A recent study undertaken by Yegor Denisov-Blanch at Stanford examined the work of over 100,000 software developers, and one of the key outputs from the study was a graph showing AI speed-up vs lines of code, reproduced here:
Note how the speed-up from AI drops to below 10% once you get to several 100k lines of code.
This would resonate with my experience with the software codebase I’m working on, which has about 400k lines of code. Since I already work fast, that <10% speed-up is effectively zero.
In any case, I am opposed to prompting an AI engine to write my own code, for reasons I have given elsewhere (it’s demoralizing, for starters). The only situations I can think of where it might be of use are for refactoring code or for generating a lot of boilerplate code if I’m creating a new application, but in the latter case I’d probably prefer to pick up an existing framework and run with that (e.g. WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, etc), as these frameworks already have a lot of key features that are robust and well tested. As for refactoring, most of the work I do involves creating new features and fixing bugs, not refactoring an entire codebase. In other words, the work is primarily about problem solving and integration of new functionality, not tidying code.
YouTube videos like this one clearly show how the use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code with Serena can speed things up. However, as you will see if you watch the video, the codebase is already pretty well formed and the task was to refactor a lot of files, not to spend time identifying and fixing bugs or to work out how to integrate a new custom feature into the application. I guess it all depends on what the developer is trying to do, and whether he or she likes using AI to do it.
As for AGI, I don’t believe it will ever happen because human beings are not machines. The fundamental error of the AI leaders lies in their materialist philosophy. The world is more than just the physical. Mind is more than matter.
Even if it’s only in a technical sense, I don’t believe AGI will happen. That would effectively mean a robot sitting at my desk and doing all my work.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Until then I shall remain well within the skeptic camp.