Claude keeps launching automation products but not sure if they are bothering about quality. I was using claude cowork and was hoping to get simple tasks done using web browser. It is unreliable and often fails
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Claude for Small Business
451–460 of 524 posts
Re: Claude for Small Business
#452Awesome. Now small businesses can do half their work before being told they've hit their usage limits too!
Re: Claude for Small Business
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what? They produce more for the same money. What's not to like?
> They produce more for the same money. The word "more" there is doing a lot of work. What is the "more"? Is it: - more documents and text or more understanding - more code or more valuable features - more things to throw against the wall or more considered experiments It's way easier to do the first things instead of the second.
I know, I know. It was more a tounge in cheek comment to something I assume was irony as well. To be fair to GP, management doesn't get any of this...
Adding is always easier than reducing to the essence.
I find it interesting how herding agents has so much in common with being a team lead. Constant struggle between too detailed and too loose instructions. One difference though is that the team learns from you, but with agents it's only you who adapts. Saying that, because I don't count instructions or anything in the context window as adapting.
Re: Claude for Small Business
#454[deleted]
Re: Claude for Small Business
#455Earlier 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…
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
clearly you just need to have your agent review, summarize, and take appropriate actions on the docs being sent to you.
Re: Claude for Small Business
#456Earlier 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.
Our company started monitoring our Claude usage so I've started coding personal stuff manually again and it's...really fun!
Re: Claude for Small Business
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's something to be said about first impressions and the GnuCash website's first impression does not give confidence in its ability to handle finances. Ironically for this thread, I think an AI redesigned website would do wonders here.
A conventionally well-designed site is actually much less trustworthy for me.
GNU cash website immediately tells that it is not a Saas and doesn't need to upsell the latest trendy addons, for it to survive.
It tells that it is not "investing" in marketing to eventually turn a profit.
It is not looking for acquisition opportunities or next funding rounds.
If you want to see what a trustworthy website looks like, take a look at SQLite or postgresql or even this website itself.
Re: Claude for Small Business
#458I'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…
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Re: Claude for Small Business
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
> most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation. I don't think so. Back then, the pool of people doing such a thing basically self-selected for intelligent, motivated types who were capable of learning on their own. The new "programmers" "programming" via Claude Code are going to be very different from those hobbyists you're talking about.
This is a comically self-absorbed perspective. Why are people making things with Claude Code if not because they’re motivated?
Because back then you had to care about the differences of e.g. 16bit vs 32bit datatypes & instructions, hardware limitations are not known to modern grown-up dev people - they think hardware is unlimited.
Earlier you really had do understand what you were doing, today cou can get along with a prompt - which works great, until it doesnt. Not to blame any vibecode hobbyist here, though real application development usually required some degree of deeper understanding back then.
Re: Claude for Small Business
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Redundant verification is built into the workflow, both at the agent-instruction level and downstream. Reconciling a monthly bank statement with your account register in QuickBooks, for example, has the benefit of making sure you haven’t omitted transactions or added phantom ones, and once you finish reconciling a period you lock the register to prevent further changes. I supervise mutations closely and can relax my oversight when I know there are redundant checks for correctness downstream.
The class of human errors I’m encountering most often are ones caused by missing context: misfiling of transactions because my bookkeeper didn’t recognize a vendor, didn’t know a transaction needed to be attached to a specific project or client, lacked access to my calendar, didn’t have my login to pull receipts, didn’t have time to understand a spreadsheet. Claude has ready access to all of these has been remarkably adept at synthesizing that to help it come at accounting tasks with a level of detailed-oriented obsessiveness that no human I’ve ever hired has shown.