Anthropic's CEO Says AI and Software Engineers Are in 'Centaur Phase' - But It Won't Last Long
7 134Human software engineers and AI are currently in a "centaur phase" -- a reference to the mythical half-human, half-horse creature, where the combination outperforms either working alone -- but the window may be "very brief," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on a podcast. He drew on chess as precedent: 15 to 20 years ago, a human checking AI's moves could beat a standalone AI or human, but machines have since surpassed that arrangement entirely.
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."
7 comments
I wish that... (Score: 5, Insightful)
by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @04:10PM (#65992884)
...these guys would stop trying to predict an increasingly unpredictable future and concentrate on accurately reporting real progress
Re:Anthropic's CEO then went home (Score: 5, Funny)
by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @04:22PM (#65992908)
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?
Man selling software overstates its capabilities (Score: 5, Insightful)
by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @04:17PM (#65992896)
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.
Re:No more hallucinations? (Score: 5, Informative)
by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:14PM (#65993156)
Just to follow up... I was referring to this Slashdot story from October 2024 [slashdot.org].
Re:For those of you old enough to remember 1997 .. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:40PM (#65993198)
...remember the contingent of naysayers who said the internet was a passing fad?
I remember both of them, and I remember thinking they were full of shit. Aside from Bill Gates and some other forgettable nobody, no one thought the Internet was a passing fad. However, just about everyone on Slashdot thought that most of the companies in the dot com boom were doomed to failure, even (especially?) as paid pundits talked up the brilliance of the companies' CEOs.
I see history repeating. The underlying technology has some cool uses (though not worth the catastrophic cost of building the models), but it's pets.com all over again.
Has Anthropic replaced its engineers? (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Lavandera ( 7308312 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @04:41PM (#65992942)
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...
Re:Has Anthropic replaced its engineers? (Score: 5, Interesting)
by ihadafivedigituid ( 8391795 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:36PM (#65993188)
I've done this stuff for so long that coding speed is the least of my issues. Vibe coding isn't attractive to me at all after trying it a few times.
I don't let LLMs directly operate on my codebases, and I don't really generate that much code with them either. Where LLMs really save me time and effort is code reviews, debugging, dealing with obscure stuff outside my areas of expertise, spitballing various approaches, etc. I get better results in way less time.
I learn a hell of a lot, too, because I ask a lot of questions. It's like having a tireless, patient, and helpful colleague with godlike (but still fallible) knowledge available 24/7.