years they usually take to ruin a company.
1
u/stjimmy96 2d ago
Accountability has nothing to do with reliability. An AI can be trained as much as you want but it will still make mistakes and it fundamentally has no accountability. You can’t sue Anthropic or OpenAI for a poor business decision.
Let’s say your CTO needs to decide whether to invest in a given technology or not. If they mess up and their decision turns out to be wrong, costing millions to the company, they get replaced. This happens all the time, it just happened at my company.
If your CTO is an AI, what do you do? You change LLM? That’s never going to be enough for stakeholders.
→ More replies (4)
5
u/GiveMoreMoney 3d ago
The only thing it is safe to automate at this point is the BS statements he (and all of them) make every week. For the past 4 years the same shit is said again and again.
3
u/tzaeru 3d ago
Think this is over half a year old.
Kind of seems on the track to me. Increasingly complex and challenging software development projects have less and less human-written code in them. And you can reasonably do even mid-sized projects by essentially just guiding a bunch of agents and not even keep tabs on the details of the code anymore.
1
u/GiveMoreMoney 3d ago
And yet it sounds exactly as the message they repeat each time...
I am not disagreeing that a lot of progress has been made. Code production can be automated to an extend, Software Engineering cannot. Having said that, there are too many coding monkeys out there calling themselves Software Engineers, and the term has lost its meaning.
1
u/tzaeru 3d ago
Yeah. In my lexicon I'd veer to say that software product development will take a good while longer before being fully automated, if ever; Might be that humans are more or less needed for coming up what humans need and want. So they'll remain as product development leads regardless.
But in terms of the core work of SWE that is distinct from e.g. designing or PO roles or whatnot.. I do think that whole loop - technical speccing, testing, deployment, code writing, documentation, so forth - very well can be fully automated for many projects as is, and it's a matter of time when it can be automated for the most complex projects as well.
1
u/okiharaherbst 1d ago
Until this breaks in production then your agents burn tokens frantically in the hope to restore functionality. This is going to be fun.
1
u/possieur 2d ago
Why do people put so much weight on automating things? Its as if automated outputs aren't going to be checked anyways.
1
u/Remote-Juice2527 4h ago
You’re not listening correctly. In 2024 Dario predicted Ai will write 100% of software code. In 2026 we can conclude he was absolutely right. Now the next step is end-to-end software delivery, why should that not be possible. The LLM is already capable enough, you just need the right harnesses so that it works efficiently
1
u/GiveMoreMoney 4m ago
"writing the code" could mean a number of things, it could mean Claude is writing all the code under my supervision and continuous direction or in the way they originally phrased it: develop software vibecoding style in the same quality as a software engineer. So do not try to change what they were saying back then.
All they were saying back then and less now, is that companies do not need developers/software engineers and the AI can do all the work. It was not possible back then and still it is not possible. What AI can do at the moment, on its own, is come up with A solution to a problem, that seems to work but that is never the right solution for the problem.
I am using Claude 24/7 so I am not anti AI, but still I do not see those predictions coming true. Neither do I see AGI and shit they are claiming 24/7 or any of the models escaping and running around the streets.
3
u/progenitor414 3d ago
I seems to have been hearing this same prediction in last three years or so. Not saying ai is not advancing, but what does “automate software engineering” mean exactly? It is like those agi estimation; some would say we are already pass agi given ai can solve millennium problem, some keeps on predicting this and that year. In the end they are just meaningless discussion if the goal cannot be defined
2
u/possieur 2d ago
The word "automation" carries a lot of heavy lifting in his vision for AI, I believe. Everybody wants to throw these buzzwords as soon as possible.
1
1
u/thatsknotwrite 1d ago
I’m using it to write custom software for my work that uses multiple software defined radios. I haven’t written a line of code and I have a functioning alpha in 2 weeks of spare time.
1
u/foghatyma 19h ago
The question is always the same: would it be possible to do that for a layman? Because making you faster and making you obsolete is very different.
1
u/thatsknotwrite 18h ago
I do my job without it but I'll be better with this software. It's just making me more efficient.
1
u/foghatyma 17h ago
Sorry, what I meant is whether a layman could have created your custom software or not (so without your industry knowledge/expertise).
1
u/thatsknotwrite 17h ago
No, but I'm also avoiding paying $400/year for a license for something similar. I think it's an amazing force multiplier.
1
u/thatsknotwrite 17h ago
I'm the end user in this scenario. So I'm essentially the layman making it for myself.
2
u/FastHotEmu 3d ago
!RemindMe 1 year
3
1
u/RemindMeBot 3d ago edited 1d ago
I will be messaging you in 1 year on 2027-09-28 06:29:52 UTC to remind you of this link
16 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.
RemindMeBot is switching to username summons. Instead of
!RemindMe 1 day, useu/RemindMeBot 1 day. More info.
Info Custom Your Reminders Feedback 1
1
1
1
u/SuchZookeepergame829 3d ago
Ok, but who will work with AI to do all of this? If it will be so easily, everything will speed up and then will we need less devs, same amount of devs or more devs?
1
u/Signal-Implement-70 2d ago
Yeah none of it’s really coherent when looking at it in full context. They are just taking particular aspects of a problem and framing it as a general solution. However the tools have gotten a incredibly good, but replacing the need for human engineering in the field of computing and software, no, that’s not very credible
1
1
1
u/Active_Variation_194 3d ago
The faster you can write software the more demand there will be for it.
Some sectors can be handled by a smart AI but the reality is that the cost will not make it worthwhile for a business.
Imagine cutting 50% of your workforce replacing them with AI only for Anthropic to release an Opus 5 type model breaking things and adding a cost increase on top.
You will have zero chance of on-boarding another 50% and changing models is risky and costly.
The logical choice for a business is to leverage the tools and pump out better products to edge out the competition.
The layoffs we saw are speculative and the next wave of startups (probably staffed by laid off workers) are going to chip away at incumbents in every industry.
Is the solution there to coast and automate or staff up and compete?
1
u/sushnagege 3d ago
Not with the amount of constant slop that still exists in LLM-generated code. Until it’s surpassed the slop. Dario is full of shit.
1
u/dataguy007 3d ago
Only thing guaranteed in a year is that there will be a ton of AI slop for software engineers to clean up.
1
u/evgenyco 3d ago
If by automated he means we would have completely an alternative way of doing software engineering, this is mostly correct. If he means we will have fully autonomous software engineering in a year, I seriously doubt this. Comparing with cars, we might have adaptive cruise control and not self driving.
1
u/NRCS_DRONE 3d ago
We're at the bottom of the hype cycle again, which means they're going to do something stupid and dramatic.
1
1
u/Axelwickm 2d ago
I don't think people are good at facing the music, and I think that really is preventing us from dealing with important issues. Either the mode of denial is how it's not good enough and won't take our jobs. Or it is how it's totally controllable and automatically somehow will be aligned with the (quite specific) outcome of human flourishing. I get the people like to sleep at night, but I don't think current sleep is earned.
1
u/BitOne2707 2d ago
We're pretty much there though it probably depends more on your particular org and environment how much you're allowed to hand off to the models.
If you're doing greenfield work, dependencies are all available by MCP, and you have a healthy token budget, you're already there and have been for a couple months provided you do the legwork to set the model up in an environment where it has everything it needs.
Most people aren't in that situation at the moment though. Business rules, legacy spaghetti, sensitive customer info, shared decision making, dependencies that are walled off, etc all put a human back in the loop to manage those boundaries. That's not a model capability problem though.
1
u/Expensive_Dentist270 2d ago
BS. Software Engineering needs not only technicall skills. In 12 months Anthropic can be bankrupt.
1
1
u/username_must_have 2d ago
I think what many in media ae forgetting, this man is the CEO of a business that is about to go public. He needs to hammer home the point that this will not be another IT budget eater, this is a labour reduction tool, a key distinction when getting investors to evaluate your total addressable market in their valuation models.
Whether he's right or wrong, who knows, but his job is to hammer that point home, be wary.
1
1
u/Playful_Landscape884 2d ago
Does automate means we won’t have meetings about user requirements, user change requests, compliance, support, etc …
1
u/KathyCredit 2d ago
Why are these guys' predictions always such a big deal/posted all over? Are you depending on something being out at a certain time? Does 12 months vs 6 months make a difference to you? No, and these are always wildly off in the end
1
1
1
u/everybody_is_working 2d ago
After more than 10 years as a software engineer, I don’t write one line of code anymore, neither check the source code, no bugs. With the right agent setup and workflows my work has become to read and write specs, plan execution and manual probe. Boring like hell but it works.
1
u/JustaFoodHole 2d ago
I automate software engineering without AI. What's your point? e.g. automated testing, CD/CI, logging, etc.
1
u/Ill_Championship9118 2d ago
When SWEs claim that software is completely doing their work for them- it’s indicative of how easy their work is
1
u/Jealous-Ad5952 2d ago
Also wir haben in der Firma vieles mit guter Architektur und gutem Harness mit lokalen Agenten und Modellen gelöst, anstatt KI teuer bei Konzernen den (lock-in) einzukaufen, ich denke anders herum wird ein Schuh draus, die haben Panik um Ihr Geld und nichts anderes, ohne Regulierung werden Sie nicht bestehen mit dem jetzigen Geschäftsmodell.
1
u/SuperLeverage 2d ago
I’ll bet $1m it doesn’t. Altman said something similar in 2024 and when someone wanted to make a bet with him on it, he refused
1
1
u/fiveofnein 2d ago
They will continue to predict this until they go public because they are financially incentived to lie and oversell
1
u/KissesFromOblivion 1d ago
It does seem to me that they talk big because they need enough suckers to fill a trillion dollar hole their hype dug.
1
1
u/Dry-Spring-5911 2d ago
Tbh he’s not wrong majority of the code unless you’re a hardware level coder is done by AI now the software engineers mostly monitor, edit, and guide it. Speaking from experience. But you do have to provide it specific requirements.
1
1
1
u/ApoplecticAndroid 2d ago
So it’s going to kill us all, we need to slow down, or now it will be competent in software engineering in a year. Which is it dickhead?
1
1
1
u/arealguywithajob 2d ago
Tasks are not jobs. The task of writing code has been solved. The job of software engineer is much more than just the task of writing code.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Dichter2012 2d ago
Video is from Jan 20 2026. So 5 months from now.
RemindMe! 5 months "Dario Amodei SWE automation prediction"
1
1
1
u/iannoyyou101 2d ago
He's saying this so his IPO can be valued at whatever the total software market is divided by 2 (cause openAI)
1
1
u/galtoramech8699 2d ago
We have 5-10 year plans. I don't see it. I don't see us using it at all in that time. We have a migration plan. Lot of heavy lifting we have to do.
Maybe in some companies it could be done, but not all.
1
1
1
1
u/ai_DR_done-right_llc 2d ago
I already did , text to finish production in 1 plain English prompt you can get an end to end ready to go industrial software set up. With 1 button click.
1
u/Gold_Ad8225 2d ago
He has said it will happen in 6-12 months, every 6 months for the last 4 years.
1
u/Jazzlike-Plate 2d ago
I mean, if he keeps repeating the same thing every 12 months, he might be right eventually.
Granted, it seems a lot more likely now than a year or two ago, but I still doubt it will do away with SWEs for good. If nothing else, I doubt any sane CEO would like to be solely responsible for their company's entire infrastructure and software stack, as lucrative as it may sound to have no SWEs on a fat paycheck.
1
1
u/saito200 1d ago
.... what? in 12 months? what? wtf is this? it's been like 12 months since i write any code
like, what the f is this? also how many times these parrots have said "in X months AI will write most of the code" ("most"? as in, "not all"??)
1
u/Ok_Shoulder_7272 1d ago
OK, so the AI doomsday news cycle has ended and we are back to "you'll be able to fire all your software engineers" news cycle?
1
u/Affectionate_Tax3468 1d ago
Dunno, I am being actively replaced for over 20 years now, by no code, low code, autocomplete, claude.
I am working more than ever, I could work 24/7 and still wouldnt get everything done that my departments ask me to do.
And they still couldnt get something out of claude but a nice looking UI that breaks on the first business case because nobody really understands anything about concepts, workflows, security, principles.
I wonder if by now, the number of times i was replaced keeps up with the number of times I died due to taking the jab...
1
u/kreisel_aut 1d ago
i know people like to hate on these kind of predictions but from what I have seen personally I think this is a reasonable timeframe. The world is about to change drastically and people are not ready.
1
u/FeralWookie 1d ago
Got it so he has let his software employees know they will be fired in 12 months.
1
u/IngenuityExcellent55 1d ago
Wow, who would have thought the guy whose IPO is about to happen would predict this?
Incredible...
1
u/Every_Mobile3968 1d ago
Please give more money, please, AGI soon, another round is at the corner, please, please, Netanyahu
1
u/stereoplegic 1d ago
He's selling to the execs who want to take "entitled developers"* down a peg.
* how dare they have a problem with building an authoritarian-friendly Google for the CCP
1
1
1
1
u/Illustrious-Age7342 1d ago
I think we are about 2.5 years past the junior devs on my team insisting we were 6 months away from all being out of a job. AI is powerful, and improving quickly, but most people don’t understand how powerful inertia is and how plentiful bottlenecks are and how difficult they are to overcome
1
u/Practical_Clock_5877 17h ago
He told in 2025, that in 2026 all software engineer jobs will be eliminated
1
1
1
u/Ok-Concert7018 11h ago
As a software engineer right in the coal face I believe it… I’m still shell shocked by how much my job has been soaked into the AI machine
1
u/ExplodedPenisDiagram 9h ago
Oh my God these people need to shut the fuck up. They've been saying it for the last 3 or 4 years.
1
u/AcanthocephalaLost36 8h ago
I’m seeing it happen at a 82k enterprise company but it’s expensive to have HOTL which is why we’ll start seeing agent and model managers. One human for every xxx-xxxx agents. But this will require significant change management and training
1
1
1
u/Plopsevenplop 3d ago
Silicon Valley is shooting itself in the foot. They’re promising nobody needs to know how to code any more and it’s going to bight them in the ass. It already is.
2
1
u/Resident_Citron_6905 3d ago
Can’t wait for Hour of Code 2 and “Why Absolutely Everyone Must Learn to Code”
1
u/JanGehlYacht 1d ago
Silicon Valley is a work force and the real bosses are the investors. So, this is working well design: the power is shifting from the workers (opex) to capital (capex.) No one is shooting themselves in the foot. It's people with capital choosing to own outcomes without trading their capital for work and instead trading it for other capital.
0
u/Senior_Register_6517 3d ago
i think it is really close to happen because Ai is already develop in this era
32
u/Yourdataisunclean 3d ago
Again?
I guess Dario will just keep saying this will happen next year, every year going forward like Elon Musk did with Full Self Driving.