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Claude for Small Business

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude for Small Business

#151

By coincidence, I've looked yesterday a small documentary [1] about the people tagging all those invoices to train theses models. For 120 €/month they are reading about 1000 to 4000 invoices per day and check and tag them for AI training. [1] https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/126831-000-A/arte-reportage/

OCR based invoice recognition has been a solved problem for well over a decade. Source: I've consulted for a company doing that. No exploitation. No LLMs. Just clever engineering.

In my neck of the woods, B2B invoices are now required to be delivered over the Peppol network in UBL format, which further improves reliability.

Doesn't necessarily eliminate the need for an accountant, because the chosen UBL standard has lots of room for interpretation and ambiguity, and it's impossible to uniformly decide how process an invoice based on the invoice alone (e.g. is this deductible? is this even a business expense at all? which ledger should this go in? etc).

Re: Claude for Small Business

#152
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is…

> Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) The drug is scary when everyone is depending on it. I wonder what is future like.

The future is perpetually dealing with the fallout from all the vibe coding as the pool of people who'd have a shot at fixing it gets smaller and smaller. Shitty will be the new normal.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#153

Waiting to hear the stories of things Claude did running amok in Quickbooks.

I’ve given it access to my small business books for the last few months (attended sessions only) and so far it’s helped me clean up countless errors made by humans, at the expense of a small handful of duplicated transactions that got shaken out pretty quickly.

How do you know those duplicates are the only errors it made? You weren't aware of the apparently countless human errors before, so how would you be aware of Claude's errors?

Re: Claude for Small Business

#155

I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them. Managing codebases, etc. is still a hassle though. 90% of the power of Excel was that it was…

> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is…

> I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. […] 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'.

Reading the first part, I was going to say they don’t even care about whether or not there’s a codebase. It doesn’t matter; it could be all gremlins and hamsters in wheels for all they care, and for all they should care. All that matters is the functionality, the value it gives them.

We’re even getting disposable code now. Entire single-use ephemeral web apps, built on the go to enable, visualise, or simplify a specific thing, then thrown away.

Will it all lead to some trouble? Definitely. So did computers, and so did the internet.

Weird times. Fun times.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#157

My initial take is bad idea because those people don't have the kind of security hygiene instincts that make CC a sane choice for coders.

> those people don't have the kind of security hygiene instincts that make CC a sane choice for coders.

Coders don't all have those kind of security hygiene instincts either

Re: Claude for Small Business

#158

By coincidence, I've looked yesterday a small documentary [1] about the people tagging all those invoices to train theses models. For 120 €/month they are reading about 1000 to 4000 invoices per day and check and tag them for AI training. [1] https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/126831-000-A/arte-reportage/

AI: Actual Indians^WMalagasy

Re: Claude for Small Business

#160
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) The drug is scary when everyone is depending on it. I wonder what is future like.

The future is perpetually dealing with the fallout from all the vibe coding as the pool of people who'd have a shot at fixing it gets smaller and smaller. Shitty will be the new normal.

> Shitty will be the new normal.

I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing.

I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo.

There’s always someone for whom shitty is becoming the new normal. If that makes it a rule, what do we make of that rule?

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