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Comment by OkWing99

5 hours ago

1. Figma (in progress)

2. Most entry level jobs for current graduates in white collar fields. (See hiring rates for these positions)

3. Thousands of layoffs (mostly attributed to AI use, while not 100%, the Anthropic's specific marketing push has a huge influence on this - unlike OAI and other labs)

4. All low-code products/startups

5. Web agencies who did small websites for local businesses

While AI industry push is there for all of the above, Anthropic's specific marketing/PR is specifically directed towards forced adoption of AI and burning tokens, unlike from other labs.

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OkWing99

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csa  4 hours ago

> 1. Figma (in progress)

Hmmm… maybe. I think not. It really depends on your other claims below, with which I mostly disagree.

2. Most entry level jobs for current graduates in white collar fields. (See hiring rates for these positions)

Maybe a small amount. Entry level white collar jobs have a low hiring rate for other reasons, imho.

3. Thousands of layoffs (mostly attributed to AI use, while not 100%, the Anthropic's specific marketing push has a huge influence on this - unlike OAI and other labs)

What they say and what the actual reasons are not the same, imho. Correcting for over hiring is the actual main reason.

4. All low-code products/startups

Low-code and no-code products in the hands of someone who doesn’t have a developer’s mind and/or experience usually ends up as a mess, and quickly becomes an unusable mess.

I know of exactly two people who have done successfully used AI to make a low-code/no-code product. One is just highly motivated and wicked smart. The other did a minor in CS a long time ago (works in a different field). Everyone else shows me a pile of garbage and asks me how to fix it (answer: throw it away and start from scratch).

5. Web agencies who did small websites for local businesses

As with 4 above, the only site a local business can make for themselves is one that functions as a business card… at best. Usually it looks more like a business card that a kindergartner made. They simply don’t understand what makes a website good for their business, therefore they cannot direct AI to make it for them.

There’s a lot to criticize about AI, imho, but these aren’t on the list.

  • ElProlactin  3 hours ago

    I personally know several digital marketing people who were "tech savvy" but had no programming experience who have launched websites that would have cost them thousands of dollars to build.

    So much of what you'd previously pay a "real" freelance developer or web "agency" to build is no less "garbage" than what engineers would call the average vibe-coded web app.

    Claude in particular is today really surprisingly good at taking examples and a layperson's description of a website and building something that looks good and is functional.

    For obvious reasons, I think many developers/engineers don't want to accept this. They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough. But the honest will acknowledge that spaghetti code and crap pre-dated AI.

    • utopiah  2 minutes ago

      > digital marketing people who were "tech savvy" but had no programming experience who have launched websites that would have cost them thousands of dollars to build.

      Static Websites have been commoditizatized for decades now. We had :

      - one-click deploy Open-Source CMS

      - single page places like Geocities providing own domain

      - design templates where you just add your own logo, tagline, etc

      This is just yet another way to do that but the ability to have that result was there for "digital marketing people" since the early 2000s, if not earlier. In fact since the Internet existed there have been tools and resources for non developer to make Websites.

      PS: it's roughly the same for mobile Apps, namely having a basic App like a ToDo list had had scaffolding for years, including countless dedicated to non-developers.

    • slyzmud  3 hours ago

      > They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough.

      I know I can code and get better results than most people can with an LLM but I've came to realize that it doesn't matter and people just want to see results (even if they are kind of wrong).

      In other words, with the website example, I've realized that even if the agency can do something 10x better, most people will choose to "buy" the AI website just because it's free or super cheap, and that makes me sad