Great point. Alternatively, you could have addressed the arguments.
4,288 karma · joined April 4, 2007
The argument is that you need to understand why it failed, in the lifecycle between what we intended to build vs. what we built.
There's a massive difference between a bad design and bad materials, both of which could have caused it to fall.
You can get a bad design idea from the code/bridge as well, but it's pretty glaring when the intent said, "we believe balsa wood is the best bridge material", or "we decided to save 49% of our costs by getting our nuts and bolts from the Lego shop."
If you think this is theoretical at this point it's because you're not using it to do real stuff.
But much or most regular enterprise work is very much able to be done by having and regularly updating an SOP and then executing the task according to that SOP.
We suck at it. AI will be far better at it. And we'll sit above it and decide how to tweak the SOP based on taste/preference/expertise, whatever.
But the day-to-day work of handling insurance claims, doing procurement, doing analysis, creating reports, processing inputs according to some standard and producing some output according to another standard...that will largely be done by AI.
This is what makes the new /workflows feature coming to Claude Code so exciting (and frightening) to businesses. Along with Skills and Cowork and such, plus their analogs from other providers, Workflows are literally the making of opaque, alchemy-like work that Chris and Raj and Sarah do...into transparent, optimizable algorithms.
It's super hard to automate this stuff because it's super hard to articulate it. That's kind of the meta-super-power in all of this: the fact that AI is making the opaque and complex into transparent and inspectable.
One thing I've noticed is that I've actually learned a lot more code about things I didn't understand before. Just because I built guardrails to make sure that they are built exactly the perfect way that I like them to be built. And then I've watched my AI build it that way dozens of times now. Start to finish. So now I've just seen all the steps so many times that now I understand a lot more than I did before.
This sort of thing is definitely possible, but we have to do it on purpose.
- Coming up with names for cities in a role-playing game you're making - Summarizing an idea that you're writing about - Doing research for an article - Brainstorming character names - Creating an aesthetic for a new website for a customer - Etc, etc.
I could go on for days with these examples. And so could any AI.
Pre-2022 ALL these were done 100% by a human.
Now they're not. Now creative people are using AI to help them massively with tons of these. So, yes, the separation needs to happen there as well.
For example, maybe you say, I'll never use AI to help me name characters. Or to come up with plot lines. Or whatever.
That's a Gym vs. Job distinction.
And why would you think this would be the only place that'll happen?
I agree there are things they can still do better than AI, but coding isn't one of them.
And to make sure that you have your own personal goals separate from it, and that if you're getting help from it you need to make sure it's in line with those goals.
Right?
What about that do you disagree with?
But maybe both of those are in the category of undesirable things.
And the things we end up with are like art and baking and walking and talking and drinking coffee and such.
Professional Chess is a nice pattern here. A calculator can beat Magnus Carlsen at this point, but Chess is more popular than ever. So it should be ok if AI/Robots are better than us at all the stuff we still decide to do.
I feel like the way I'm building this in is a violent maintenance of two extremes.
On one hand, fully merged with AI and acting like we are one being, having it do tons of work for me.
And then on the other hand is like this analog gym where I'm stripped of all my augmentations and tools and connectivity, and I am being quizzed on how good I could do just by myself.
And based on how well I can do in the NAUG scenario, that's what determines what tweaks need to be made to regular AUG workflows to improve my NAUG performance.
Especially for those core identity things that I really care about. Like critical thinking, creating and countering arguments, identifying my own bias, etc.
I think as the tech gets better and better, we'll eventually have an assistant whose job is to make sure that our un-augmented performance is improving, vs. deteriorating. But until then, we have to find a way to work this into the system ourselves.
I like Doctorow a lot, and I always read his stuff.
I think his assessment is pretty good. I think the issue is how he is perceiving it and therefore what he is recommending to do about it.
It all hinges on him thinking AI is basically an autocomplete fad that will blow over and require companies to hire all the people back.
And he's just wrong about that. And because he's wrong about that, the rest of his advice is worse than unhelpful.
I think what pops is the false belief.
.com -> going online will save you AI -> adding a chatbot will save you
To me, those are what qualify as bubbles. And the other stuff is just overheating, disruption, and other effects.
It's open-source on Github.
https://github.com/danielmiessler/fabric
The tagline is Human Augmentation Using AI, but really it's a crowd-sourced library of prompts.
Basically, I solve a problem once, to a satisfactory level, and then I upload it to Fabric so everyone else can do the same.
Over 22K stars just since January 2024.
1. It’s a curated set of problem/solutions more than prompts 2. It abstracts away tons of the work of dealing with the various APIs 3. It’s crowdsourced and constantly improving
1-3 are useful because most people aren’t AI engineers like you, and they shouldn’t have to be to get the benefits of AI.