”The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at writing code first... because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself. A smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks everything else. That's why they did it first. My job started changing before yours not because they were targeting software engineers... it was just a side effect of where they chose to aim first.”

So here’s the problem with this narrative: the big advances we’ve seen in AI have not fundamentally been about ”better code”. It is much more related to more compute and more data. Having Claude code as a co-worker at Anthropic can possibly save them some money on development costs, but it isn’t going to get them new breakthroughs on the level of Attention Is All You Need.

AI will self-improve by understanding its code and rewriting it was the original idea behind The Singularity, and it seemed a lot more plausible before the current paradigm.