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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

#131

Post by vages »

stego-tech wrote: post #80
danpalmer wrote: post #29

I've noticed a huge gap between AI use on greenfield projects and brownfield projects. The first day of working on a greenfield project I can accomplish a week of work. But the second day I can accomplish a few days of work. By the end of the first week I'm getting a 20% productivity gain. I think AI is just allowing everyone to speed-run the innovator's dilemma. Anyone can create a small version of anything, while b…

Enterprise IT dinosaur here, seconding this perspective and the author’s. When I needed to bash out a quick Hashicorp Packer buildfile without prior experience beyond a bit of Vault and Terraform, local AI was a godsend at getting me 80% of the way there in seconds. I could read it, edit it, test it, and move much faster than Packer’s own thin “getting started” guide offered. The net result was zero prior knowledge t…

Which local AI do you use? I am local-curious, but don’t know which models to try, as people mention them by model name much less than their cloud counterparts.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#132

Post by swyx »

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.

this is generic startup advice (doesnt mean its not true). you level up a bit when you find instances where slow beat fast (see: Teams vs Slack)

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#133

Post by crystal_revenge »

One the most reliable BS detectors I've found is when you have to try to convince other people of your edge.

If you have found a model that accurately predicts the stock market, you don't write a blog post about how brilliant you are, you keep it quiet and hope no one finds out while you rake in profits.

I still can't figure out quite what motivates these "AI evangelist" types (unlike crypto evangelists who clearly create value for themselves when they create credibility), but if you really have a dramatically better way to solve problems, you don't need to waste your breath trying to convince people. The validity of your method will be obvious over time.

I was just interviewing with a company building a foundation model for supposedly world changing coding assistants... but they still can't ship their product and find enough devs willing to relocate to SF. You would think if you actually had a game changing coding assistant, your number one advantage would be that you don't need to spend anything on devs and can ship 10x as fast as your competition.

> First, you have the "power users", who are all in on adopting new AI technology - Claude Code, MCPs, skills, etc. Surprisingly, these people are often not very technical.

It's not surprising to me at all that these people aren't very technical. For technical people code has never been the bottleneck. AI does reduce my time writing code but as a senior dev, writing code is a very small part of the problems I'm solving.

I've never had to argue with anyone that using a calculator is a superior method of solving simple computational math problems than doing it by hand, or that using a stand mixer is more efficient than using a wooden spoon. If there was a competing bakery arguing that the wooden spoon was better, I wouldn't waste my time arguing about the stand mixer, I would just sell more pastry then them and worry about counting my money.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#134

Post by ktzar »

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?

because we have an alternative that we humans can fix. The problem with AI is that it creates without leaving a trace of understanding.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#135

Post by p_v_doom »

majormajor wrote: post #24
defrost wrote: post #12

The "upside" description: On the other you have a non-technical executive who's got his head round Claude Code and can run e.g. Python locally. I helped one recently almost one-shot converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code. Once the model is in Python, you effectively have a data science team in your pocket with Claude Code. You can easily run Monte Carlo simul…

One of the dirty secrets of a lot of these "code adjacent" areas is that they have very little testing. If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output? Or maybe you'll be too worried about getting chided for "not being data driven" enough. If an exec tells an i…

> If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late.

Back in my data scientist days I used to push for testing and verification of models. Got told off for reducing the teams speed. If the model works well enough to get money in, and the managers that make the final calls do not understand the implications of being wrong, this would be the majority of cases.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#136

Post by camgunz »

I think this article is generally insightful, but I don't think the author really knows if they one shotted the excel to python transformation or not. Maybe they elided an extensive testing phase, but otherwise big bugs could be lurking.

Maybe it's not a big deal, or maybe it's a compliance model with severe financial penalties for non-compliance. I just personally don't kind these tradeoffs going implicit.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#137

Post by p_v_doom »

aschla wrote: post #45
tharkun__ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pet peeve of mine at work. Any and I mean any statistic someone throws at me I will try and dig in. And if I'm able to, I will usually find that something is very wrong somewhere. As in, the underlying data is usually just wrong, invalidating the whole thing or the data is reasonably sound but the person doing the analysis is making incorrect assumptions about parts of the data and then drawing incorrect co…

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.

Also rigor is slow. Looks like a waste of time.

What are you optimizing all that code for, it works doesnt it? Dont let perfect be the enemy of good. If it works 80% thats enough, just push it. What is technical debt?

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#138

Post by gingersnap »

K0balt wrote: post #91
danpalmer wrote: post #29

I've noticed a huge gap between AI use on greenfield projects and brownfield projects. The first day of working on a greenfield project I can accomplish a week of work. But the second day I can accomplish a few days of work. By the end of the first week I'm getting a 20% productivity gain. I think AI is just allowing everyone to speed-run the innovator's dilemma. Anyone can create a small version of anything, while b…

It seems to be fantastic up to about 5k loc and then it starts to need a lot more guidance, careful supervision, skepticism, and aggressive context management. If you’re careful, it only goes completely off the rails once in a while and the damage is only a lost hour or two. Overall, still a 4x production gain overall though, so I’m not complaining for $20 a month. It’s especially good at managing complicated aspects…

Yes, I see the same thing. My working thesis is that if I can keep the codebase modular and clear seperations, so I keep the entire context, while claude code only need to focus on one module at a time, I can keep up the speed and quality. But if I try and give it tasks that cover the entire codebase it will have issues, no matter how you manage context and give directions. And again, this is not suprising, humans do the same, they need to break the task apart into smaller piecers. Have you found the same?

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#139

Post by mattmanser »

martinald wrote: post #47
smuhakg wrote: post #37

> On one hand, you have Microsoft's (awful) Copilot integration for Excel (in fairness, the Gemini integration in Google Sheets is also bad). So you can imagine financial directors trying to use it and it making a complete mess of the most simple tasks and never touching it again. Microsoft has spent 30 years designing the most contrived XML-based format for Excel/Word/Powerpoint documents, so that it cannot be parse…

Totally agree, though ironically Claude code works way better with Excel than I expected. I even tried telling Copilot to convert each sheet to a CSV on one attempt THEN do calculations. It just ignored it and failed miserably, ironically outputting me a list of files that it should have made, along with the broken python script. I found this very amusing.

Think why an LLM might really struggle with csvs. You're asking a chat bot to make a weird sentence with tons of commas in it.

I've read that they're supposed to be great with XML as it's so structured, better than JSON, but haven't actually found that to be the case.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#140

Post by [deleted] »

Incipient wrote: post #86
stego-tech wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise IT dinosaur here, seconding this perspective and the author’s. When I needed to bash out a quick Hashicorp Packer buildfile without prior experience beyond a bit of Vault and Terraform, local AI was a godsend at getting me 80% of the way there in seconds. I could read it, edit it, test it, and move much faster than Packer’s own thin “getting started” guide offered. The net result was zero prior knowledge t…

>LLMs really are a game changer for my personal sales pitch of being a single dinosaur army for IT in small to medium-sized enterprises. This is essentially what I'm doing too but I expect in a different country. I'm finding it incredibly difficult to successfully speak to people. How are you making headway? I'm very curious how you're leveraging AI messaging to clients/prospective clients that doesn't just come acro…

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