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Claude for Small Business

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude for Small Business

#431

Post by xienze »

dperks wrote: post #361
elliotbnvl wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a comically self-absorbed perspective. Why are people making things with Claude Code if not because they’re motivated?

I think the point is that you had to be deeply curious and more of a "hacker" or "computer nerd" type to be able to figure things out. But I think the same applies to not just AI but various tools that have abstracted away the complexity of things over the years. For example, I would imagine the average person deploying some sort of web app or API today knows far less about networking and infrastructure than someone…

Yes, exactly. I'm reminded of the articles detailing how Gen Z has fewer computer skills than previous generations because computing has become so abstracted -- turn on iPhone, tap button. "What's a directory?" -- files just kind of exist on these devices without any real notion of _where_, as far as the user knows. Stuff like that.

Compare that to say 30ish years ago. If you wanted to do something as simple as play a computer game you had to know how to navigate a command line, know about device drivers, make a boot disk, etc. Users were a whole lot closer to the realities of what makes computing work. And no internet, at least as we know it now. You really had to have a certain mindset to be a developer.

It's a far cry from "hey Claude make an app."

Re: Claude for Small Business

#432

Post by array_key_first »

mooreds wrote: post #377
darepublic wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen people just generate large docs with Claude cowork and they themselves have not scrutinized it or know why/how it's useful. It's just kind of impressive in its volume and well formatedness. And then they dump it in your lap as being helpful

> And then they dump it in your lap as being helpful I've been guilty of this and gotten pushback from my manager: "this feels like homework, cut these options down to 100 words each, max". Curation and refinement are even more important when you can have genAI generate reams of text. Seeking outside signals is even more important, like talking to customers, looking at real usage data, and more. It's too easy to trus…

We often see this bizarre workflow where notes, like engineering notes, are converted to large prose using AI. And then, the large prose is converted back to short bullet points on the other end for summarization!

Re: Claude for Small Business

#433

Post by speleding »

arjie wrote: post #10

I understand why this is a good idea. I have Claude Code hooked up to my mail synced via IMAP, my Mercury read-only token, and beancount, and it gets almost all of my invoices and categorizes them. The tedious portion for a lot of this is: * find invoice I_E for expense E * associate and categorize E based on I_E and transaction field These things are annoying but Claude Code is great at it and it leaves a much small…

Text based accounting is a great use case for LLMs. I was pleasantly surprised how well Codex works with ledger CLI, especially in combination with git.

I wonder if this is going to give text based accounting a boost. Reviewing clearly worded git commits is so much more reassuring then letting an LLM drive your accounting package and hoping it doesn't mess up somewhere.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#434

Post by ragazzina »

notRobot wrote: post #388

IDK if it's just me, but the rate at which Anthropic and similar are launching (and changing!) features and offerings doesn't inspire confidence. I expect stability from software and platforms I buy into and integrate into my systems. Feels like they're just using LLMs to produce enormous levels of output, without understanding that quantity ≠ quality.

If it makes you feel better, Apple releases new features at glacial speed and they still suck.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#435

Post by Ucalegon »

recitedropper wrote: post #426
Ucalegon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is, for a lot of people, they do not care about risk or implication or cost, as so long as they see things moving forward, especially if they do not understand what they are dealing with. The desire of 'build, build, build', to these people does not have a downside because they do not have the knowledge of what the implications of that actually means nor is there a culture associated with the duty of care…

This is such an excellent summary of everything wrong with Silicon Valley's current ethos.

'Move fast and break things' has been a core ethos for so long that many have forgotten that moving and breaking without an end or a point just leads to a lot wreckage and nothing to show from it, since someone else moves fast and breaks what you just did.

No one is asking why we are doing all of this, just some vague hand waving that it is inevitable, predetermined, as if we are not taking actions that are leading to these outcomes, that we do not have agency. But if we all tell ourselves that the future is predetermined, that this was always going to happen, then we do not have to own the outcomes.

For alot of people who preached radical ownership within the product, they are not willing to take radical ownership of the product externally besides profit.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#436

Post by infecto »

Ucalegon wrote: post #427
caminante wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy's acting in bad faith. Sorry you got swept into this.

I know. I don't expect them to come up with anything, but its fun to see how far they will backtrack/change the goalposts and how much they will tie themselves into knots to try and justify their lack of integrity.

Says the “Cool story bro” guy.

My point has been consistent. You jumped to specific conclusions from a 30second post that adds little to the parent discussion.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#437

Post by SahAssar »

zer0tonin wrote: post #428
scoutt wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ScamInc might also have a platform to create perfect invoices, perfect email conversations, scanning LinkedIn to find the right people to scam, etc.

Might? They have had that for a year at least. Plus an entire office block of slave workers in Cambodia.

This might help your local mom-and-pop scammer compete with the ScamInc.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#439

Post by onefiftymike »

kibwen wrote: post #328
riddlemethat wrote: post #291

I run a small business. I used AI to do book keeping for my LLC with two members (I have a partner). We had used a bookkeeper in previous years but we couldn’t ignore the potential cost savings of using AI. We have a CPA who said the books look great so we will likely no longer need a human to do book keeping. We were able to cancel Quickbooks because of this. Quickbooks (andvanced plan) alone was $3k/year in savings…

Then I have good news, you can save even more money by cancelling your Claude plan and using GnuCash for free, without having to worry about the inevitability of having your financials hallucinated.

I use GnuCash for my small business. I am not a programmer, but know enough to be dangerous. My use for AI was to have it write a small python script that will take my bank csv and set accounts properly based on how I have categorized them in GnuCash in the past, it spits out a clean csv to import into GnuCash. Now I can see exactly what the matches are, and the whole thing runs on my local computer. No worries about hallucination of new account names.

The python script is basic enough that even I can figure out what it is doing, and I still have to review the import to GnuCash and reconcile with my bank.

It is saving me about an hour of work every week right now.

I think this is my biggest use of AI - making small tools to do the work locally rather than sending things to the cloud to be stolen and messed with.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#440

Post by mNovak »

CSMastermind wrote: post #53

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…

Lately I've been thinking that UI really needs to include the equivalent of a screenshare meeting. Ideally you could click through an example of a software flow Claude's never seen before, with a few quick notes, and have it reliably work.

These narrow integrations with specific software suites seems like a dead end.

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