Comment by teacpde
8 hours ago
If AI can write better code and design better architecture, why can’t it make better product decisions? I don’t see how they are fundamentally different
8 hours ago
If AI can write better code and design better architecture, why can’t it make better product decisions? I don’t see how they are fundamentally different
LLMs are disembodied-the products are ultimately by and for bodies on different ends of a transaction. The loop between llm and body is primitive today. Therefore products need someone who can speak in body and translate for AI.
Also, where are the AI-operated startups?? Why has nobody’s openclaw biz gone multinational by now?
> Why has nobody’s openclaw biz gone multinational by now?
Maybe it keeps deleting and the emails and business records.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla...
Seems like it happens fairly often, considering the amount of pages like this I just found.
https://drecov.pandaoffice.com/data-recovery/how-to-fix-open...
Because an LLM is like a person with a super powered left brain and absolutely no right brain. It lacks intuition - passion, love, unexplainable feelings, deep insights, etc. This is the source of what/what not to build.
If right brains could talk they'd be very upset :P
Code and architecture (at least the architecture that AI can do) only need to be “good enough” to fulfill the requirements. Today I can write more tasteful and elegant code than AI, but that doesn’t matter very much. But the marginal value of taste in product decisions is much higher comparatively. A product is never good enough, it can always be better.
Ideas are easy to generate. But vision and dedication can't be faked nor programmed. You really need to believe in a cause to make choices sometimes that won't make financial sense or any sense to anyone else except you. An AI will only optimize for what it's trained to do, and that's usually optimized for maximum shareholder value, for example. An AI also doesn't really care about anyone except itself, so many incidents have proven that. Not that it can really "care" like a human can, to begin with. I'm all up for AI but, this isn't the hill to die on.
Products that people use require the developer to imagine they are the person using this. Those of us who develop user interfaces whether visual dashboards or automations driven by voice agents call it "empathy for the user."
AI is not capable of empathy.
AI is not capable of having good taste.
So to clarify it can imagine its way through writing massive gnarly page-long regexps or imagine how a complex API works and what will happen if it makes a given call or imagine just by reading disassembled code precisely how a binary works, but it will never be able to imagine how a human might feel about a user experience?
I have an experiment to offer. Find a really, really great example of something poorly-designed, too busy or whatever other metric you want to use as your "poorly-designed" thing, then ask Claude what's wrong with it and how it should be improved?
Ok and then in your thought experiment, after Claude builds its solution, what are the chances you can prompt it to be improved even more? Or has Claude reached perfection?
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It doesn't "imagine" at all.
This is like explaining to someone that there are no little people in the TV set, what a movie is, and then they go "yeah but sometimes they don't just talk, they also sneeze, and you can't fake sneezing, I read that in an article".
yeah you got it. they really can't. I'm a product manager, I'm STRUGGLING to create a harness for product work, the llms models just can't model a user's mindset very well and make very obvious bad choices that seem to be consistent (and getting worse with the new generations). That doesn't bother me, the code is getting better, but the work to talk to users and understand what needs to be built is still far from being conquered by AI.
I don't think the other answers you're getting are right at all. AI isn't good at product/design decisions because it's not as easy to generate trillions of objectively right/wrong examples in those other domains. The training data isn't there yet.
Also, it’s a moving target. The training data must change every second. What worked yesterday will not work tomorrow.
AI is good at code but bad at writing. So what makes you think that its skill with code would generalize to product decisions?
AI is very good at writing, in a vacuum. The issue with AI writing isn’t quality, it’s 1) shows the prompter may not have but as much effort as one would expect from a polished writing and make amateur mistakes 2) uses cliches that are grating due to being very easy to recognized at this point. If you submit a LLM written article to a website/paper in 1990, no one would say that it is a technically poor piece of writing.
It is bad writing. Almost always its far too verbose. It will get hung up on meaningless details for entire paragraphs. It has no real range. The reason everyone is sick of its voice is because it is always the same and you'd notice that even in a single piece.
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Because one is an artistic/emotional decision, another is a functional one.
i would expect it to make great product decisions for it's own model, and perhaps other LLMs. for humans, why would you assume it would?
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