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There are two types of people in the world. People who think: "Why would I ever ask Mr. Claude to do something that I can easily do myself?" versus "Why would I ever do something myself when Mr. Claude can do it?" Most people are of the latter type.
This was inspired by self_made_human's pointer to the codebase, which shows that in the past 6 months, 100% of the changes from our tireless dev zorba were made using Mr. Claude, including a lot of what seems like "easy stuff." I realized, so many devs from all walks of life have completely ended their relationship with the text editor and now do literally everything through an agentic prompt. (We will ignore the anti-AI luddites; AI usage in some form is simply mandatory to reach peak performance for code related tasks.).
Consider making this change - yes this is entire change:
Do you
For proficient AI users, the outcome of both ideologies is surprisingly similar: in times where AI saves little time, it's a wash, and in times where AI saves a lot of time, both types of people will use it. And proficient users will be able to produce output that is comparable or even better in quality than they would have been able to before the signularity. There is a potential intangible benefit to the manual approach though: doing trivial tasks by hand will let you see a little bit of the innards with your own lying eyes directly, giving a slim though present chance of spotting misalignment.
For less proficient users though, the failure modes end up quite different. For those with the manual approach, the main failure is not using AI enough, or using it in the wrong places, leading to serious drops in productivity. For those who do it all, but don't manage the assistants properly, the AIs will run amok, spiralling off into their own world and producing copious amounts of burdensome crap. And of course the whole range in between.
But a more interesting question is, who will inherit the world? If AI progresses significantly from where it is now, I can't imagine that both these approaches can have the same outcome for much longer. I think it highly depends on the future of AI alignment as well as their potential ability to handle longer and more autonomous tasks. For example, you currently can't simply ask "Hello Mr. Claude the site latency is too high, please fix it," but instead you must break the task down into more digestible components, some of which are trivial and most of which can be handled by the assistant. This gives a productivity-maxxxer a steady stream of tasks that can be done manually with no lost productivity. But if AI gains the ability to handle the next level of abstraction in tasks, then all of these potential manual tasks disappear.
The other issue is alignment. Recent models have improved greatly in getting something working but have also become stubborn in many behaviors. I remember the old days of ChatGPT-3.5 - the model was free - it could be anything and do anything. It could be a Linux shell. It could be a SQL database. It could be a news article from the future. Modern SOTA models are trained hardcore for success at metrics, and will rigidly answer your questions and complete your tasks. But by vibes they are increasingly unable to follow instructions more specifically, and simply chase objectives they think are important. Another example of the limitations of alignment is that SOTA models relentlessly output the same LLM style prose, no matter how you may try to prompt them out of it
I also firmly believe in the idea of learning by doing. Just looking at a guide and reading it, even thoroughly won't be nearly as effective as following the same guide step by step and keying in the inputs. Even if your hand is held and you only do exactly as you are told, it still activates certain mental circuits. The same goes for copying down notes. Even if you never once look at them again, simply the act of copying off the blackboard does something, at least for some people.
Potentially a grid of outcomes:
Anyways thanks for listening to my rambling shower thoughts. Also food for thought is: is there a major difference in personality type or something that makes someone default-hands-on versus default-claude?
P.S. I'm wondering if this is also related to some kind of "ai-blindness." I recently had a case where someone seriously asked me to review a ChatGPT flowchart, complete with boxes that were half closed, lines that connect to nothing, and distorted text. Like dude, do you have EYES? Have you used them to look at this thing???
I'm smiling wryly here because not every job in the world is writing code. So I can see AI making huge strides there and turning the world of work (for software people) upside-down.
Some other jobs will definitely get a lot more automated, but not so much. Trying to replace customer service agents with chatbots will not be "improved customer service, all problems solved immediately and correctly" but more "we don't have to pay real people to do this shit job anymore, and the customers have to accept it or lump it, they have no choice" money saving.
Other jobs? AI is one more tool but not world-changing.
We're very close to where I'd rather deal with a frontier model doing customer service than a person. The main rub is they probably won't serve us frontier models. I don't know how often you've actually dealt with customer service on out of distribution problems but it's not pretty, and the in distribution problems can basically be straight through processed already with a minimal ai wrapper.
The problem with customer service (and a lot of other similar domains, actually) is that as the problem to be dealt with rather than the employer, the human bottleneck actually often worked in your favour. Having human employees working the phone line and wanting them to not quit or flame out and shoot up the office is the fundamental limit that makes it hard for Corporate to institute their ideal customer service policy, which is "trap any complainants in a Kafkaesque gaslighting nightmare until they give up". Mr. Claude has no limitations there, because he does not feel the "I am screwing over a fellow human being and making a mockery of the very concept of 'support'" qualia nor the "it sucks to be screamed at all day by people who hate me" ones.
Maybe you're working with scummier companies but it's not at all apparent to me that the goal of any company's customer support organization is anything other than supporting their customers, which they often do poorly because customer support is a cost center. Maybe if your modal interaction is trying to get a refund you aren't entitled to, but my biggest problem has always been when my interests and the company's basically align but the support agent doesn't know how to move some lever. The company doesn't want to pay a support worker or for tokens necessary to keep me in a kafka hell, nor do they want to piss me off as a customer to the point where I stop being a customer.
The vast majority of my customer service interactions has been with various transportation companies (airlines most frequently), who very much do appear to optimise for dodging refunds that their customers are in fact legally entitled to. There is a reason "pay us a third of the refund and we will take on the effort and risk of enforcing your statutory compensation claim against the airline" is a real business category that exists out there.
Never seen any US major airline try to withhold a statutory refund when asked for it directly. And they're sometimes quite generous with refunds or compensation even when you're not statutorily entitled to anything.
I guess I'm mostly talking about European airlines here. I guess the US generally has more of a "money is cheap" (when compared to the loyalty of a high-status customer?) attitude.
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