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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

#91

Post by K0balt »

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 of c so I can focus on the bigger picture rather than the symbol contortions.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#92

Post by gyomu »

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.

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)...

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#93

Post by Dylan16807 »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #19
martinald wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an excel sheet next to it - they can test it against that. Plus they can ask questions if something seems off and have it explain the code.

I'm not sure being able to verify that it's vaguely correct really solves the issue. Consider how many edge cases inhabit a "30 sheet, mind-numbingly complicated" Excel document. Verifying equivalence sounds nontrivial, to put it mildly.

Consider how many edge cases it misses. Equivalence probably shouldn't be the top priority here.

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#94

Post by catlifeonmars »

linsomniac wrote: post #23
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.

It depends on how easily testable the Excel is. If Claude has the ability to run both the Excel and the Python with different inputs, and check the outputs, it's stunningly likely to be able to one-shot it.

You touched on Kolmogorov complexity there :)

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#95

Post by _1tan »

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…

What‘s used instead of MCP in reality? Just REST or other existing API things?

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#96

Post by SubiculumCode »

wrs wrote: post #49

Some minor editing to how this would have been written in the mid-1980s: “The real leaps are being made organically by employees, not from a top down [desktop PC] strategy. Where I see the real productivity gains are small teams deciding to try and build a [Lotus 123] assisted workflow for a process, and as they are the ones that know that process inside out they can get very good results - unlike a [mainframe] softw…

The power is in the tails

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#98

Post by bitwize »

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…

The thing is, when you use AI, you're not really doing things, you're having things done. AI isn't a tool, it's a service.

Now, back in the day, IBM designed and built an "executive data terminal". It wasn't really a computer terminal in the sense that you and I understand it. Rather, it was a video and two-way-audio feed to a room with a team of underlings, which an executive could ask for business data and analyses, which could be called up on a computer display (also routed to the executive's office). This allowed the executive to ask questions so he (it was the 1960s, it was almost invariably a he) could make informed decisions, and the team of underlings to call up data or crunch numbers on the computer and show the results on the display.

So because executives are used to having things done for them, I can totally see AI being used by executives to replace the "team of underlings" in this setup—in principle. The fact is that were I in that CEO's chair, I'd be thinking twice before trusting anything an LLM tells me, and double-checking those results—perhaps with my team of underlings.

Discussed on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405462 IEEE article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-demo

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#99

Post by athrowaway3z »

> 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?

Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging

#100

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]
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