The first 40 months of the AI era

sudo_man

Bro but... you now are having a business is planned by a paid chatbot, they can shutdown anytime or make it more expensive, also it is imposiable to get something new, you are copying for somewhere else, maybe what claude is copying is having a copyrights on it, like a leaked code and etc, also your brain will slowly shutdown from thinking about 'business' so you will hevaly relays on claude in the future :) My friend is trying to do the same, the Docker stack he made for his SaaS is really amazing, it is following the standards from the ancient age.

aidos

> To what degree did I expand scope because I knew I could do more using the AI? Someone at work recently termed this “Claude Creep”. It’s so easy to generate things push you towards going further but the reality is that’s you’re setting yourself up for more and more work to get them over the line.

H8crilA

Do you regularly find text content that you know is AI written (but is not marked as such)? Because honestly I don't, and it must exist in decent quantity by now. Or perhaps it's still sparse?

ivanjermakov

> 40 months Not counting from 1971s DARPA? Sorry I'm allegric when LLMs being called AI like nothing existed before it.

tkgally

Nice observation about AI-generated content: > I’ve had the idea that from a social perspective it’d be regarded like plastic surgery, in that it only looks weird when its over-done, or done badly.

OrangePilled

This is a sound personal assessment. The section about being "glazed" into action resonates. Hidden within this concept I think is something profound about human motivation, innuendo and all. > AI generated prose is at best boring, and at worst genuinely unappealing. I’m continually tempted, because in theory it should work well. The AI has perfect spelling and grammar, has more than enough context to produce article-length content, and can do in seconds what takes me hours. I have a thesis in mind...that there is something fundamental to the human spirit that relishes a sort of friction that LLMs cannot observe or reproduce on their own.

oceanplexian

> (The) Output was coherent but its ‘style’ was very boring and overtly inoffensive, which was (and still is) a clear limitation of the technology. The style isn’t a limit of the technology, it’s a limit of the lobotomized models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The open source community has lots of models that are great at creative writing.

theteapot

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating. I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I can't get information on how the current API of some-thing works into my brain fast enough, because the docs are non existent, outdated, or scattered and hard to collate.

Hekkova

I would agree with the utility of Claude and Claude Code. Claude feels like your own executive assistant, sales team and IT department. Combine that with Claude Code and you can build some incredible things. Myself as an example, I used Claude to advise me on starting a business and building a MVP. After a few weeks of refinement I was able to create something I never could have done without Claude. It is a game changer for sure.

_bernays_sauce

The Gartner hype cycle has 5 phases: tech trigger (6 months - 2 years), peak of inflated expectations (6 months - 2 years ), the slope of enlightenment (2 - 5 years), and the plateau of productivity (5+ years), and the slope of decline (Obsolescence which noone talks about). If we are in fact at the 40th month then we are either approaching the peak of inflated expectations, the slope of enlightenment, or the plateau of productivity. I would say we are probably approaching the peak of inflated expectations. We are constantly hearing the symptoms of the 'This Time is Different' Syndrome from people saying the old rules don’t apply which is the classic sign the peak is approaching. The average financial bubble bursts after 3 years, however the dot-com bubble burst 5 years after peak and the housing bubble took 3-4 years. We are probably in the “bubble mania” phase right now because of all the irrational exuberance. Ride the Lightning!

deadbabe

The stupid thing is that instead of using AI to give ourselves 1 hour work days, we’re just cramming more work into the same amount of time we’ve always worked.

SloppyDrive

The biggest positive I have seen is not so much in the new tools, but in new ways to convince the higher ups to do sensible things. We always find that small teams of locals can do much much more than a team with an unlimited number of low cost "developers". Not just because the competence of low cost devs is poor, but also the structure of how you work changes for the worse with a bigger team, for the worse with a distributed team, and for the worse with a skill-diverse team. Thats before you get into the cultural flaws of favored destinations like India. So we have been able to argue things like add one local + ai is better than about 20-100 Indians, depending on role and business structure needed to manage low-competence low-trust "developers". So we are planning to completely on-shore in the near future. The bean counters are happy, and the quality of the work is improving.

gobdovan

Generating AI Content sucks, Consuming AI Content sucks, but combine them in the same loop and it's really addicting. AI Content Prosuming rocks. Since LLMs, if I see a video I think is interesting, I take the transcript, feed it into an LLM, I summarize it and ask it a couple of questions. I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on. I suppose that when you're the one generating the request, it feels more personal. It is also very interesting that most LLMs respond like a normal person when you talk to them directly, but suddenly adopt the more annoying blogger speech patterns when you tell them 'create content'.

jofzar

> I remember the first time I vibe-coded a small project. It was an app that generated placeholder cards for my MTG collection. I prompted the bot (now Claude, not ChatGPT)..... I would be interested what date this was? I am surprised if it's been recent that Claude didn't 1 shot this.

1vuio0pswjnm7

A solution looking for a problem Marketers present a list of potential problems The smallest success stories are marketed as indicators of future success, but to verify this, one must wait patiently for the future to arrive

maxbeech

the 'claude creep' framing is real but there's a flip side worth naming. the synchronous pair programming case - AI as a faster version of you - is what most productivity debates focus on. the more interesting shift is genuinely async delegation: you define the task, set acceptance criteria, kick it off, come back to results. that's a different relationship to the tool entirely, and it forces you to get better at specifying what 'done' looks like upfront.that's actually a good forcing function. most productivity loss from AI-assisted work comes from underspecifying the task, not from the AI being bad.

Devasta

A big part of the benefit of AI has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with leading point haired bosses around. They won't approve needed refactorings but promise to integrate AI and suddenly budget is no problem, just add an easily removable chatbot afterward and you're golden. I think we'll find that for most AI stuff.