Comment by elar_verole
12 hours ago
It is very good at programming. Because programming is a lot of language, and these tools were also made by programmers and post trained to be good at it.
But I assure you it's even "better" (not really but the task is so much easier) at making your spreadsheet look nice and compare actuals vs forecast for your budget than a complicated programming task. It will just one shot it, and it will be objectively correct, all in a very short time. But these non tech people don't know they can use an agent, they have asked one question in the chat interface with 0 context about what they're trying to do, and conclude they are not good enough.
I'm not saying everything is replaceable by AI - and by the way I don't want anything to be replaced by it, but I believe it will happen - just that some people don't realize yet how "trivial" their job is to modern models.
This. The main blocker in AI proliferation I see is that people don't even consider it can do more than they thing it can.
Just yesterday, my wife recounted to me a conversation with her friend, where the friend mentioned they felt lazy and had some piece of copywriting done by AI this time. To which my wife said, "TeMPOraL would've also had AI upload it to the website afterwards".
Yes, I would have, and I would've also had it install the tools needed to upload it too, because why not. The only difference between me and my wife's friend here is that I know I can ask AI that, and I know it will work.
People have gotten very used to breaking down tasks into separate things they know how to do on a computer. Asking an LLM to do each of those individual tasks is easy but feels both lazy and also ‘so what?’ - I knew how to do that task.
The thing people are slow in realizing is that you don’t need to break the task down, and you don’t need to know how to do the task. You don’t even need to have the software installed on your computer to do the task, or even know that software to do the task exists - a sufficiently motivated LLM can pull down the needed open source tools and use them, or even build its own.
Exactly. It takes some... willingness to break through your own mindset (I don't want to call this "courage", but at times feels like it), to just tell the LLM, "I need <this and that> to be <like this>, make it so".
Two years ago, that was unthinkable. A year ago, it was a quick way to set a lot of tokens on fire. Today, well, I'm yet to find a thing Opus 5.5 doesn't do at least passable (and usually stellar) job on.
This is why hosted agents (muse, dots, grok bot) will succeed. Organizations won't relax their PC security policies, so they'll need a platform where the agent actually has permissions to develop and install software.
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