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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

#51

Post by majormajor »

duskwuff wrote: post #36
majormajor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of specialization of interfaces is apparent if you compare Photoshop with Gemini Pro/Nano Banana for targeted image editing. I can select exactly where I want changes and have targeted element removal in Photoshop. If I submit the image and try to describe my desired changes textually, I get less easily-controllable output. (And I might still get scrambled text, for instance, in parts of the image that it did…

One reasonable niche application I've seen of image models is in real estate, as a way to produce "staged" photos of houses without shipping in a bunch of furniture for a photo shoot (and/or removing a current tenant's furniture for a clean photo). It has to be used carefully to avoid misrepresenting the property, of course, but it's a decent way of avoiding what is otherwise a fairly toilsome and wasteful process.

This sort of thing (not for real estate, but for "what would this furniture actually look like in this room) is definitely somewhere the open-ended interface is fantastic vs targeted-remove in Photoshop (but could also easily be integrated into a Photoshop-like tool to let me be more specific about placement and such).

I was a bit surprised by how it still resulted in gibberish text on posters in the background in an unaffected part of the image that at first glance didn't change at all. So even just the "masking" ability of like "anything outside of this range should not be touched" of a GUI would be a godsend.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#52

Post by QuantumGood »

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…

Tim Berners-Lee thought pages would become machine-readable long ago, with "obvious" benefits, and that idea partly drove XML, RDF and HTML 5. Now the benefit of doing so seems even bigger (but are they?), and the time spent making existing documents AI readable seems to keep growing.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#53

Post by DaedalusII »

Spivak wrote: post #25
decimalenough wrote: post #18

> I helped one recently almost one-shot[3] converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code. I'm sure Claude Code will happily one-shot that conversion. It's also virtually guaranteed to have messed up vital parts of the original logic in the process.

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...

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#54

Post by data-ottawa »

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’s fantastic to be able to prototype small to medium complexity projects, figure what architects work and don’t, then build on a stable foundation.

That’s what I’ve been doing lately, and it really helps get a clean architecture at the end.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#55

Post by moregrist »

martinald wrote: post #41
AlotOfReading wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something being simultaneously described as a "30 sheet, mind-numbingly complex Excel model" and "testable" seems somewhat unlikely, even before we get into whether Claude will be able to test such a thing before it runs into context length issues. I've seen Claude hallucinate running test suites before.

It compacted at least twice but continued with no real issues. Anyway, please try it if you find it unbelievable. I didn't expect it to work FWIW like it did. Opus 4.5 is pretty amazing at long running tasks like this.

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.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#56

Post by neom »

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…

Not sure how much falling behind there is even going to be, I'm an old school linux type with D- programming skills, yet getting going building things has been ridiculously easy. The swarms thing makes is so fast. I've churned 2 small but tested apps out in 2 weekends just chatting with claude code, the only thing I had to do was configure the servers.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#57

Post by DavidPiper »

> To really underline this, Microsoft itself is rolling out Claude Code to internal teams, despite (obviously) having access to Copilot at near zero cost, and significant ownership of OpenAI. I think this sums up quite how far behind they are

I think it sums up how thoroughly they've been disrupted, at least for coding AIs (independent of like-for-like quality concerns rightly mentioned elsewhere in this thread re: Excel/Python).

I understand ChatGPT can do like a million other things, but so can Claude. Microsoft deliberately using competitors internally is the thing that their customers should pay attention to. Time to transform "Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft" into "Nobody gets fired for buying what Microsoft buy", for those inclined.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#59

Post by stavros »

martinald wrote: post #41
AlotOfReading wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something being simultaneously described as a "30 sheet, mind-numbingly complex Excel model" and "testable" seems somewhat unlikely, even before we get into whether Claude will be able to test such a thing before it runs into context length issues. I've seen Claude hallucinate running test suites before.

It compacted at least twice but continued with no real issues. Anyway, please try it if you find it unbelievable. I didn't expect it to work FWIW like it did. Opus 4.5 is pretty amazing at long running tasks like this.

I generally agree with you, but I tried to get it to modernize a fairly old SaaS codebase, and it couldn't. It had all the code right there, all it had to do was change a few lines, upgrade a few libraries, etc, but it kept getting lots of things wrong. The HTML was wrong, the CSS was completely missing, basic views wouldn't work, things like that.

I have no idea why it had so much trouble with this generally easy task. Bizarre.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#60

Post by johnrob »

data-ottawa wrote: post #54
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’s fantastic to be able to prototype small to medium complexity projects, figure what architects work and don’t, then build on a stable foundation. That’s what I’ve been doing lately, and it really helps get a clean architecture at the end.

I’ve done this in pure Python for a long time. Single file prototype that can mostly function from the command line. The process helps me understand all the sub problems and how they relate to each other. Best example is when you realize behaviors X, Y, and Z have so much in common that it makes sense to have a single component that takes a parameter to specify which behavior to perform. It’s possible that already practicing this is why I feel slightly “meh” compared to others regarding GenAI.
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