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> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has
by ageitgey 4mo ago
> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user
That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :)
I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is that these people just ask Claude to do whatever it is they need done. Codebase needs managing? They just ask Claude to do it. No idea how to deploy an app? They just ask Claude to do it.
Any app built on top of this stack to 'make it easier' is competing with 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'.
- nicce 4mo ago> Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) The drug is scary when everyone is depending on it. I wonder what is future like.
- safety1st 4mo agoSeems far less scary to me than, say, building an electrical grid in a cold climate, where if it fails for a few days people start to die. Oh wait...
- coldtea 4mo agoIt's the same, on steroids.
- M95D 4mo agoWhy would they die in cold climate? I would expect them to die in hot climate (no AC - heat stroke, no refrigerator - food poisoning), not the cold where they would have wood/gas heating.
- InitialLastName 4mo agoIn lots of places that get very cold, even if the heat source is combustion, electricity is still used for ignition, control and distribution through the house.
- jappgar 4mo agowhich is more likely when they start vibe-coding grid managers
- never_inline 4mo agoElectricity is very predictable and not under control of one or two nations.
- tyre 4mo agoSame as anything else. It’ll go down sometimes, people will take a break and chat, then it will come back up. Like Slack or GitHub or AWS or whatever. It’s almost always a net positive to wait vs do it yourself.
- lukan 4mo agoI think the scenario was more of, if really everyone depends on claude, then better nothing critical(medical software, aviation, traffic controll ..) breaks while claude is offline.
- jebus989 4mo agoThe good thing is we've learned this already from cloud. When one AWS region is degraded we all failover to other regions, and then other cloud providers, right? ...right?
- andrewl-hn 4mo agoAt least some of the projects in these industries now specify strict no-AI-use policies in contracts. I participate in a few of these, and it’s becoming a bit of a pain, because all dev tool vendors insist on adding AI features, and if there’s no way to turn them off completely we have to migrate away. However, the temptation of productivity gains are strong, and few of the customers look into relaxing these rules.
- vrganj 4mo agoI'm more scared at everyone outsourcing their thinking to a private, for-profit company. What could possibly go wrong.
- dns_snek 4mo agoThinking, yes, but also secrets, access and effective control of important services in every country and company worldwide, centralized in the US (or anywhere else) where the NSA can take the driver's seat at any time. "AI" is the ultimate sleeper agent.
- M95D 4mo agoImagine what happens if computers stop working* and you have to go back to pen and paper for a few days. * ransomware attack, fire in the server room, database HDD crash, car accident takes out the internet connection, ...
- ValentineC 4mo ago> The drug is scary when everyone is depending on it. I wonder what is future like. I can't wait for a Hollywood blockbuster that'll pretty much be science non-fiction.
- puchatek 4mo agoThe future is perpetually dealing with the fallout from all the vibe coding as the pool of people who'd have a shot at fixing it gets smaller and smaller. Shitty will be the new normal.
- ElFitz 4mo ago> Shitty will be the new normal. I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing. I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo. There’s always someone for whom shitty is becoming the new normal. If that makes it a rule, what do we make of that rule?
- freetanga 4mo agoMaybe it’s a process. Many of the transitions you mentioned did bring shitty apps (not all of them, the ones replacing tech for tech were mostly ok, the ones democratizing dev did come with a quality drop), but eventually Darwinism will take effect and trim the long tail. Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.
- ElFitz 4mo agoThe risk is people who incidentally get into software engineering through using agents probably won’t be aware of any of that. And probably wouldn’t care even if they did. And for most software they’ll create, single user, perhaps even single use, it’ll be fine. And for those who might care about these things, they’ll probably just be facing constant pressure to deliver more, faster, perhaps with less. One of the issue about literacy in algorithms, data modeling, efficiency, development patterns, systems designs… is that people either aren’t aware of them (and in the best case scenario reinvent the wheel), don’t care about them, or feel they aren’t given the time to invest in learning them (or worse, might be penalized for it).
- dheera 4mo ago> wonder what is future like Probably "don't do anything to upset AI companies or you will effectively become a handicapped person" Not that different from life in China: "don't do anything to upset Tencent and AliPay or you will become an outcast" Or life in the US if you're a content creator: "don't do anything to upset Meta or Youtube or you will not be able to pay your rent" The future: ToS basically becomes law, and you will be stripped of your own second brain if you violate it or say anything they deem "sensitive"
- oulipo2 4mo agoFull of security holes
- mercanlIl 4mo agoI think there are some pretty good ways to understand it now. When the electricity goes out, (most) people get similarly upset. No electricity means no internet, and all of a sudden everything that people had planed to do can’t be done until the power returns.
- BoredPositron 4mo agosame was said about electricity.
- FeteCommuniste 4mo agoOur future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNo5fs1iDrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNo5fs1iDrs
- antihero 4mo agoOur company started monitoring our Claude usage so I've started coding personal stuff manually again and it's...really fun!
- KellyCriterion 4mo agoOpus 4.7 is really expensive, I had to throw in several times 5 bucks the last days just to get a larger task finished.
- agrippanux 4mo agoThere is a fintech startup that surrounds me at my co-working place. They literally stop working and shoot the shit with each other if Claude has a hiccup. Yesterday one asked another "how much of this deck did Claude do"? and the response was "50%". "What 50% did you do?" => "I chose the font and colors".
- morpheuskafka 4mo ago> Any app built on top of this stack to 'make it easier' is competing with 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'. To put it another way, the customers of these frontier models are implicitly being competed against by the model itself.
- ElFitz 4mo ago> I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. […] 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'. Reading the first part, I was going to say they don’t even care about whether or not there’s a codebase. It doesn’t matter; it could be all gremlins and hamsters in wheels for all they care, and for all they should care. All that matters is the functionality, the value it gives them. We’re even getting disposable code now. Entire single-use ephemeral web apps, built on the go to enable, visualise, or simplify a specific thing, then thrown away. Will it all lead to some trouble? Definitely. So did computers, and so did the internet. Weird times. Fun times.
- rahoulb 4mo agoWhen I quit my day job and started Rails freelancing a big chunk of my work was from companies with "that tech guy" who had built a database in Microsoft Access that was vital to the department's operations. And then either left the company - or the app had started to fall apart under its own weight. I would get called in to rewrite it, using a proper database, documented rules and ensure it stayed scalable - and everyone would be happy. These Access "apps" were abominations from a technical point of view - but they got the job done without having to spend a load of money on off-the-shelf or bespoke software. And the "tech guy" made a valuable contribution to the company. It's only at a certain point that Access started to struggle. I foresee the exact same thing happening in the near future - except we won't be building the replacement apps ourselves - we'll just know how to give the coding agents well-specified prompts and tell them when they're making a mistake.
- mattmanser 4mo agoBut at least you could basically follow their logic. I think what a lot of us are concerned about is that the vibe-coded stuff bloats fast. It's so verbose and all over the place, that picking that thing apart will be a huge job, and relying on an AI to pick apart work that an AI already failed to maintain seem like wishful thinking. It's literally "The AI is failing! Don't worry I'll just use AI to fix the AI!".
- 4mo ago
- Ucalegon 4mo ago>Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Do you, and those executives, own the risks associated with that practice? Are those risks actually indemnified? Its neat that 'anyone can do anything' but if they don't actually know what the risk to business or 3rd parties, why is this a good thing, especially in the enterprise where there are actors who are explicitly looking for this type of environment to exploit?
- ageitgey 4mo agoThese are largely friends and peers, so they ultimately own their own risks. But I'm not saying it is good or bad. I'm just telling you what is happening in the real world. Every senior person I know, whether a high tech exec or a solo coffee bean importer, is vibing to some degree. Some will be more successful than others. I've been working in tech since the late 90s. This is the biggest and most sudden change in company behavior I've ever seen. The only thing that comes close was the web 1.0 world in the 90s where everything suddenly became websites. That creates tons of risks and opportunities. Good and bad. Maybe a great time to start a security company. But maybe a terrible time to be a small time web app developer when your clients can get 'good enough' in minutes for dollars on their own.
- Ucalegon 4mo ago>But I'm not saying it is good or bad. Wait, you exposed people to a technology, taught them how to use it, then you are not going to own the implications of that action without teaching them about the risks or telling them how they need to ensure they don't shoot themselves in the face or violate their duty of care? Do you understand what you are saying and the implications of that in the real world relative to the insurance contracts that they have? Your company is associated with HIPAA, you should have a much higher standard than this.
- ageitgey 4mo agoYou are assuming like 12 things that aren't true in this response.
- bandrami 4mo agoYeah I'm realizing now how many of you guys work in industries with no data security/protection requirements
- newsclues 4mo agoThere are requirements they just don’t get enforced enough to matter
- senexox 4mo agoExactly. The tools aren't the rate limiting factor for me. I can automate an entire department right now with Claude but I can't because of regulations and audits. Basically, turning an error prone manual process into a probabilistic process that Claude would do far more accurately in the end than what we do now. The process wouldn't be "repeatable" though by the letter of the regulation so would open the company up to automated regulatory violations and existential fines. The technical issues for me are trivial but the regulations are insurmountable. The bubble is in the TAM. My work is exactly who Claude for Small Business would be aiming at but we can't do anything with these tools because of regulation. That is a huge % of the economy.
- bandrami 4mo agoFor me the much bigger problem is the data (and God knows what else) going to a third party. But yeah the non-repeatability doesn't pass the DoD audits either.
- mannanj 4mo agoMakes me wonder though, how likely it is your field/industry/discipline/company/business is to be replaced by some small player who makes the risk, doesn't get caught or deterred early enough, and then either becomes large enough to sway the industry regulation or pay off or otherwise continue to deter enforcement onto them. Isn't it the uber model? Isn't that likely where the future is to go with this new uncertain technology that will surely create new unthought of verticals?
- 4mo ago
- darepublic 4mo agoI have seen people just generate large docs with Claude cowork and they themselves have not scrutinized it or know why/how it's useful. It's just kind of impressive in its volume and well formatedness. And then they dump it in your lap as being helpful
- bix6 4mo agoThis. The amount of long winded unedited docs people think it’s ok to dump on me now is unbelievable.
- wing-_-nuts 4mo agoIt's ok, you can use AI to summarize the key points. No need to read anymore! /s
- bix6 4mo agoI wish. I have to fix all the bs before things get sent out. It’s so exhausting.
- gte525u 4mo agoOrganizational self-imposed DOS attacks.
- renegade-otter 4mo agoSomeone recently here used the term "intellectual denial of service".
- pixelbart 4mo agoWe've really reached the point where one person uses AI to create an impressive report based on a few prompts with some keywords, and the receiver uses another AI to summarize the report to a short TL;DR that's almost identical to the input prompts.
- 4mo ago
- causal 4mo agoHaha I can't even trust developers who know the dangers of what they're doing to vibe code responsibly
- rglover 4mo agoExecutives in what industry out of curiosity?
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago> Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry Withdrawal symptoms. We've all been there.
- renegade-otter 4mo agoSo now average-skilled employees generate even more average-quality work. Is that really a good thing. I don't know if those senior AWS devs are thrilled about having to review a crapton of new code the juniors are churning out literally in their sleep. We are now measuring productivity in lines-of-code. This is not going to end well, not to mention introduce massive amounts of burnout.
- sizzle 4mo agoHow much would it cost a non enterprise paid customer to experiment and vibe code apps without too many token limits?