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Two kinds of AI users are emerging

martinalderson.com

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Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#121

Post by laserlight »

gyomu wrote: post #92
aschla wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be an ever-present trait of modern business. There is no rigor, probably partly because most business professionals have never learned how to properly approach and analyze data. Can't tell you how many times I've seen product managers making decisions based on a few hundred analytics events, trying to glean insight where there is none.

If what you're saying 1) is true and 2) does matter in the success of a business, then wouldn't anyone be able to displace an incumbent trivially by applying a bit of rigor? I think 1) holds (as my experience matches your cynicism :), but I have a feeling that data minded people tend to overestimate the importance of 2)...

> does matter in the success of a business

In many experience, many of the statistics these people use doesn't matter in the success of a business --- they are vanity metrics. But people use statistics, and especially the wrong statistics, to pass their agenda. Regardless, it's important to fix the statistics.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#122

Post by NitpickLawyer »

s-lambert wrote: post #9

I don't see a divergence, from what I can tell a lot of people have only just started using agents in the past 3-4 months when they got good enough that it was hard to say otherwise. Then there's stuff like MCP, which never seemed good and was entirely driven by people who talked more about it than used it. There also used to be stuff like langchain or vector databases that nobody talks about anymore, maybe they're s…

While I agree that the MCP craze was a bit off-putting, I think that came mostly from people thinking they can sell stuff in that space. If you view it as a protocol and not much else, things change.

I've seen great improvements with just two MCP servers: context7 and playwright. The first is great on planning sessions and leads to better usage of new-ish libraries, and the second is giving the model a feedback loop. The advantage is that they work with pretty much any coding agent harness you use. So whatever worked with cursor will work with cc or opencode or whatever else.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#123

Post by mettamage »

gyomu wrote: post #92
aschla wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be an ever-present trait of modern business. There is no rigor, probably partly because most business professionals have never learned how to properly approach and analyze data. Can't tell you how many times I've seen product managers making decisions based on a few hundred analytics events, trying to glean insight where there is none.

If what you're saying 1) is true and 2) does matter in the success of a business, then wouldn't anyone be able to displace an incumbent trivially by applying a bit of rigor? I think 1) holds (as my experience matches your cynicism :), but I have a feeling that data minded people tend to overestimate the importance of 2)...

Rigor helps for better insights about data. That can help for entrepreneurship.

What also can help for entrepreneurship is having a bias for action. So even if your insights are wrong, if you act and keep acting you will keep acting then you will partially shape reality to your will and bend to its will.

So there are certain forces where you can compensate for your lack of rigor.

The best companies have both of those things by their side.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#124

Post by leptons »

DaedalusII wrote: post #53
Spivak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it help you sleep at night that your 401k might be managed by analysts #yoloing their financial modeling tools with an LLM?

having worked in large financial institutions, this would be a step improvement the largest independent derivatives broker in australia collapsed after it was discovered the board were using astrology and magicians to gamble with all the clients money https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-16/stockbroker-used-psyc...

It sounds like a step sideways, not a step up. LLMs are akin to a Ouija board.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#125

Post by NitpickLawyer »

Gigachad wrote: post #78
with wrote: post #50

> The bifurcation is real and seems to be, if anything, speeding up dramatically. I don't think there's ever been a time in history where a tiny team can outcompete a company one thousand times its size so easily. Slightly overstated. Tiny teams aren't outcompeting because of AI, they're outcompeting because they aren't bogged down by decades of technical debt and bureaucracy. At Amazon, it will take you months of de…

I swear in a month at a startup I used to build what takes a year at my current large corp job. AI agents don't seem to have sped up the corporate process at all.

> AI agents don't seem to have sped up the corporate process at all.

I think there's a parallel here between people finding great success with coding agents vs. people swearing it's shit. But when prodded it turns out that some are working on good code bases while others work on shit code bases. It's probably the same with large corpos. Depending on the culture, you might get such convoluted processes and so much "assumed" internal knowledge that agents simply won't work ootb.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#126

Post by jsattler »

Some years ago, I was at a conference and attended a very interesting talk. I don't remember the title of the talk, but what stuck with me was: "It's no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow". This talk was before all the AI hype. Working at a big company myself, I think this has never been more true. I think the question is, how to stay fast.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#127

Post by NitpickLawyer »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #99

> sandboxing agents is difficult I use this amazingly niche and hipster approach of giving the agent its own account, which through inconceivably highly complex arcane tweaking and configurations can lock down what they can and cant do. --- Can somebody for the love of god tell me why articles keep bringing up why this is so difficult?

I have antigravity in its own account and that has worked pretty well so far. I also use devcontainers for the cli agents and that has also worked out well. It's one click away in my normal dev flow (I was using this anyway before for python projects).

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#128

Post by leptons »

onion2k wrote: post #88
nebula8804 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All we need is one major crash caused by AI to scare the capital owners. Then maybe us white collar workers can breath a bit for at least another few more years(maybe a decade+).

All we need is one major crash caused by AI to scare the capital owners. All the previous human-driven crashes didn't change anything about capital owners' approach to money, so why would an AI-driven crash change things?

The scapegoating is different. Using an LLM makes them more culpable for the failure, because they should have known better than to use a tech that is well known to systematically lie.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#129

Post by leptons »

fdsf2 wrote: post #17
ed_mercer wrote: post #14

> Microsoft itself is rolling out Claude Code to internal teams Seems like Nadella is having his Baller moment

Nothing but ego frankly. Apple had no problem settling for a small market share back in the day... look where they are now. It didnt come from make-believe and fantasy scenarios of the future based on an unpredictable technology.

>look where they are now.

Still with a small market share. They only figured out how to extort the maximum amount of money from a smaller user base, and app developers, really anyone they can.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#130

Post by josters »

jsattler wrote: post #126

Some years ago, I was at a conference and attended a very interesting talk. I don't remember the title of the talk, but what stuck with me was: "It's no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow". This talk was before all the AI hype. Working at a big company myself, I think this has never been more true. I think the question is, how to stay fast.

And, to add to that, how to know when to slow down. Also, having worked at a big company myself, I think the question shifts towards "how to get fast" without compromising security, compliance etc.
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