It was either this or Claude had to become a generic term like sheetrock.

AI writing is aggressively, aggressively mediocre. It is only good for how cheap it is. If you're indifferent to how much better good human writing is than AI writing, you should not be the one to evaluate human writing.

I think the limiting factor is often the human's ability to articulate the goal and hold the agent accountable.

The working memory of technical people and the way they communicate often seems to prioritize how they're doing a task and not why they're doing it. So when they talk to you about their problem, they give you the human equivalent of modem noises and stack traces. This is such a common problem on tech support and Q&A forums like StackOverflow that it spawned its own terminology and website: https://xyproblem.info/

The agents don't respond to XY problems any better than a colleague does, and usually much worse.

An effective colleague asks why, and we need a similar relationship between the agent and its human supervisor.

If true, this is a disastrously foolish thing to believe. Education is only going to become more important as supervising increasingly advanced AI agents becomes more difficult. We need people who understand all different domains of human endeavor at the deepest level possible.

I mean, what's the alternative? AI does everything for me and I play Fortnite all day? Might as well plug yourself into the Matrix.

MIT/Stanford:

> Simplicity -- the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.

New Jersey:

> Simplicity -- the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.

TFA maps "simplicity" to "MIT/Stanford simplicity" (simplicity for the user) and "smallness" to "New Jersey simplicity" (simplicity for the developer).

I wonder if the root of the tension between the two schools comes down to the ambiguity of the user/developer distinction. Developers are also users. Simplicity of implementation is helpful to developers when they are working directly on implementation, while simplicity of interface is helpful to developers when they are using other developers' work.

[1] https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

> Claude, generate a 500 word blog post about how people don't refactor anymore because of AI.

Just send me the prompt!

Do you think misrepresentation has to be consciously deceptive? That it feels insincere to the person doing it?

I encourage anyone interested in this to read On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, the best popular philosophy work in a long time.

It must end up being rare for some other reason.

The real world version is "they're ripping us off by giving us cheap stuff that our producers can't compete with on price." Which is arguably a problem, yes, but the one thing it's not is a "ripping us off" problem.

I don't understand this claim. Doesn't every business have costs to make its goods and services, and revenue when those are sold? A grocery store sells food and uses the money to buy more food, pay its employees, reinvest etc, and the profit leftover goes to the owners. An insurance company sells policies and similarly uses the money to pay claims, pay employees, reinvest, and profit. Why is the insurance company's sales revenue pass-through and the grocery store's sales revenue not?

Update (30 minutes in): the replies so far all seem very superficial. Yes, I know that insurance is not exactly the same as grocery stores. This does not explain why they should suddenly be treated differently from an accounting perspective despite what everyone else before this moment has done.

Plenty of companies run most of their internal operations on Excel and Access for exactly this reason. And most developers barely know anything about databases anyway.