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100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other offic

100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefiting from the productive gains of these systems.

dboreham 8mo ago
This isn't my experience. I see many non-software people using AI regularly. What you may be seeing is more: organizations with no incentive to do things better never did anything to do things better. AI is no different. They were never doing things better with pencil and paper.
DaedalusII 8mo ago
I think anthropic will succeed immensely here because when integrated with Microsoft365 and especially Excel it basically does what co-pilot said it would do. The moment of realisation happen for a lot of normoid business people when they see claude make a DCF spreadsheet or search emails claude is also smart because it visually shows the user as it resizes the columns, changes colours, etc. Seeing the computer do things makes the normoid SEE the AI despite it being much slower
- sheeshkebab 8mo ago
  No one wants a chatbot “integrated” with excel and office365 crap, it’s clippy 2.0 bullshit. Replace excel and office stuff with ai model entirely then people will pay attention.
  - DaedalusII 8mo ago
    that only works if you can oneshot. but nobody can oneshot. iterating over work in excel and seeing it update correctly is exactly what people want. If they get it working in MSWord it will pick up even faster. If the average office worker can get the benefit of AI by installing an add-on into the same office software they have been using since 2000 (the entire professional career of anyone under the age of 45), then they will do so. its also really easy to sell to companies because they dont have to redesign their teams or software stack, or even train people that much. the board can easily agree to budget $20 a head for claude pro the other thing normies like is they can put in huge legacy spreadsheets and find all the errors Microsoft365 has 400 million paid seats
- oblio 8mo ago
  > normoid Do you work extra hard to be this arrogant or does it come naturally?
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  Hilarious lack of self awareness. Calling others "normoids" yet you believe you can emphasise with them enough to predict how they will adopt AI?
yodsanklai 8mo ago
I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical. For my team at least, the productivity boost is difficult to quantify objectively. Our products and services have still tons of issues that AI isn't going to solve magically. It's pretty clear that AI is allowing to move faster for some tasks, but it's also detrimental for other things. We're going to learn how to use these tools more efficiently, but right now, I'm not convinced about the productivity gain.
- david_shaw 8mo ago
  > I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical. What improvements have you noticed over that time? It seems like the models coming out in the last several weeks are dramatically superior to those mid-last year. Does that match your experience?
  - nrclark 8mo ago
    Not the grandparent, but I've used most of the OpenAI models that have been released in the last year. Out of all of them, o3 was the best at the programming tasks I do. I liked it a lot more than I like GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro. Overall, I'm not at all convinced that models are making forward progress in general.
  - yodsanklai 8mo ago
    Yes, it matches my experience. Now I can throw tasks at the agent and have it write a full PR, with tests, good summary. Or it can review things and make good suggestions that a casual reviewer or non-expert would have missed. It can also take a bunch of logs as input, find the issue, fix the code. I can't deny it's impressive and useful. What I'm still skeptical about is how much more productive it makes us. In my case, coding is maybe 50% of my job, and I work on complex and novel systems. The agent gives me the illusion I don't need to think anymore, but it's not the case. Agents slow me down in many cases too, I'm not learning and improving as I used to.
- techpression 8mo ago
  In a team of one at work I see clear benefits, but having worked in many different team sizes for most of my career I can see how it quickly would go down, especially if you care about quality. And even with the latest models it’s a constant battle against legacy training data, which has gotten worse over time. ”I have to spend 45 minutes explaining why a one minute AI generated PR is bad code” was how an old colleague summarized it.
dimitri-vs 8mo ago
IMO Copilot was "we need to give these people rope, but not enough for them to hang themselves". A non technical person with no patience and access to a real AI agent inside a business is a bull in a china shop. Copilot Cowork is the closest thing we have to what Copilot should have been and is only possible now because models finally got good enough to be less supervised. FWIW Gemini inside Google apps is just as bad.

dboreham 8mo ago

This isn't my experience. I see many non-software people using AI regularly. What you may be seeing is more: organizations with no incentive to do things better never did anything to do things better. AI is no different. They were never doing things better with pencil and paper.

DaedalusII 8mo ago

I think anthropic will succeed immensely here because when integrated with Microsoft365 and especially Excel it basically does what co-pilot said it would do. The moment of realisation happen for a lot of normoid business people when they see claude make a DCF spreadsheet or search emails claude is also smart because it visually shows the user as it resizes the columns, changes colours, etc. Seeing the computer do things makes the normoid SEE the AI despite it being much slower

sheeshkebab 8mo ago
No one wants a chatbot “integrated” with excel and office365 crap, it’s clippy 2.0 bullshit. Replace excel and office stuff with ai model entirely then people will pay attention.
- DaedalusII 8mo ago
  that only works if you can oneshot. but nobody can oneshot. iterating over work in excel and seeing it update correctly is exactly what people want. If they get it working in MSWord it will pick up even faster. If the average office worker can get the benefit of AI by installing an add-on into the same office software they have been using since 2000 (the entire professional career of anyone under the age of 45), then they will do so. its also really easy to sell to companies because they dont have to redesign their teams or software stack, or even train people that much. the board can easily agree to budget $20 a head for claude pro the other thing normies like is they can put in huge legacy spreadsheets and find all the errors Microsoft365 has 400 million paid seats
oblio 8mo ago
> normoid Do you work extra hard to be this arrogant or does it come naturally?
slopinthebag 8mo ago
Hilarious lack of self awareness. Calling others "normoids" yet you believe you can emphasise with them enough to predict how they will adopt AI?

yodsanklai 8mo ago

I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical. For my team at least, the productivity boost is difficult to quantify objectively. Our products and services have still tons of issues that AI isn't going to solve magically. It's pretty clear that AI is allowing to move faster for some tasks, but it's also detrimental for other things. We're going to learn how to use these tools more efficiently, but right now, I'm not convinced about the productivity gain.

david_shaw 8mo ago
> I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical. What improvements have you noticed over that time? It seems like the models coming out in the last several weeks are dramatically superior to those mid-last year. Does that match your experience?
- nrclark 8mo ago
  Not the grandparent, but I've used most of the OpenAI models that have been released in the last year. Out of all of them, o3 was the best at the programming tasks I do. I liked it a lot more than I like GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro. Overall, I'm not at all convinced that models are making forward progress in general.
- yodsanklai 8mo ago
  Yes, it matches my experience. Now I can throw tasks at the agent and have it write a full PR, with tests, good summary. Or it can review things and make good suggestions that a casual reviewer or non-expert would have missed. It can also take a bunch of logs as input, find the issue, fix the code. I can't deny it's impressive and useful. What I'm still skeptical about is how much more productive it makes us. In my case, coding is maybe 50% of my job, and I work on complex and novel systems. The agent gives me the illusion I don't need to think anymore, but it's not the case. Agents slow me down in many cases too, I'm not learning and improving as I used to.
techpression 8mo ago
In a team of one at work I see clear benefits, but having worked in many different team sizes for most of my career I can see how it quickly would go down, especially if you care about quality. And even with the latest models it’s a constant battle against legacy training data, which has gotten worse over time. ”I have to spend 45 minutes explaining why a one minute AI generated PR is bad code” was how an old colleague summarized it.

dimitri-vs 8mo ago

IMO Copilot was "we need to give these people rope, but not enough for them to hang themselves". A non technical person with no patience and access to a real AI agent inside a business is a bull in a china shop. Copilot Cowork is the closest thing we have to what Copilot should have been and is only possible now because models finally got good enough to be less supervised. FWIW Gemini inside Google apps is just as bad.