That’s a norm at my place as well. But it’s not free. We have definitely given up on quality (both code and general stability) and fully understanding what’s going on. People are generally working more as well, because of all the layoffs pressure.
Industry is betting that we don’t need to. I still consider it a bet because Claude Code this scale has become norm just for a year.
>> what people are sending to Claude that is so secret
Its the same point used against privacy. What's so secret you are doing that you need privacy. I think in the end, its about privacy and not trusting these model companies with your data. Facebook manipulated people behaviors with all the data they had, no reason AI companies wont someday decide to do that same, and they have far more intimate knowledge.
When it comes to coding, I also don't like the idea of them taking my money and potentially at same time potentially using as dataset generator.
I've mixed opinions on that. For example, there are products like Google Shopping or Google Travel etc. They show up bunch of stores where you can buy a flight ticket or a particular product from.
However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want. So if I'm going to most likely buy something from Amazon anyway, why not just use Amazon web page. They've had one click buy button for ages.
> However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want.
I've got enough complaints about the amazon customer and user experience that I'm not going to list them here, but returns are so easy.
I click the button, and then I don't need to print off a shipping label or even package the item back up, I just drop it off at the convenience store by my house, they scan a QR code on my phone, and take the bare item from me.
Yes Amazon’s power is very difficult to overcome. The hope with my marketplace is that stores will offer cheaper prices since we are interfacing with them directly and they are not paying Amazon a cut.
Also, Amazon Prime is affordable now, but it will get more and more expensive. They have a large distribution network but most of their drivers are contractors. Amazon also is not as powerful in non-Western countries. They still rely on many different websites depending on need.
>> but I kind of wonder why we write articles like this
I think its a way to speak out and get it out there, than stay unspoken. Author as well others who share same opinion get some validation that they are not only ones.
I'm actively uninspired to write high quality code when using Anthropic/OpenAI models given the high chance I'm a customer as well as used as dataset generation tool for them.
But currently cloud does beat costs of hardware ownership, particularly with ridiculously high RAM/GPU/SSD costs....again due to these same companies.
Or, they can figure out something else out? I recall couple years ago when China didn't have enough GPUs (still don't?), DeepSeek team figured out how to train with less computing. IIRC they made Mixture of Experts mainstream and made really optimized kernels and clever use of PTX instruction set.
Seems like parent thread spoke from perspective of developer/tech savvy person.
But even from end-user perspective, maybe its hard to see change when you compare one year or so, but over somewhat longer period I definitely see improvements. Over say a decade or so, wifi/bluetooth/trackpad support has significantly improved. Over last 5 years, I think gaming has become huge and you can actually use Linux as gaming machine. In last 3 years or so, I think I've seen my 5k display using Thunderbolt work much better. Fractional scaling also works much nicer.
NVIDIA GPUs are not shitty to use on Linux, and AMD has been working great for slightly longer. UEFI/TPM works much better now as well, where I don't have to worry about booting in legacy mode when using GPU drivers.
I didn't have to think about any of these above. If I think harder, I can likely come up with many more.
As great LLMs are, they are no where close to any biological brain. We are not even close to replicating human brain or even brain of an animal. Let’s not add more fuel into this hype.
How do you define average person here? I have friends who are not into tech, but use instagram or ChatGPT. They can tell. It’s just matter of using it enough times.
For the work, I don’t think it’s just “costing the job” fear. It’s so many more things. Someone everyone is even more overworked, the amount of babysitting they require which everyone just seem to not talk that much about. Design docs and code that are increasingly weirder to read, sometimes make sense and other time look like they make sense but not really, the docslop, commit messages slop, I can go on.
It’s mix of people issue where it’s race to bottom to increase utilization, which leads to less than ideal experience. Technology is great but it’s definitely getting more trust than it should when we accept the output. I think everyone would be much happier, and technology would have much better reputation if everyone just slows the f down and uses it bit more reasonably. What is reasonable, you figure that out by slowing down and actually thinking about the problem you are trying to solve … not just prompt your way out for everything.
> Design docs and code that are increasingly weirder to read, sometimes make sense and other time look like they make sense but not really, the docslop, commit messages slop, I can go on.
The "average person" I'm referring to is not an engineer/developer. It's an office worker, grandmother, HVAC technician, etc. Non-techies who use the internet for entertainment and information.
From where I sit, most of them can't tell an AI-generated image from a real one (when the latest models are used), don't read something and think "it looks like Claude wrote this", etc.
I think its just matter of time. We can tell, not because we are into tech or not-"average person", but because we have seen outputs of these systems enough times as well as actively use it.
AI is in growth phase, and as more people use it more they will be able to tell particularly as they interact first hand with it.
Going back to your original point, people don't hate "slop" because they think it will cost their job (maybe some people). People hate slop, because they are forced to read it most of the day and if you want to do your job well closely babysit, verify and rearrange. The overall expectation of quality has declined over quantity.
I'm not saying its not productivity booster. But the way its used to increase quantity and then map it to productivity. This results in to two things (1) more work for people so worse WLB (2) increased dissatisfaction with work because the quantity is high and maybe you can call it X% productivity boost, but maybe with X/2% productivity boost you may get Y% quality boost, wlb and satisfaction with your work.
> AI is in growth phase, and as more people use it more they will be able to tell particularly as they interact first hand with it.
Have you ever looked at the content and interactions on social platforms like Facebook? I hate to be that guy, but it's not only that the average person is just not that smart, it's that the average person doesn't care.
If the AI content tells them what they want to hear or seems informative or entertaining, they'll eat it up.
It's the same reason some of the most obvious scams continue to fool millions upon millions of people.
Industry is betting that we don’t need to. I still consider it a bet because Claude Code this scale has become norm just for a year.
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