alt Hacker News> As an experiment, one Anthropic engineer gave Fable 5.2 the task of designing a prototype operating system. Starting from an empty folder, the model coordinated over 1,000 subagents, working around the clock for eight days writing, testing, and reviewing code. It produced a working operating system that boots on a laptop, with its own core that runs the machine, drivers for the disk, keyboard, and network, permanent file storage, windows, a login screen, an installer, and built-in Claude functionality (see the video below).
As impressive as this sounds, whether it is tech teams or agent farms, the progress slows down considerably as the codebase grows. The real pain was seldom about shipping v1, but was more about how the v8 scales and how easy it is to get there, how robust the system remains between versions, and how constraints are held.
A huge part of the challenge is to pick/choose the design and implementation strategy that can only come from experience. That is one of the primary reasons why it's an absurd advice to me to let the llm do the goalseek and freestyle. This may be a no big deal on microservice or any managed runtime software that is an update away, but on an embedded or a high availability system where the field upgrade and hardware replacement costs could bankrupt a business.
if llm designed a circuit, will you bankroll it?
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While this unattended example is impressive, this is why you need to guide things more closely and make sure the design is itself scalable and maintainable. Otherwise you can get wad-o-slop.
Same thing happens in many cases with junior or mid-tier programmers slung at a project without supervision.
I thought the recommendation was to not plan for scalability but rewrite every time your user base grows tenfold. I'm only half-joking here :-)
There's been some discussion around Shopify (and others) move from React Native to purely native and that leading some people to conclude that LLMs have effectively killed RN. Which has always seemed silly to me for 2 reasons: First, Shopify almost certainly has on staff (or access to) actual native devs to steer that ship that a small/medium-sized company may not have. But more importantly, it's not the "Translate this RN app into native" that's the trouble. It's the hundreds and thousands of additional iterations you'll have to do on top to maintain and build out that product.
It's hard keeping separate code bases with separate languages in tandem, and while LLMs definitely aid in that area, I can't imagine it's a free lunch.