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That's not the intention behind my argument really. People are using Claude to code a calculator (and that was something you could have done a year or two back), it just doesn't make sense when we already have perfectly adequate human-designed calculators.
But put your ears (?) to the grapevine and you'll see that people are making all kinds of toys, bespoke bits of standalone software that AI enabled them to do. Are they world-changing, yet? Probably not. But the proof of principle is there. Notice that I've called them toys, even if some of these things are legitimately valuable for their creator or people with similar, bounded but under-serviced use cases. I collect these things on X, though I'm too tired to present examples. I wasn't kidding about a bad migraine.
Of course, that is today AD. I have no reason to dispute the claim that in the near future, far more sophisticated and immediately compelling software artifacts will be abundant, but I must note that their commercial moat will be nonexistent, since any other Claude Code Monkey should be able to replicate them in a fast-follower fashion.
And implicitly, I've accounted for larger models coordinating agentic swarms. Mythos 2 ordering around a bunch of Sonnet 5.2s and Haiku 5.1s to manage the grunt work. Humans already do this, and I've seen the benefits after a month of extensive practice with agentic orchestration.
Here, my reply would be that in the near to medium term (2-5 years), the human aspect will be severely deprecated. It won't be a lawyer writing an LLM brief that another judge uses an LLM to explain. That's a very transitional stage, though it's anyone's bet how long that state of affairs will last with protectionist and credentialist regulations at play. As someone who worries that ChatGPT can replace me at 80% of my job, I can't complain too hard about the extra time, money and job security.
This is the kind of inference that will die. Eventually. My point is that it's like people using email to send each other scanned documents, signing them, and sending them back. A short, stupid stage that won't last. But more streamlined and coherent systems only drastically increased the value of email.
You'd previously said you didn't want to know if it could identify you. I presume that's changed? Because it can. In incidental conversation, it knows who you are as "2rafa", and it definitely knows you're a woman. You crop up in discussions of the Motte all the time as a "valued contributor", a framing I can't disagree with at all. Beyond that, I've tried to respect your privacy and didn't outright check but I expect to see interesting things.
It's not even the NHS! I had a big debate with @Shrike about... alien civilizations. Just those samples of my text pegged me as self_made_human with Claude reporting a subjective 50-60% confidence. And guess what it gets it more right than not. I'm usually the top pick, even if it worries if it's missed someone else. Bridge Mormons? Oh, that's obvious too. I've tested on samples that minimize PII or obvious interests.
The problem is that everyone catches up fast. I don't know how closely you followed Mythos and recent events, but OAI made a big deal about how GPT 5.5 Thinking was just as good at cybersecurity, for much cheaper, and most importantly available to the public for $20. They joked that Dario was doing a big safety jig to avoid the uncomfortable possibility that Anthropic simply can't afford to sell Mythos at scale, they lack the compute. This might change with the new xAI tie up, Elon prefers that Dario wins if that means Altman loses.
Apologies if I've missed anything, wasn't kidding about the migraine, and the meds plus sequelae have me loopy. I hate my job. Take it away, as long as I get paid. Jokes aside, tell me if I've ignored something or overlooked something else, I go above and beyond when talking to you.
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