Since reading it, I’ve been thinking about the employee quotes from Anthropic’s new study about AI self improvement. Employees claim to have not written any code for five months; another acknowledges, on days when the entire process proceeds smoothly, they start thinking if what they are doing even really matters.
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These developers are not new to the industry – they are some of the most highly regarded engineers employed by one of the premier artificial intelligence laboratories in the universe; therefore, their reported lack of clarity regarding their respective roles leads me to believe they experience disorientation.
Most of the press will report on the scale of Anthropic’s success as indicated by Claude creating over 80 percent of the merged code into Anthropic’s production repository, and engineers producing 8 times more code per quarter than in 2024. While these facts are noteworthy on their own, what is more fascinating is what occurs to the human beings driving the car when it drives itself.
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No one knows for sure what the relationship will be like between AI and humans long term. The company’s view is that humans will focus on higher-level tasks (like setting research direction, determining the value of experiments, and deciding what to build next), while the doing has been automated through Claude. While this may be a good portrayal for senior leaders in the room, it may be a less clear picture for everyone else. When Claude has the ability to answer open-ended questions, troubleshoot live production issues, and manage end-to-end cycles of applied research with minimal human intervention, it can be difficult to tell the difference between directing AI versus watching the AI perform these tasks.
Another area that Anthropic does mention but doesn’t expand on enough is the impact of technology on how people work together. One employee talked about how before there were many small favours exchanged for a variety of reasons, like asking someone for a favour quickly and having shared context, which created mutual awareness between two people. With the assistance of Claude, this process has been accelerated and all social debt created through these small exchanges has been completely eliminated. While productivity has increased as a result of Claude, many moments of lost human collaboration have also disappeared.
None of this is an argument against the technology. The gains are real and the applications go well beyond shipping code faster. But we are in a strange moment where the people closest to this transition are themselves struggling to articulate what their role now is.
That is not a crisis yet. But it is a question that deserves a more honest answer than “humans will focus on the important stuff.” Because right now, even at Anthropic, nobody seems entirely sure what the important stuff is anymore.
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