When GPT-4 came out, I worked on a project called Duopoly [1], which was a coding bot that aimed to develop itself as much as possible.
The first commit was half a page of code that read itself in, asked the user what change they'd like to make, sent that to GPT-4, and overwrote itself with the result. The second commit was GPT-4 adding docstrings and type hints.
Over 80% of the code was written by AI in this manner, and at some point, I pulled the plug on humans, and the last couple hundred commits were entirely written by AI.
It was a huge pain to develop with how slow and expensive and flaky the GPT-4 API was at the time. There was a lot of dancing around the tiny 8k context window. After spending thousands in GPT-4 credits, I decided to mark it as proof of concept complete and move on developing other tech with LLMs.
Today, with Sonnet and R1, I don't think it would be difficult or expensive to bootstrap the thing entirely with AI, never writing a line of code. Aider, a fantastic similar tool written by HN user anotherpaulg, wasn't writing large amounts of its own code in the GPT-4 days. But today it's above 80% in some releases [2].
Even if the models froze to what we have today, I don't think we've scratched the surface on what sophisticated tooling could get out of them.
The first commit was half a page of code that read itself in, asked the user what change they'd like to make, sent that to GPT-4, and overwrote itself with the result. The second commit was GPT-4 adding docstrings and type hints.
Over 80% of the code was written by AI in this manner, and at some point, I pulled the plug on humans, and the last couple hundred commits were entirely written by AI.
It was a huge pain to develop with how slow and expensive and flaky the GPT-4 API was at the time. There was a lot of dancing around the tiny 8k context window. After spending thousands in GPT-4 credits, I decided to mark it as proof of concept complete and move on developing other tech with LLMs.
Today, with Sonnet and R1, I don't think it would be difficult or expensive to bootstrap the thing entirely with AI, never writing a line of code. Aider, a fantastic similar tool written by HN user anotherpaulg, wasn't writing large amounts of its own code in the GPT-4 days. But today it's above 80% in some releases [2].
Even if the models froze to what we have today, I don't think we've scratched the surface on what sophisticated tooling could get out of them.
[1]: https://github.com/reitzensteinm/duopoly [2]: https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html