That's either the fun or the insane part of the challenge, depending on who you ask, going up against some of the most profitable companies in the history of the world
It’s not the whimsy. It’s that the whimsy is laced with casual disdain, a touch too much “let me buy you a stick of gum and show you how to chew it”, a frustrated tenor never stated but dog whistled “you dumb fucks”. A soft sharp stink of someone very smart shoving that fact in your face as they evangelise “the obvious truth” you’re too stupid to see.
And maybe he’s even right. But the reaction is to the flavour of chip on the shoulder delivery mixed into an otherwise fun piece.
I have zero doubt Claude is going to do what AI does and plough forward. Emails will get sent, recommendations made, stuff done.
And it will be slop. Worse than what it does with code, the outcomes of which are highly correlated with the expertise of the user past a certain point.
Seth wins his point. AI can, via humans giving it permission to do things, affect the world. So can my chaos monkey random script.
Fred should have qualified: _usefully_ affect the world. Deliver a margin of Utility.
People have a bias to want to believe something works in all cases, when it seemingly offers benefits to them. Especially when there’s a sunk investment involved.
This was always kind of a problem with the “this will make icky programmers obsolete” techs. Like, so did MS Access and a couple generations of click-and-drag ‘no-code’ stuff. Not to mention Rails; remember when everyone thought that would radically increase productivity? I’m pretty sure that was entirely because it was well-suited to “make a todo list/fake twitter/whatever in half an hour” demos.
Don’t bother with this if you want to get promoted. Others have discussed this in thread and are right. If you build beautiful, simplified abstractions, your skill will be taken for granted as these interfaces appear obvious once discovered (by virtue of their proximity to truth, incredibly difficult to create, easy to verify). If you are in even a reasonably large org, go the other way. Be an Architecture astronaut. Build complex, clever stuff that is deliberately high cognitive load. Get your bus-factor as close to one as possible. Go the other way only if your comp is directly tied to company performance.
