Anthropic's CEO Says AI and Software Engineers Are in 'Centaur Phase' - But It Won't Last Long (businessinsider.com)
- Reference: 0180804730
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/02/16/1753253/anthropics-ceo-says-ai-and-software-engineers-are-in-centaur-phase---but-it-wont-last-long
- Source link: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-centaur-phase-of-software-engineering-jobs-2026-2
Amodei said the same transition would play out in software engineering, and warned that entry-level white-collar disruption is "happening over low single-digit numbers of years."
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-centaur-phase-of-software-engineering-jobs-2026-2
We should totally trust this. (Score:3)
It's not like he has a vested interest or anything. And so many other technologies that were touted to replace humans have always completely done so in the past. I mean, no one works are car washes or fast food anymore. They are completely human free.
Anthropic's CEO then went home (Score:2)
Anthropic's CEO then went home to his newborn and his one year old son, and announced that he will have 1024 children in the next ten years.
Re:Anthropic's CEO then went home (Score:5, Funny)
> Anthropic's CEO then went home to his newborn and his one year old son, and announced that he will have 1024 children in the next ten years.
Isn't that the one goal that Elon Musk actually achieved on schedule?
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That's going to be hard on his wife.
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He can just have his wife spin up a bunch of assistant wives, each carrying one-three children.
Man selling software overstates its capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
When an AI can do everything a human software engineer can do, it will be able to do anything a human can do.
Doing what a human software engineer can do requires knowledge of real life, the ability to learn new things like a human does, the ability to see the big picture based on living a real life.
Someday, an AI will do that. But LLMs won't.
No more hallucinations? (Score:2)
The current need for humans in the loop is much less about performance and much more about accuracy. Amodei must believe (in public anyway) that the hallucination problem is nearly solved.
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I'm not sure why people keep insisting on believing what these guys say has any basis in fact - or assuming that the tech bro isn't lying through his teeth.
I recall a story on this site, probably two years ago, where an AI company CEO stated categorically that the "hallucination problem" was solved.
Re: No more hallucinations? (Score:2)
I wish it were solved. I wouldn't need to constantly hold it's hand.
Isn't this a step backwards? (Score:2)
They said AI was replacing developers last year. Extrapolating, by this time next year AI will be completely gone and it will take two humans to do the work of one human.
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AI did replace them to a frightening degree in 2025, have you not been paying attention to the hiring & layoff numbers?
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Most of the "because AI" headcount reductions were complete bullshit, or a "realignment" of the companies towards the AI future. Assuming it ever actually happens. I mean, they spent billions and promised hundreds of billions more.
Now, I certainly wouldn't want to work at a company that's making a shitty SaaS replacement for a dBase III application or excel spreadsheets or something. That sort of thing is doomed no matter how you look at it. If AI does even 5% of what they're replacing, you just ask Claude
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> Most of the "because AI" headcount reductions were complete bullshit, or a "realignment" of the companies towards the AI future.
I envy your insight into the private staffing decisions of thousand of companies worldwide. That, or your crystal ball or your [1]spy birds [birdsarentreal.com] or whatever other source you have that no one else does.
Back in the real world, the greedy people running companies hire people if they can employ them at a profit. This implies there is work for them to do, which there isn't if the people who are already there are a lot more productive.
It blows me away how many people don't see what happened in the dotcom boom, the
[1] https://birdsarentreal.com/
Re: Isn't this a step backwards? (Score:2)
Every single one of those steps ended up creating millions of new jobs overall. Because it turns out that when presented with new tools people come up with new uses for them.
For those of you old enough to remember 1997 ... (Score:2)
... remember the contingent of naysayers who said the internet was a passing fad?
For those of us who were lucky enough to work through that period and not have their industry destroyed, it probably seemed like a dream come true. Slashdot is full of such people.
But the outcome for most others was terrible. Now it's coming for us .
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> ... remember the contingent of naysayers who said the internet was a passing fad?
I don't remember that. Was that a thing?
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Yes, and in some ways they were right. What they got wrong was that its replacement was also the internet rather than everyone going to back to... BBSs I guess.
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Recursive reply is recursive.
Keep sailing down denial ...
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> I don't remember that. Was that a thing?
Yes. [1]Here's a sample. [newstatesman.com] Lots more where that came from.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2016/08/25-years-here-are-worst-ever-predictions-about-internet
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Fantastic article! Clifford Stoll (first person quoted) has a hilarious blurb in his wikipedia article:
> When the article resurfaced on Boing Boing in 2010, Stoll left a self-deprecating comment: "Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler ... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..."[13]
I was a teenager in the 1990s. My memories of that era of the Internet, and the adults I associated with, was pretty much unbridled enthusiasm! I was running DOS and OS/2 in the early 90s, and I got on several BBSes that had mail relays and a dialup connection to a local university that got me directly on the Internet through a modem terminal (Usenet, lynx, etc.). Great time to believe alive.
This article r
Has Anthropic replaced its engineers? (Score:3, Interesting)
It did not... ?
I wonder why... they should know best how to do it and yet they have not...
seriously... For me so far AI is just a better interface to web/stack overflow... and still generating lots of crap...
Sure it saves time on some simple things like unit tests generation but even there it has some issues...
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I have seen codegen accelerate stuff, but it's still just dumb as all get out. It can successfully generate longer streams of code, but subjectively the lines per mistake seem similar, and I have my best result keeping it on a short leash or maybe 6 or 7 lines of code. I have to correct that code at least half the time and I don't have the attention span to review and repair a batch of a few hundred lines of codegen when it isn't quite right.
Exception being if I'm doing something very easy yet tedious, th
Next phase: A few software engineers (Score:2)
who are Reverse Centaurs. Definition: A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.
From: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05-pop-that-bubble-u-washington-8b6b75abc28e
Now, because the AI is a statistical inference engine, because all it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past, it will “hallucinate” a library called lib.pdf.text.par
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> From: [1]https://doctorow.medium.com/ht... [medium.com]
I read about 2/3 of that before I got intensely bored. I have yet to find Corey Doctorow ever say something interesting--it's like his super power is talking about technology to people who don't know anything, and making them feel good about reading it. I don't know if he's ever written for Wired, but I get the same feeling when I read his tripe that I get when I read Wired. Way back in highschool one of my best friends was obsessed with Wired and later became a columnist for them for a couple of years. He
[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-12-05-pop-that-bubble-u-washington-8b6b75abc28e
Do they actually talk to programmers? (Score:2)
Because I've been using LLMs for over a year now in my dev work. There is just not way at all that any of this can replace what I do. Like, every time I switch context I have to essentially re-contextualize the LLM for that new project in order to get any use out of it. That takes a lot of time and it can be frustrating. If you don't do that then the LLM is going to be giving you very bad code advice.
Re: Do they actually talk to programmers? (Score:1)
Start using instructions files everywhere. The AI is pretty good at generating them. But itâ(TM)s an evolving problem. Every day I find a new thing I need to add to my instructions file because the AI made a bad assumption.
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I do use them. But they are still limited. Projects aren't static. So you constantly have to update those files to keep the LLM current.
Chess (Score:1)
A human using a computer can still beat a computer at chess.
Guy selling thing says his thing is best thing (Score:1)
...story at 11.
Seriously though, we seem to be flatlining with what agentic AI can handle. The new models are...fine. They are marginally better than the last, but replacement level? No. Not in software dev, not in legal, not in medical, not in anything. Useful yes, replacement no.
Centaur phase? (Score:2)
They mean they have a horse's ass?
I wish that... (Score:5, Insightful)
...these guys would stop trying to predict an increasingly unpredictable future and concentrate on accurately reporting real progress
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> ...these guys would stop trying to predict an increasingly unpredictable future and concentrate on accurately reporting real progress
The CEOs? Their jobs are mostly to behave as hype men for the new hotness, which may or may not ever come, but so long as it keeps sucking up dollars and mindshare, they're fulfilling their purpose.
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The progress is right there in front of your eyes in the form of the bloodbath underway in a number of white collar fields.
It is also right there in front of you if you've used any of these tools.
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see the near future, but go on talking like a buggy whip maker in 1905 if it makes you feel better.
Re: I wish that... (Score:2)
If you can replace programmers then surely AGI will happen then as it'll self improve. Besides once it gets to that level there won't be any white collar jobs left. "Write me a program to replace a lawyer. Make no mistake" boom end of the legal field... we will have much bigger problems long before that comes to pass.
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Maybe "programmers" come in different tiers, and AI can only replace the lower tiers. Like, programmers who can only implement simple generic code when given clear instructions (but cannot design solutions themselves and cannot debug very well) would be the bottom tier, and perhaps AI will be able to completely replace them, but still not able to replace higher tier programmers.
If we make some more distinctions:
Mid-tier: can independently design and implement business solutions using existing tools and fra
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Cloud services replaced the shit out of sysadmins and other operator types.
Signed,
I Racked Servers In Sunnyvale In the Late 90s
Re: I wish that... (Score:2)
For every 1U you racked there's 20U in the wild today. And yes it still needs a meat sack human to slide it in.
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> Write me a program to replace a lawyer. Make no mistake"
I am working on a project in this direction at the request of a law firm. They see it as replacing paralegals , not the partners, but it's all the same thing.
Re: I wish that... (Score:1)
I use Sonnet (4.5) every day and itâ(TM)s improving much faster than I expected. But I still correct it every 5 minutes. My first attempt to use Opus 4.6 as an agent failed immediately. Somehow Sonnet 4.5 did the same task better than Opus 4.6. But people are claiming fantastic results, so Iâ(TM)ll test it some more this week. Maybe Opus has a different âoepersonalityâ and requires a different style of prompt.
Last week I had to argue with my companyâ(TM)s customer support because ou
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I've used Sonnet 4.5 most days for almost everything recently. However, last week it got stuck on a problem. So I took a screenshot of the issue (was a math error that led to a visualization issue) and gave it to Opus 4.6 with 2 sentences of prompt. 28 minutes later O4.6 reasoned itself to the correct root cause and fix. Game changing moment for me. It figured out the issue from a screenshot. But i also gave O4.6 another problem and it chewed on it in circles for half an hour and hit me for 16x usage reque
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I had similar experience. Eventually went back to Sonnet.
My one suggestion is to have the AI update the copilot-instructions.md file on its own after a session. This will help it keep things in memory. Too often I've caught Claude doing stupid things I told it not to do a few prompts back.
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Like other "AI" company CEOs, Anthropic's CEO sees the purpose of his role to do everything he can to sell the company for many billions, as quickly as possible, so he can join the "absurdly rich tech bro" club. That's it, there is no secondary purpose in his mind.
That's not what he says, of course, if people ask him about it though.