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Maybe that's true, and maybe you're an outlier. But from what we've been seeing, the frontier LLMs have torn apart many codebases, finding bugs littered everywhere, some over a decade old.

At this point it seems impossible for human to write better/more efficient code than a swarm of agents -- to be clear, multiple coordinated LLMs, not one-shot builds with a single agent.

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How much money was put into this, and what would putting a similar amount of money into fuzzing, static analysis, and human researchers look like?
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Ten median US software developers cost about $1.5 - $1.7 million per year - including all benefits - as of a couple of years ago.

A frontier AI is at least as capable as ten median human software developers. It's likely well beyond that now. Over the course of a year, would you have to spend $1.5 million to get the output of those ten median humans? No chance in hell. You'd have to spend less than 10% of that.

Then on top of that: the AI is improving rapidly; the humans go on vacation, the humans decline, the humans get old, the humans get sick, the humans take parental leave, the human struggle to adapt, the humans are resistant to change, the humans riot, the humans protest, the humans need healthcare, the humans want paid more, the humans can only work for 4-6 hours at peak while writing software (slowly).

Do you know any humans that are experts at a dozen programming languages? That human does not exist. The frontier AI are omnimaths.

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> the humans are resistant to change, the humans riot, the humans protest

This is partially a feature. Conflict and disagreement tends to produce better decisions in the end.

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And this counts the training and data center construction?
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What's my cost as a business to utilize the latest cutting edge Chinese model, renting its usage from the cloud? Whatever the Chinese cost (on their side), I'm never going to suffer even a tiny fraction of that pass-along cost no matter what. We can all appreciate the subsidization going on.

Or to grab a bunch of $200 per month accounts from OpenAI or Anthropic for a team to use?

The calculations is: I'm in the US, if I have ten median software developers, what's my cost? Then versus using AI instead.

The human labor can't keep up. Even if we freeze things right here, and then hyper optimize Fable 5.2 by etching it straight to silicon, the human developers are obsolete. And the future isn't going to stop coming.

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I like their angle though - from a societal perspective of allocated resources, how long until we've paid off the cost of building these LLMs? Imagine instead the entire supply chain was Stalinistically tuned towards finding bugs in Linux. Training rare earth mineral miners how to code level or whatever. I think as a thought experiment it's interesting, the answers could translate to an organizational level about comparing labor cost against token cost. What's a good breakdown of token spend vs hiring some new juniors to train up?
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>Gotta be honest, LLMs are still subpar compared to what I do.

Im sorry... what?

You are replying to this:

> Our first formalization of Fermat’s Last Theorem, performed by an unreleased research version of Claude, took 11 days. It relied on a purpose-built harness along with guidance from a human researcher. By contrast, a team of 1,000 Fable 5.2 agents fully formalized the theorem in just 30 hours, with minimal human intervention. Fable 5.2 started from minimal prompts, built its own ways to coordinate, and used no mathematical references, only a list of intermediate theorem statements to score progress. It needed one-third of the action tokens as our first formalization and produced a proof seven times shorter. As can be seen in the figure below, Opus 5.5 (with the same 1,000-agent setup) completed only 26% of the formalization in 18 hours, and barely made any more progress after 30.

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I imagine the author was comparing it being subpar at what _they_ do as a contrast to it being excellent at formalizing mathematical theorems. Thus suggesting that there is a significant "spikiness" to AI.
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HN has become so miserable over the past ~12-24 months because it's a site filled full of highly paid techies living in the deepest pit of denial that has ever existed.

It's all going away. Here's a prediction: HN will effectively die with the software developer.

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It's possible "tech companies" die as tech no longer becomes a differentiator. Businesses will just ask their agents for whatever tech they need.
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Is it that dependent on the software developer segment? Why do you expect it to die rather than just shift more towards... I don't know, startup business droids?
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I can guarantee that Dario will be unemployed before I am.
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I think that's called retirement.
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I was you just a few months ago. It's a skill issue.

You are not going to produce better outputs than a team of Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 xhigh agents.

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