Comment by ageitgey
11 hours 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'.
I 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
This. The amount of long winded unedited docs people think it’s ok to dump on me now is unbelievable.
Organizational self-imposed DOS attacks.
It's ok, you can use AI to summarize the key points. No need to read anymore! /s
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I have seen this happening with contracts. Using AI to help evaluate contracts is fine, but I'm getting 5-10 page Claude docs with dozens of asks that they haven't read and many of which don't make sense. I find it pretty counterproductive, because it makes negotiation almost impossible -- you can't tell what the other side wants, because they haven't even read the output.
> And then they dump it in your lap as being helpful
I've been guilty of this and gotten pushback from my manager: "this feels like homework, cut these options down to 100 words each, max".
Curation and refinement are even more important when you can have genAI generate reams of text.
Seeking outside signals is even more important, like talking to customers, looking at real usage data, and more. It's too easy to trust believe what Claude tells you, even if you say "please argue against this idea", which you always should.
We often see this bizarre workflow where notes, like engineering notes, are converted to large prose using AI. And then, the large prose is converted back to short bullet points on the other end for summarization!
It's all fun and games until some high level executive realizes everyone is using it and still demanding the same paycheck.
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Yep, I've received a few powerpoints like that.
I'm using Claude to write large files too, but it's a very iterative process and involves a lot of reading and correcting.
I'm beginning to see this in my industry (consulting). I was at a client site last week and in a room with some heavy hitters both from my side and client side but in a casual setting (lunch). Everyone was discussing how they sometimes "cheat" using genAI to put together decks when one of the out-of-the-blue 1 sentence questions that takes 4 hours to answer come down from the c-suite. They all said they heavily edit the output but at least it gives them a place to start. I have my doubts though, i wonder how many times they just take it as gospel and forward the deck on.
to be fair, i've been guilty of this with code. Ask claude to generate a python script that takes X as input and produces Y as output, run it, pipe to more, output looks ok but i don't check everything, write it to a file, send it on.
We'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.
This, creating order from chaos (reducing entropy) is difficult and requires real intelligence. Inflating some small prompt into a wall of text and creating a bunch of entropy in the process is not as useful as it appears.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication". I'm more impressed by a pithy sentence than 100 pages of statistical fluff.
This reminds me of that game of telephone. Eventually, the message gets morphed and transformed into something different from what was originally said. Is this really what we want?
clearly you just need to have your agent review, summarize, and take appropriate actions on the docs being sent to you.
I'm a victim of this. Very bad taste of AI generated gibberish that was obviously not read through before being sent.
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> 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.
The 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.
I feel like it will be like going back to the 80s, when PCs became a norm and most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation. Thousands of shareware apps you had to navigate, everyone trying to solve the same problems from different angles..
I do agree quality will be missed, and shadow IT will be again a big issue like at the end of the 80s and early 90s.
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Eventually there will be an incident with bad software at a hospital or bank that leaves some people dead or broke.
Then regulators will take things seriously.
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> 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?
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> as the pool of people who'd have a shot at fixing it gets smaller and smaller
Sounds like job prospects to me.
I'm working on a possibly-quixotic tool to mitigate the "cognitive debt" from AI-assisted development. Not everybody agrees that this is a problem. Maybe some teams that are only writing specs and reviewing plans still understand their products adequately. If you have an opinion either way, I'd appreciate hearing from you.
There 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".
Opus 4.7 is really expensive, I had to throw in several times 5 bucks the last days just to get a larger task finished.
Our company started monitoring our Claude usage so I've started coding personal stuff manually again and it's...really fun!
I 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.
Same 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.
I'm more scared at everyone outsourcing their thinking to a private, for-profit company.
What could possibly go wrong.
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I 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.
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What about when you work at Anthropic?
> 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.
> 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"
Our future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNo5fs1iDrs
Full of security holes
Seems 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...
Why 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.
Electricity is very predictable and not under control of one or two nations.
which is more likely when they start vibe-coding grid managers
It's the same, on steroids.
same was said about electricity.
Imagine 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, ...
>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?
These 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.
saying "every X i know" in all your comments is a bit ridiculous.
You comments read like reddit clickbait. How many of these executives/senior/coffee bean/whatever ppl do you even know and why you the one enlightening them with claude cowork ? . "Every X i know" sounds like a large sample size. Make ridiculous claims by prefixing " every X i know" .
I feel so angry at this linkedin speak. so infuriating. Hate that we've accepted these ppl without any pushback.
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>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.
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What kind of risk do you see?
Depends on what types of apps are being built, what data they touch, and what those apps are exposed to from a network perspective. Ie; all of the fundamentals of information/network security. Generally speaking, most executives do not have an information/network security background but do have privileged access to extremely valuable information, even if an attacker just has access to their email.
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What risks? You don't even known what they are building and you start the FUD train.
I found the Microsoft guy!
What does this even mean?
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> 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.
When 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.
I’m at exactly that point where it sounds like you were. I’ve done 3 Access to Rails conversions and I’m hunting for the next one. The one I’m on at the moment is supporting 5 branches over 2 countries and 2 independent machine shops. Even if I can understand what Access is doing under the hood there is no one left to ask why. And I have so many questions. Sit with the users, spec the feature, ground it in whatever data I can find. I don’t think that ever changes for SMEs that take this path (Access or Vibeccess) and need re-writes. I’m also very happy to do them. They are IMO giving me more valuable usage data than any design process ever could.
What is different on this one vs the others is I have Claude to help me data dive and write the boring CRUD parts. I am able to spend so much more time with users testing and getting feedback and just thinking deeply about how to structure things. The quality of what I’m building now has never been higher and I think it’s just because I have more time to spend with it.
My experience with AI has been almost wholly positive and I wonder if Rails is part of the reason. Such well established patterns and structure the agent one shots most things and I spend most of my time wrangling view code based on my preferences.
But Access DB Apps had one big advantage: You could put it on a network share and everybody could use it - good enough for a lot of SME (at least if someone is there who can adminstrate it or develop new features) Access is/ws one of he by far underrated products from Microsoft Office in the last 30 years.
Its not a good experience,esp the "debugger" and its traits - but a good tool that just does its job :-)
But 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!".
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Yeah I'm realizing now how many of you guys work in industries with no data security/protection requirements
Exactly. 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.
For 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.
Makes 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?
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There are requirements they just don’t get enforced enough to matter
> Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry
Withdrawal symptoms. We've all been there.
> 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.
Haha I can't even trust developers who know the dangers of what they're doing to vibe code responsibly
Executives in what industry out of curiosity?