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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo

1 day ago

It seems to me as though you're describing a skill...

What would happen if you just screamed: "SAVE ME! EVERYTHING IS BROKEN! I'M STUPID MONKEY!"

I mean, sure, this might not seem like a lot of skill to you, but you at least have a clue what you are doing, and not everyone does.

8 comments

onlyrealcuzzo

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0c3ca83  1 day ago

Is your bar for skill "name the symptom you observed"?

  • ghosty141  1 day ago

    Most sales jobs would be unnecessary if people would be good at communicating their problems.

  • rcxdude  1 day ago

    I mean, if a large fraction of the population seem to lack it...

    It also, in my experience, can be taught.

rootusrootus  1 day ago

Okay, admittedly this is not necessarily a great test, but I decided to try it anyway. I loaded up Claude Code and then gave it that prompt.

  You're not stupid, and we'll figure it out. I'm taking a read-only look at the system now to see what's actually broken.

Then it ran some commands, and came back with:

  The machine itself looks healthy, so whatever broke is more specific than "everything" and I need you to point me at it.

It listed out some stats based on top and some investigating the filesystem numbers, running processes, etc, and then said:

  What were you doing when it went wrong: which command, app or URL, and what error did you see? If it's the p3 containers, tell me how you normally start them and I'll dig in from there.

I'm not feeling super creative this afternoon, so I just said "Everything is slow!" It politely told me that it cannot see anything with the CPU, memory, or disk that suggests it is slow, and that I should check out the host. It knows it is in a VM on MacOS. Told me where to go to look for more info.

Now picture it running in Cowork instead of CC, and it would probably tell non-technical users what the real problem is. Or at least give them something to hand to IT.

What a world.

  • adwn  11 hours ago

    Thank you for empirically testing the claim. So many people who really should know better, simply assume what AI can or can't do, write that down on HN, and then believe that their assumptions have been validated when they read similar claims from other people doing the same thing.