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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

#141

Post by gregoryl »

skybrian wrote: post #101
moregrist wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the skepticism here is that without tests or a _lot_ of manual QA how would you know that it did it correctly? Maybe you did one or the other , but “nearly one-shotted” doesn’t tend to mean that. Claude Code more than occasionally likes to make weird assumptions, and it’s well known that it hallucinates quite a bit more near the context length, and that compaction only partially helps this issue.

If you’re porting some formulas from one language to another, “correct” can be defined as “gets the same answers as before.” Assuming you can run both easily, this is easy to write a property test for. Sure, maybe that’s just building something that’s bug-for-bug compatible, but it’s something Claude can work with.

For starters, Python uses IEEE 754, and Excel uses IEEE 754 (with caveats). I wonder if that's being emulated.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#142

Post by PunchyHamster »

I'd argue 2 types of users are

* People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper.

* People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are interested only in results, and are not interested in knowing more about the topic or honing their skills in the topic

The second group is one that thinks talking to a chatbot will replace senior developer

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#143

Post by Aardwolf »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #142

I'd argue 2 types of users are * People using it as a tool, aware of its limitations and treating it basically as intern/boring task executor (whether its some code boilerplate, or pooping out/shortening some corporate email), or as tool to give themselves summary of topic they can then bite into deeper. * People outsourcing thinking and entire skillset to it - they usually have very little clue in the topic, are int…

The same person might be both kinds of users, depending on the topic or just the time of the day

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#144

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

Yeah, I use it to get some basic info about topic I know little of (as google search is getting worse by the day..). That then I check.

Honestly the absolute revolution for me would be if someone managed to make LLM tell "sorry I don't know enough about the topic", one time I made a typo in a project name I wanted some info on and it outright invented commands and usages (that also were different than the project I was looking for so it didn't "correct the typo") out of thin air...

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#145

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

we're going from "bad excel sheet caused recession" to "bad vibe-coded financial thing caused recession"

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#146

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

> There is still a real question that has to be answered: how do you safely let your company ship AI-generated code at scale without causing catastrophic failures? Nobody has solved this yet.

It's very simple. You treat AI as junior and review its code.

But that awesomely complex method has one disadvantage, having to do so means you can't brag about 300% performance improvement your team got from just commiting AI code to master branch without looking.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#147

Post by PunchyHamster »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #16
Havoc wrote: post #5

The copilot button in excel at my work can’t access the excel file of the window it’s in. As in “what’s in cell A1” and it says I can’t read this file. Not even sure what the point is then frankly. I’m happily vibe coding at work but yeah article is right. MS has enterprise market share by default not by merit. Stunning contrast between what’s possible and what’s happening in big corp

Meanwhile the people I know who work at Microsoft say there's a constant whip-cracking to connect everything they're doing to "AI" and prove that's what they're doing.

so whole company decided to collectively half-ass it so managers fuck off ? :D

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#148

Post by michaelt »

somat wrote: post #104
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…

Isn't this true of any greenfield project? with or without generative models. The first few days are amazingly productive. and then features and fixes get slower and slower. And you get to see how good an engineer you really are, as your initial architecture starts straining under the demands of changing real world requirements and you hope it holds together long enough to ship something. "I could make that in a week…

> Isn't this true of any greenfield project?

Sometimes the start of a greenfield project has a lot of questions along the lines of "what graph plotting library are we going to use? we don't want two competing libraries in the same codebase so we should check it meets all our future needs"

LLMs can select a library and produce a basic implementation while a human is still reading reddit posts arguing about the distinction between 'graphs' and 'charts'.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#149

Post by PunchyHamster »

FilosofumRex wrote: post #89

Generally speaking, if you're using your coding agent as your assistant inside your IDE, you're missing out on 80% of its benefits... If anything you should ask it how to do something and then act as its assistant on implementing it

also missing out on 80% of bugs

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#150

Post by anal_reactor »

> This effectively leads to a situation where smaller company employees are able to be so much more productive than the equivalent at an enterprise. It often used to be that people at small companies really envied the resources & teams that their larger competitors had access to - but increasingly I think the pendulum is swinging the other way.

Small companies are more agile and innovative while corporations often just shuffle papers around. Wow, what a bold claim, never seen before in the entire history of economics.

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