I've started a new job, and I'm giving Claude Code an honest-to-god try. I'm simultaneously more and less impressed than I thought I'd be. I still think that the fundemental assumption of...
I've started a new job, and I'm giving Claude Code an honest-to-god try. I'm simultaneously more and less impressed than I thought I'd be.
I still think that the fundemental assumption of significant proctivity boosts are a mirage. Even at the most basic tasks, it's performance relative to 'coding by stackoverflow' is marginal. In part because I can search, read, find the correct answer, and adapt if far faster in aggregate. Claude will happily spit out the wrong answer over and over for some things, and thus negate any time savings that accumulated over the previous hour. And when you lean on a powerful tool, your muscles atrophy and fixing said problems become exponentially harder.
In other words, Claude isn't making you 10x more productive. Productivity implies sustained persistent improvement, not requiring power naps every time you're not working. It's letting you burn your wick at both ends, making your productivitt a zero-sum game.
The biggest problem is that tech workers never unionized when we had all the power. That's how you attain that work/life balance. Not sure how so many words were written without "Tech workers need to unionize to avoid complete inevitable exploitation" becoming the conclusion. That is how you figuratively punch the dollar signs out of the bosses eyes.
I've never seen it do this "generate the wrong answer over and over" behavior with current models. (I did see that when I was experimenting a couple of years ago.) But I'm writing a fairly...
I've never seen it do this "generate the wrong answer over and over" behavior with current models. (I did see that when I was experimenting a couple of years ago.) But I'm writing a fairly standard web app. I suspect performance varies a lot depending on what you're doing. And whether you get a productivity boost probably varies a lot as well?
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From the article:
Agentic software building is genuinely addictive. The better you get at it, the more you want to use it. It’s simultaneously satisfying, frustrating, and exhilarating. It doles out dopamine and adrenaline shots like they’re on a fire sale.
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And that’s where the problem gets into full swing. Because other people are listening!
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We’re all setting unrealistic standards for everyone else.
Maybe me worst of all. I have 40 years of experience, I’ve led large teams, I read fast, and I have essentially unlimited time, energy, and now tokens for experimenting. I am completely unrepresentative of the average developer.
But I’m still standing up and telling everyone “do it this way!” I even co-wrote a book about it.
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I don’t think there’s a damn thing we can do to stop the train. But we can certainly control the culture, since the culture is us. I plan to practice what I preach, and dial my hours back. That’s going to mean saying No to a lot of people who want to chat with me (sorry!), and also dialing back some of my ambitions, even if it means losing some footraces. I don’t care. I will fight the vampire.
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If you have joined an AI-native startup, the founders and investors are using the VC system to extract value from you, today, with the glimmer of hope for big returns for you all later.
Most of these ideas will fail.
I know this because they are literally telling me their plans like villains at the end of an old movie, since with Gas Town I have mastered the illusion of knowing what I’m doing. Truth is, nobody, least of all me, knows what they’re doing right now. But I look like I do, so everyone is coming to show me their almost uniformly terrible ideas.
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Enterprises see the oncoming horde and think, oh jeez, we need to hustle. And they’re not exactly wrong. Which means this lovely dystopian picture is making its way slowly but surely into enterprise, at the big company where you work.
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My friends who were grumbling back in 2001 needed some help with this, and I gave it to them. One day I walked up to the whiteboard during a particularly heated grumble-session, and I wrote a ratio on the board: $/hr (dollars divided by hours).
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I said to everyone, Amazon pays you a flat salary, no bonuses, and you work a certain number of hours per week. From that, you can calculate that you make a certain number of dollars per hour.
I told the grumbler group, you can’t control the numerator of this ratio. But you have significant control over the denominator. I pointed at the /hr for dramatic effect.
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As for my part, I went ahead and dialed that denominator down, and lived life a bit while I was at Amazon, because fuck extraction.
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That old formula is also my proposed solution for the AI Vampire, a quarter century later.
Someone else might control the numerator. But you control the denominator.
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You need to push back. You need to tell your CEO, your boss, your HR, your leadership, about the AI vampire. Point them at this post. Send them to me. I’m their age and can look them in the eye and be like yo. Don’t be a fool.
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I regret the unrealistic standards that I’m contributing to setting. I don’t believe most people can work like I’ve been working. I’m not sure how long I can work how I’ve been working.
I’m convinced that 3 to 4 hours is going to be the sweet spot for the new workday. Give people unlimited tokens, but only let people stare at reports and make decisions for short stretches. Assume that exhaustion is the norm. Building things with AI takes a lot of human energy.
I've started a new job, and I'm giving Claude Code an honest-to-god try. I'm simultaneously more and less impressed than I thought I'd be.
I still think that the fundemental assumption of significant proctivity boosts are a mirage. Even at the most basic tasks, it's performance relative to 'coding by stackoverflow' is marginal. In part because I can search, read, find the correct answer, and adapt if far faster in aggregate. Claude will happily spit out the wrong answer over and over for some things, and thus negate any time savings that accumulated over the previous hour. And when you lean on a powerful tool, your muscles atrophy and fixing said problems become exponentially harder.
In other words, Claude isn't making you 10x more productive. Productivity implies sustained persistent improvement, not requiring power naps every time you're not working. It's letting you burn your wick at both ends, making your productivitt a zero-sum game.
This Youtube short feels especially appropo
The biggest problem is that tech workers never unionized when we had all the power. That's how you attain that work/life balance. Not sure how so many words were written without "Tech workers need to unionize to avoid complete inevitable exploitation" becoming the conclusion. That is how you figuratively punch the dollar signs out of the bosses eyes.
I've never seen it do this "generate the wrong answer over and over" behavior with current models. (I did see that when I was experimenting a couple of years ago.) But I'm writing a fairly standard web app. I suspect performance varies a lot depending on what you're doing. And whether you get a productivity boost probably varies a lot as well?
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