Yeh I think you’re probably right. But in the wider use of these tools - less so. Yet the uptake for report writing and email sending and …whatever else - massive.
Great piece, well written and succinctly sums up my thoughts.
The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated shit. I pushed back, it apologised, and then generated more crap that had nothing to do with reality, I pushed back, we looped again, still just total fiction: “the drums don’t come in until bar 16” on a song that opens with a drum loop, that kind of crap.
We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.
I’m guessing it’s that humans don’t have capacity to deal with this kind of scenario - it’s like having a junior staff member who is utterly incredible 90% of the time - completely convincing in their certainty and skill level, and then 10% of the time you catch them doing a shit in their desk drawer because they couldn’t be arsed to walk to the toilet. AI’s are basically sociopaths.
> On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier.
Wowzers this resonated with me. I’m an ideas person, and a pretty bad coder, at least compared to the normal HN crew. I’ve found Claude to be absolutely astonishing at creating amazing, working apps that I use all the time. But I’ve also been aware for a while that having no bottleneck on ideas isn’t 100% a happy situation.
I’ve spent years and years - 30, maybe - coming up with various (often web related) ideas and having to kick them into the “no time, not enough expertise” long grass. Claude removed this barrier - which is incredible - but also I’ve become aware about how damaging this is mentally, too.
My attention - already scattered - was totally, totally fucked for a while there, 5 windows with different agents all pumping out my latest, greatest idea, no guard rails, no buffer…
I’ve spent the last month being very deliberately not this - and it’s making a huge difference. I’m lucky because I noticed it, and I’m lucky because I’ve somehow got the wherewithal to do something about it, but it’s all been quite sobering.
15 years in running a tiny micro agency (me and my wife), working with non profits. Still looking ok right now, and I still love it and my clients who are ace. I’m mainly a PM though with hacker-developer tendencies. Hoping my sector hold together for another 10 years. I’m 53 so that’ll do it. We’ve been relatively sensible over the years, good work / life balance and our children (now adult and left home) know who we are. So that’s the main job done :-)
What strikes me a significant percentage of the time I see posts like this and the responses to it is how shit other people’s jobs seem and how unfair their employers appear to be. I don’t know if this is because it’s US centric or tech centric or just full of people under a particular HN-like duress. But, man, it sounds crappy out there. Is there anyone here who actually likes what they do, has a decent employer, has a nice life…?
I think it’s this but also that we all see the value in our own niche because it’s ours, and have more trouble seeing the values in other niches. So it becomes a self perpetuating positive reinforcement thing.
I’ve had some fun building simple instruments in the browser using AI and piping midi to Live, then munging from there [0]. The whole principle of fully AI generated music leaves me cold but AI as a sort of sidechain to the creative process seems potentially interesting.
This is a job for people like me: product / project managers who work on a project to translate business (and audience!) needs into specifics around design and build. It's a skill all of its own, and it requires time and effort and expertise - it won't just emerge naturally, it won't happen without time thinking about strategy, audience, metrics, goals.
We spend a whole bunch of time when we're running projects pushing back and telling clients to "think less like you and more like your audience". It's not surprising to me that clients come with pre-set notions: of course they do, it's their business, they're in it all day every day, and they're thinking about it all the time. This doesn't make them good at thinking about this stuff from alternative / audience angles!
100% agree. The 2007 smoking ban in the UK totally transformed the landscape here, and yes people could still go home and smoke or whatever, but that ban has made a huge and significant change to health and thinking about smoking over the last 20 years. We need to do the same with social media and recognise that it's likely to be seen as toxic as smoking in a few years time - if not already.
It’s a fun idea. I was thinking much like others that you need a web app - but then presumably you’re having to intercept the “real” url on qr codes, right? I mean - if I scan a qr just using my phone camera, there’s a reasonable chance I’ll end up at a url - whereas you’re intercepting that flow?
Much as I love using Claude or whatever to help me write some code, it's under some level of oversight, with me as human checking stuff hasn't been changed in some weirdly strange way. As we all know by now, this can be 1. Just weird because the AI slept funny and suddenly decided to do Thing It Has Been Doing Consistently A Totally Different Way Today or 2. Weird because it's plain wrong and a terrible implementation of whatever it was you asked for
It seems blindingly, blindingly obvious to me that EVEN IF I had the MOST TRUSTED secretary that had been with me for 10 years, I'd STILL want to have some input into the content they were interacting with and pushing out into the world with my name on.
The entire "claw" thing seems to be some bizarre "finger in ears, pretend it's all fine" thing where people just haven't thought in the slightest about what is actually going on here. It's incredibly obvious to me that giving unfettered access to your email or calendar or mobile or whatever is a security disaster, no matter what "security context" you pretend it's wrapped up in. A proxy email account is still sending email on your behalf, a proxy calendar is still organising things on your calendar. The irony is that for this thing to be useful, it's got to be ...useful - which means it has at some level to have pretty full access to your stuff.
And... that's a hard no from me, at least right now given what we all know about the state of current agents.
Plus... I'm just not sure of the upside. Am I seriously that busy that I need something to "organise my day" for me? Not really.