5 ms·

Fine article but a very important fact comes in at the end — the author has a human personal assistant. It doesn't fundamentally change anything they wrote, but

by dcre 8mo ago

Fine article but a very important fact comes in at the end — the author has a human personal assistant. It doesn't fundamentally change anything they wrote, but it shows how far out of the ordinary this person is. They were a Thiel Fellow in 2020 and graduated from Phillips Exeter, roughly the most elite high school in the US.

skybrian 8mo ago
Sure, but that also means they’re well-positioned to do a comparison.
- verdverm 8mo ago
  Elites live in a different world from you and I.
ryukoposting 8mo ago
The screenshots of price checks for a hotel charging $850 a night is what tipped me off. The reservations at expensive bay area restaurants, too. I have a guess for why this guy is comfortable letting clawdbot go hog-wild on his bank account.
RC_ITR 8mo ago
Yeah, I've found AI 'miracle' use-cases like these are most obvious for wealthy people who stopped doing things for themselves at some point. Typing 'Find me reservations at X restaurant' and getting unformatted text back is way worse than just going to OpenTable and seeing a UI that has been honed for decades. If your old process was texting a human to do the same thing, I can see how Clawdbot seems like a revolution though. Same goes for executives who vibecode in-house CRM/ERP/etc. tools. We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost always outperform in-house, even with strong in-house development teams, but now that the executive is 'the creator,' there's significantly less scrutiny on things like compatibility and security. There's plenty real about AI, particularly as it relates to coding and information retrieval, but I'm yet to see an agent actually do something that even remotely feels like the result of deep and savvy reasoning (the precursor to AGI) - including all the examples in this post.
- candiddevmike 8mo ago
  I feel bad for whoever gets an oncall page that some executive's vibe coded app stopped working and needs to be fixed ASAP.
- zer00eyz 8mo ago
  > Typing 'Find me reservations at X restaurant' and getting unformatted text back is way worse than just going to OpenTable and seeing a UI that has been honed for decades. Your conflating the example with the opportunity: "Cancel Service XXX" where the service is riddled with dark patterns. Giving every one an "assistant" that can do this is a game changer. This is why a lot of people who aren't that deep in tech think open claw is interesting. > We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost always outperform in-house Do they? Because I know a lot of people who have (as an example) terrible setups with sales force that they have to use.
- linschn 8mo ago
  > We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost always outperform in-house, Funny, I learned the exact opposite lesson. Almost all software suck, and a good way for it not to suck is to know where the developer is and go tell them their shit is broken, in person. If you want a large scale example, one of the two main law enforcement agency in france spun off libreoffice into their own legal writing software. Developped by LEOs that can take up to two weeks a year to work on that. Awesome software. Would cost litterally millions if bought on the market.
mrdependable 8mo ago
Kind of funny to say you helped make the Harvard CS curriculum and then dropped out. Your own curriculum was not good enough for you? Probably extenuating circumstances, but still seems funny.
AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
You do understand that is who you’re competing with now right? My daughter is a excellent student in high school She and I spoke last night and she is increasingly pissed off that people who are in her classes, who don’t do the work, and don’t understand the material get all A’s because they’re using some form of GPT to do their assignments, and teachers cannot keep up I do not see a world in the future where you can “come from behind” because all of the people with resources are increasingly not going to need experts who need money to survive to be able to do whatever they want to do While that was technically true for the last few hundred years it was at least required to deal with other humans and you had to have some kind of at least veneer of communal engagement to do anything That requirement is now gone and within the next decade I anticipate there will be a single person being able to build a extremely profitable software company with only two or three human employees
- taytus 8mo ago
  >You do understand that is who you’re competing with now right? No. I'm competing with no one.
  - warkdarrior 8mo ago
    You may think you are not competing. The people whose money you may want (employers, investors, customers) definitely see you as one of many competitors for their funds.
    - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
      Exactly
- foobarian 8mo ago
  Ironically I feel like this may force schools to get better at the core mission of teaching, vs. credentialing people for the next rung on the ladder. What replaces that second function remains to be seen.
  - 8mo ago
nunez 8mo ago
Exeter had a hella good policy debate team back in the day. Probably still do; I've been out of the loop for a while.
jen729w 8mo ago
When I saw them buying $80 Arc'teryx gloves that was enough for me.

by dcre 8mo ago

skybrian 8mo ago

Sure, but that also means they’re well-positioned to do a comparison.

verdverm 8mo ago
Elites live in a different world from you and I.

ryukoposting 8mo ago

The screenshots of price checks for a hotel charging $850 a night is what tipped me off. The reservations at expensive bay area restaurants, too. I have a guess for why this guy is comfortable letting clawdbot go hog-wild on his bank account.

RC_ITR 8mo ago

Yeah, I've found AI 'miracle' use-cases like these are most obvious for wealthy people who stopped doing things for themselves at some point. Typing 'Find me reservations at X restaurant' and getting unformatted text back is way worse than just going to OpenTable and seeing a UI that has been honed for decades. If your old process was texting a human to do the same thing, I can see how Clawdbot seems like a revolution though. Same goes for executives who vibecode in-house CRM/ERP/etc. tools. We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost always outperform in-house, even with strong in-house development teams, but now that the executive is 'the creator,' there's significantly less scrutiny on things like compatibility and security. There's plenty real about AI, particularly as it relates to coding and information retrieval, but I'm yet to see an agent actually do something that even remotely feels like the result of deep and savvy reasoning (the precursor to AGI) - including all the examples in this post.

candiddevmike 8mo ago
I feel bad for whoever gets an oncall page that some executive's vibe coded app stopped working and needs to be fixed ASAP.
zer00eyz 8mo ago
> Typing 'Find me reservations at X restaurant' and getting unformatted text back is way worse than just going to OpenTable and seeing a UI that has been honed for decades. Your conflating the example with the opportunity: "Cancel Service XXX" where the service is riddled with dark patterns. Giving every one an "assistant" that can do this is a game changer. This is why a lot of people who aren't that deep in tech think open claw is interesting. > We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost always outperform in-house Do they? Because I know a lot of people who have (as an example) terrible setups with sales force that they have to use.
linschn 8mo ago
> We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost always outperform in-house, Funny, I learned the exact opposite lesson. Almost all software suck, and a good way for it not to suck is to know where the developer is and go tell them their shit is broken, in person. If you want a large scale example, one of the two main law enforcement agency in france spun off libreoffice into their own legal writing software. Developped by LEOs that can take up to two weeks a year to work on that. Awesome software. Would cost litterally millions if bought on the market.

mrdependable 8mo ago

Kind of funny to say you helped make the Harvard CS curriculum and then dropped out. Your own curriculum was not good enough for you? Probably extenuating circumstances, but still seems funny.

AndrewKemendo 8mo ago

You do understand that is who you’re competing with now right? My daughter is a excellent student in high school She and I spoke last night and she is increasingly pissed off that people who are in her classes, who don’t do the work, and don’t understand the material get all A’s because they’re using some form of GPT to do their assignments, and teachers cannot keep up I do not see a world in the future where you can “come from behind” because all of the people with resources are increasingly not going to need experts who need money to survive to be able to do whatever they want to do While that was technically true for the last few hundred years it was at least required to deal with other humans and you had to have some kind of at least veneer of communal engagement to do anything That requirement is now gone and within the next decade I anticipate there will be a single person being able to build a extremely profitable software company with only two or three human employees

taytus 8mo ago
>You do understand that is who you’re competing with now right? No. I'm competing with no one.
- warkdarrior 8mo ago
  You may think you are not competing. The people whose money you may want (employers, investors, customers) definitely see you as one of many competitors for their funds.
  - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
    Exactly
foobarian 8mo ago
Ironically I feel like this may force schools to get better at the core mission of teaching, vs. credentialing people for the next rung on the ladder. What replaces that second function remains to be seen.
- 8mo ago

nunez 8mo ago

Exeter had a hella good policy debate team back in the day. Probably still do; I've been out of the loop for a while.

jen729w 8mo ago

When I saw them buying $80 Arc'teryx gloves that was enough for me.