There was a time, in the early to mid 2010s, when the phrase "Fake News" was almost exclusively used by people in publishing to talk about a very real rise in editorial disruption as news readers shifted from being desktop and homepage-driven to mobile and facebook-driven.
And then, one day, the politicians started saying it...
I work for an "AI-native" company now and have found this to be the case.
EVERYONE (engineers, pms, managers, sales) uses Claude Code to read and write Google Docs (google workspace mcp). Ideas, designs, reports. It's too much for one person to read and, with a distributed async team, there's an endless demand for more.
So for every project there's always one super Google Doc with 50 tabs and everyone just points their claude code at it to answer questions. It's not to be read by a human, it's just context for the agent.
Everyone cranks out endless pages of slop, that everyone else then has to ingest. Anthropic collects a fee from all of you and is the only winner here.
I'm looking forward to the impending crash when the AI providers actually start charging what it costs to run these models. It's going to be a bloodbath, and it's going to be cathartic as fuck.
They are so far removed from the process they can claim they are any % more productive and no one is able to contradict them. Call it a ‘productivity theatre’
The economic reality check is going to be devastating. It won’t be a crash of AI as a tech, it will be a crash of every ‘AI native’ company that does not even know what is their product any more.
I really hope that more people become aware of how much of our society is turning into kayfabe.
Just think of the rise of all the new types of ____ theatre like this that have been coined over the last decade or more. It's not an accident or fad, it reflects something true that's happening to society at large.
Everything authentic and valuable is being turned into something inauthentic, based only on conjured up perceived value and competition to fulfill the perception, and not real or useful purposes. It's all in the service of propping up systems that no longer function for the majority of people, or even for basic needs. And until a lot more people are willing to point out that the emperor is quite naked, even at their own social or financial risk, this will continue to rot everything down to the foundation.
Yes, it's amazing how quickly so many tech companies have hitched their tooling to these big AI vendors seemingly without any thought towards whether they'll still exist a year or three or five from now. Insane behavior. To the (debatable!) extent that AI coding tools are useful at all wouldn't it be a hell of a lot smarter to self-host? At least that way you have some control over QoS, and a stable, predictable result... Or maybe nobody cares about that kind of thing anymore? What happened to basic business math in this industry?
The basic business math is (to start) software companies realizing that spending $10k, $20k, $50k (more ?) per year, per developer for current models at current token rates might not be particularly insane, given the value return.
Models are likely going to keep getting better, and as costs go down, demand is likely to rise faster.
I feel the same about Claude Code. It's a fast but average developer at just about everything and there are some things that average developers are just consistently bad at and therefore Claude is consistently bad at.
I'm not sure, I think you overestimate the average developer. But then, the average code doesn't end up in public repositories, it spends decades in enterprise codebases rotting.
At this point I'd rather review LLM generated code than a poor developer's.
That person's actions were only possible because the administration explicitly decided to put that much unchecked power into poorly vetted individuals.
I'm teaching a class in agent development at a university. First assignment is in and I'm writing a human-in-the-loop grader for my TAs to use that's built on top of Claude Agent SDK.
Phase 1: Download the student's code from their submitted github repo URL and run a series of extractions defined as skills. Did they include a README.md? What few-shot examples they provided in their prompt? Save all of it to a JSON blob.
Phase 2: Generate a series of probe queries for their agent based on it's system prompt and run the agent locally testing it with the probes. Save the queries and results to the JSON blob.
Phase 3: For anything subjective, surface the extraction/results to the grader (TA), ask them to grade them 1-5.
The final rubric is 50% objective and 50% subjective but it's all driven by the agent.
It's just "Thou shalt not grow a brain in a test tube and force it to play a 1993 shooter" didn't make any sense to Moses and therefore didn't make the editors cut.
Though I disagree it would be tragic to lose this reference. It’s not a good movie. It’s basically “say thing, immediately interpret it literally”. Throw in some stereotypes from time to time. Rinse and repeat.
And then, one day, the politicians started saying it...
reply