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The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

rickmanelius.com

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Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#21

Post by vouaobrasil »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #10

I launched 1 side project that could potentially help my main project every week, for the last couple of months. To me, it’s not draining at all. I love that the main barrier, time, has been removed. The nagging feeling that I am missing out, did not try, should be working on something, seeing competitors launch my idea. All gone. I love it. Will any of them succeed? It’s early days, but seeing potentially life chang…

Keep in mind that if a large mass of people experience a boost in activity and energy to explore new topics, those at the top will simultaneously want to use up all that energy by making us work harder as well. The end result only seems like a benefit to you because the other side of the equation hasn't caught up.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#23

Post by cgearhart »

This seems very related to a trend I’m seeing as my company goes all in on AI: everyone thinks that every problem is “a couple hours” with AI now, and they all want zero external dependencies because they can move faster alone. As a result, we’re now in an even worse “yet-another-…” age where everyone has built approximately the same (but somehow incompatible) versions of all the same beginner-level software, and (ironically) while they want no external dependencies they’re also pushing for org-level mandates to require everyone else to use their solution. Meanwhile, no one wants to do the slow/bottleneck part that cant easily be automated or scaled; they just throw an “agent” at it and call it done—but there’s nothing _there_. You can trust the agent on easy tasks and you can’t trust it on hard ones, but you can’t tell which ones are easy or hard. Improvements in foundation model tech move thresholds of the problem but can’t eliminate it.

Long story short, I think we’re in a phase where the organizational value function is lagging behind the tech. A “proof of concept” used to be correlated with “proof of work” and some amount of domain understanding, but I think now what we need is a focus on “proof of understanding” or else you’re probably just wasting tokens on a baby version of the problem. A decent proxy right now is that if you have zero external dependencies then your solution is probably a toy.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#24

Post by danshipt »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #3

In my side hustle time, I use coding agents to explore what if projects I would otherwise never get to build. At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would s…

AI as an expensive bandaid

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#25

Post by NateEag »

misiti3780 wrote: post #12
voicedYoda wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest struggle is UI. I can make functional, but my design skills couldn't sell water to someone in death valley

Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I do this all the time and the results are pretty impressive and different than what you get out of the box prompting.

> Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration.

I believe you misspelled "rip it off."

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are using the tools built by ripping off the collective creative works of humanity to rip off individual things, too.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#26

Post by LogicFailsMe »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #20
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #3

In my side hustle time, I use coding agents to explore what if projects I would otherwise never get to build. At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would s…

> At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day. I think it was a mistake to add this much complexity to the world of software in th…

Oh no disagreement that it was a mistake, but as Ambassador Kosh once stated "The avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote."

I would suggest not concluding the end of this movie from the first 5 minutes of the story. But then, I really fought against complexity over my career and lost hard. One can either check out as a fossil of the good old days or adapt to the new reality. 6 months ago, AI was about to replace all the engineers and then reality slapped the C-suite hard on that subject as just one recent plot twist.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#27

Post by vouaobrasil »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #26
vouaobrasil wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day. I think it was a mistake to add this much complexity to the world of software in th…

Oh no disagreement that it was a mistake, but as Ambassador Kosh once stated "The avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." I would suggest not concluding the end of this movie from the first 5 minutes of the story. But then, I really fought against complexity over my career and lost hard. One can either check out as a fossil of the good old days or adapt to the new reality. 6 months ago, AI was…

It's not 5 minutes into this story, I think. It's been going on for a long time, but really started to become a "conscious entity" with computers - and I do think computers were a mistake.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#28

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

NateEag wrote: post #25
misiti3780 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I do this all the time and the results are pretty impressive and different than what you get out of the box prompting.

> Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I believe you misspelled "rip it off." I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are using the tools built by ripping off the collective creative works of humanity to rip off individual things, too.

When other people emulate your behavior because they appreciate the results you got, we used to call that leadership. Something has gone awry that we now call it a ripoff.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#29

Post by daveguy »

BatFastard wrote: post #13

I totally agreed with Rick. A.I is a rabbit hole revealer. And it encourages me to go down them with its "Great Idea" spam. Edit: Reveler vs Revealer

It's good that you clearly see the "Great Idea" spam for what it is. That comes from the reinforcement-learning human-feedback (RLHF) that is used to keep you coming back for one more pull.

Re: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

#30

Post by tomrod »

NateEag wrote: post #25
misiti3780 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I do this all the time and the results are pretty impressive and different than what you get out of the box prompting.

> Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I believe you misspelled "rip it off." I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are using the tools built by ripping off the collective creative works of humanity to rip off individual things, too.

Steve Jobs said something about good and great artists.
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