If you read nothing else today, read Matt Shumer on AI

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Pp who works with AI agents - np above is on point. The author is on the inside and frankly doing a public service

Claude skills and cowork has rocked a lot of companies this January. Everyone is sprinting to adopt - it’s not hype or futurist predictions anymore.

This post is such transparent marketing hype. This is all a desperate attempt to make AI happen as these overvalued companies are hemorrhaging money in this silly endeavor.

I’m the np above. Look, I get it, I’m skeptical and lean towards being a Luddite. And AI can do dumb things. One of my co-workers described it as like working with an eager intern who needs to be reined in sometimes. But the changes are real. The improvements in its quality are exponential.

I don’t really know what this means for the future of work, especially for my kids who are still in high school, but this isn’t smoke blowing. Disruptive change is coming.

Ok but what ARE the changes? What are the exponential improvements? Where can I look and see for myself something completed with AI that is really mind-blowing? People keep talking about AI doing things but provide no evidence of AI actually doing the thing. This is not coming from a place of skepticism; it’s just a basic question that no one seems able to answer.

Again, if you read the article, it explains it well. Most people who "use" AI are using older models that are still a bit buggy. There's a new generation, as in the last month, that doesn't just do stuff 80% of the way -- it's 100% now. It's perfect. These two are GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT).

The leap, according to the article, is "I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave."

He then goes on to say you can try it for yourself, but you have to pay the $20 and be sure to be using the latest version. "Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude."

So, your question, "Where can I look and see for myself." It's right there. He tells you how to do it.

We are going in circles. I DO use the paid versions of Claude and ChatGPT. I do NOT see this “leap” that the article (by someone with a vested interest in hyping his product) discusses.

WHERE are these amazing things being built by AI without user input? Where are they in YOUR work?

So, you must not be very good at prompting. He covers this, too. My guess is you ask it questions, treating it like it's Google.

As I said, I'm a writer. I can see the dramatic improvements versus the output only a year ago.

Ok. So give us an example of something complete that the AI has written for you. Or better yet, go ahead and use your superior prompting skills to generate something you would use for your work, since it requires virtually no effort from you.

NP. Here you go:
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/75/1299444.page
Look at the last entry on page 6 (or the one earlier re sports).

OK so...a mid college application essay? With enough logical inconsistencies/improbable analogies to be easily recognized as AI?

People pay editors $3.5-5k a pop for one of these polished and finished essays. Iykyk.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pp who works with AI agents - np above is on point. The author is on the inside and frankly doing a public service

Claude skills and cowork has rocked a lot of companies this January. Everyone is sprinting to adopt - it’s not hype or futurist predictions anymore.

This post is such transparent marketing hype. This is all a desperate attempt to make AI happen as these overvalued companies are hemorrhaging money in this silly endeavor.

I’m the np above. Look, I get it, I’m skeptical and lean towards being a Luddite. And AI can do dumb things. One of my co-workers described it as like working with an eager intern who needs to be reined in sometimes. But the changes are real. The improvements in its quality are exponential.

I don’t really know what this means for the future of work, especially for my kids who are still in high school, but this isn’t smoke blowing. Disruptive change is coming.

Ok but what ARE the changes? What are the exponential improvements? Where can I look and see for myself something completed with AI that is really mind-blowing? People keep talking about AI doing things but provide no evidence of AI actually doing the thing. This is not coming from a place of skepticism; it’s just a basic question that no one seems able to answer.

Again, if you read the article, it explains it well. Most people who "use" AI are using older models that are still a bit buggy. There's a new generation, as in the last month, that doesn't just do stuff 80% of the way -- it's 100% now. It's perfect. These two are GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT).

The leap, according to the article, is "I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave."

He then goes on to say you can try it for yourself, but you have to pay the $20 and be sure to be using the latest version. "Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude."

So, your question, "Where can I look and see for myself." It's right there. He tells you how to do it.

We are going in circles. I DO use the paid versions of Claude and ChatGPT. I do NOT see this “leap” that the article (by someone with a vested interest in hyping his product) discusses.

WHERE are these amazing things being built by AI without user input? Where are they in YOUR work?

So, you must not be very good at prompting. He covers this, too. My guess is you ask it questions, treating it like it's Google.

As I said, I'm a writer. I can see the dramatic improvements versus the output only a year ago.

Ok. So give us an example of something complete that the AI has written for you. Or better yet, go ahead and use your superior prompting skills to generate something you would use for your work, since it requires virtually no effort from you.

I'm literally doing that right now, producing thought leadership to make a case for cosourcing certain professional services. That's all I can say without revealing too much of my identity. I was having trouble making sense of a couple of interviews I had with executives earlier this week, so I uploaded my notes from those interviews to an AI and asked it to generate a 1,000-word article that incorporates them along with the findings of a couple of recent survey reports and at the moment I'm playing around with whether or not I want the output suitable for a LinkedIn post or an article for our website. This involves a series of prompts. But the immediate output is heads and shoulders better than anything from a year ago and was generated in seconds versus something that might have taken me several hours to do, especially since I was having some trouble wrapping my head around the angle for this one.

OMG, you're "producing thought leadership" by feeding interview notes to an AI to write an article for LinkedIn? Life is satire.

What? We all do this to shortcut the drafting process. Why aren't you?
Lawyer here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The people on this site are the most pessimistic about AI I have ever met. I think part of it is because many in the DMV who frequent this site are extremely well paid and have relative safe jobs and they do not want the gravy train to leave.

We can't predict the future of AI. But to dismiss anyone who speaks about its potential tells me you are just as terrified about your future standard of living should some of the predictions about AI and white collar jobs turn out to be true.

Well, I'm not extremely well paid but I work in a job where the relevant data a) isn't online and/or b) isn't reproduced accurately by currently available AI models. If facts and physical evidence matter in your job, it's hard not to be pessimistic.

I do worry about my future kids' standard of living, but not JUST because of AI.

[Anonymous]

The crowd of people who are all-in on AI in the workplace must also be okay with the overall "en-sh*t-ification" of all aspects of modern life, because that's the end state that broad-scale AI adoption will bring us.

[Anonymous]

all of this misses what the likely end-state will be: a handful of "too big to fail" AI providers having lured enough customers with their "only $20 a month!" model into completely killing their employee pipeline so that they are stuck when the magical code writing machine suddenly turns into $15,000 a month. or more. then you'll try to fall back to using humans for stuff that doesn't "need" to be made by the magic machine but ooops, there are no longer any junior staff that can become domain experts.

it's the modern equivalent of trying to fix a website that was created with dreamweaver. no one will be able to read or troubleshoot the underlying code so the only answer will be to keep having the ever-more-expensive AI burn it to the ground and re-write.

and in the mean time we are just accelerating the extraction and exhaustion of fossil fuels to run the power hungry datacenters. unless we can somehow get safe nuclear spun up... will nuclear become *less* of a third rail if it's entirely designed and virtually tested and approved by an AI? i can see why musk wants to get to mars as soon as possible. hopefully his grok built space-trebuchet will get him there swiftly and leave him there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pp who works with AI agents - np above is on point. The author is on the inside and frankly doing a public service

Claude skills and cowork has rocked a lot of companies this January. Everyone is sprinting to adopt - it’s not hype or futurist predictions anymore.

This post is such transparent marketing hype. This is all a desperate attempt to make AI happen as these overvalued companies are hemorrhaging money in this silly endeavor.

I’m the np above. Look, I get it, I’m skeptical and lean towards being a Luddite. And AI can do dumb things. One of my co-workers described it as like working with an eager intern who needs to be reined in sometimes. But the changes are real. The improvements in its quality are exponential.

I don’t really know what this means for the future of work, especially for my kids who are still in high school, but this isn’t smoke blowing. Disruptive change is coming.

Ok but what ARE the changes? What are the exponential improvements? Where can I look and see for myself something completed with AI that is really mind-blowing? People keep talking about AI doing things but provide no evidence of AI actually doing the thing. This is not coming from a place of skepticism; it’s just a basic question that no one seems able to answer.

Again, if you read the article, it explains it well. Most people who "use" AI are using older models that are still a bit buggy. There's a new generation, as in the last month, that doesn't just do stuff 80% of the way -- it's 100% now. It's perfect. These two are GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT).

The leap, according to the article, is "I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave."

He then goes on to say you can try it for yourself, but you have to pay the $20 and be sure to be using the latest version. "Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude."

So, your question, "Where can I look and see for myself." It's right there. He tells you how to do it.

We are going in circles. I DO use the paid versions of Claude and ChatGPT. I do NOT see this “leap” that the article (by someone with a vested interest in hyping his product) discusses.

WHERE are these amazing things being built by AI without user input? Where are they in YOUR work?

So, you must not be very good at prompting. He covers this, too. My guess is you ask it questions, treating it like it's Google.

As I said, I'm a writer. I can see the dramatic improvements versus the output only a year ago.

Ok. So give us an example of something complete that the AI has written for you. Or better yet, go ahead and use your superior prompting skills to generate something you would use for your work, since it requires virtually no effort from you.

I'm literally doing that right now, producing thought leadership to make a case for cosourcing certain professional services. That's all I can say without revealing too much of my identity. I was having trouble making sense of a couple of interviews I had with executives earlier this week, so I uploaded my notes from those interviews to an AI and asked it to generate a 1,000-word article that incorporates them along with the findings of a couple of recent survey reports and at the moment I'm playing around with whether or not I want the output suitable for a LinkedIn post or an article for our website. This involves a series of prompts. But the immediate output is heads and shoulders better than anything from a year ago and was generated in seconds versus something that might have taken me several hours to do, especially since I was having some trouble wrapping my head around the angle for this one.

OMG, you're "producing thought leadership" by feeding interview notes to an AI to write an article for LinkedIn? Life is satire.

What? We all do this to shortcut the drafting process. Why aren't you?
Lawyer here.

I don't "produce thought leadership" on LinkedIn, I do real work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pp who works with AI agents - np above is on point. The author is on the inside and frankly doing a public service

Claude skills and cowork has rocked a lot of companies this January. Everyone is sprinting to adopt - it’s not hype or futurist predictions anymore.

This post is such transparent marketing hype. This is all a desperate attempt to make AI happen as these overvalued companies are hemorrhaging money in this silly endeavor.

I’m the np above. Look, I get it, I’m skeptical and lean towards being a Luddite. And AI can do dumb things. One of my co-workers described it as like working with an eager intern who needs to be reined in sometimes. But the changes are real. The improvements in its quality are exponential.

I don’t really know what this means for the future of work, especially for my kids who are still in high school, but this isn’t smoke blowing. Disruptive change is coming.

Ok but what ARE the changes? What are the exponential improvements? Where can I look and see for myself something completed with AI that is really mind-blowing? People keep talking about AI doing things but provide no evidence of AI actually doing the thing. This is not coming from a place of skepticism; it’s just a basic question that no one seems able to answer.

Again, if you read the article, it explains it well. Most people who "use" AI are using older models that are still a bit buggy. There's a new generation, as in the last month, that doesn't just do stuff 80% of the way -- it's 100% now. It's perfect. These two are GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT).

The leap, according to the article, is "I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave."

He then goes on to say you can try it for yourself, but you have to pay the $20 and be sure to be using the latest version. "Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude."

So, your question, "Where can I look and see for myself." It's right there. He tells you how to do it.

We are going in circles. I DO use the paid versions of Claude and ChatGPT. I do NOT see this “leap” that the article (by someone with a vested interest in hyping his product) discusses.

WHERE are these amazing things being built by AI without user input? Where are they in YOUR work?

So, you must not be very good at prompting. He covers this, too. My guess is you ask it questions, treating it like it's Google.

As I said, I'm a writer. I can see the dramatic improvements versus the output only a year ago.

Ok. So give us an example of something complete that the AI has written for you. Or better yet, go ahead and use your superior prompting skills to generate something you would use for your work, since it requires virtually no effort from you.

I'm literally doing that right now, producing thought leadership to make a case for cosourcing certain professional services. That's all I can say without revealing too much of my identity. I was having trouble making sense of a couple of interviews I had with executives earlier this week, so I uploaded my notes from those interviews to an AI and asked it to generate a 1,000-word article that incorporates them along with the findings of a couple of recent survey reports and at the moment I'm playing around with whether or not I want the output suitable for a LinkedIn post or an article for our website. This involves a series of prompts. But the immediate output is heads and shoulders better than anything from a year ago and was generated in seconds versus something that might have taken me several hours to do, especially since I was having some trouble wrapping my head around the angle for this one.

OMG, you're "producing thought leadership" by feeding interview notes to an AI to write an article for LinkedIn? Life is satire.

What? We all do this to shortcut the drafting process. Why aren't you?
Lawyer here.

I don't "produce thought leadership" on LinkedIn, I do real work.

Lol, in a few years, people will assign their personal bots to read all the Thought Leadership on LinkedIn and bring back the top 5 one-line bullets they need to know.

Yes they can do that today but some people still choose what they digest.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The people on this site are the most pessimistic about AI I have ever met. I think part of it is because many in the DMV who frequent this site are extremely well paid and have relative safe jobs and they do not want the gravy train to leave.

We can't predict the future of AI. But to dismiss anyone who speaks about its potential tells me you are just as terrified about your future standard of living should some of the predictions about AI and white collar jobs turn out to be true.

I’m not pessimistic about AI. I just don’t think this article backed up its own claims.

The author says AI built him a perfect app instantly. Ok, where is it? What does it do? Can I, the reader, test it out and see if his claim holds?

I would like to say this is critical thinking but I don’t think it even rises to that. If someone says “I built this cool thing” the most natural response is “what is it?”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The people on this site are the most pessimistic about AI I have ever met. I think part of it is because many in the DMV who frequent this site are extremely well paid and have relative safe jobs and they do not want the gravy train to leave.

We can't predict the future of AI. But to dismiss anyone who speaks about its potential tells me you are just as terrified about your future standard of living should some of the predictions about AI and white collar jobs turn out to be true.

I’m not pessimistic about AI. I just don’t think this article backed up its own claims.

The author says AI built him a perfect app instantly. Ok, where is it? What does it do? Can I, the reader, test it out and see if his claim holds?

I would like to say this is critical thinking but I don’t think it even rises to that. If someone says “I built this cool thing” the most natural response is “what is it?”

It’s pretty transparently false, but the AI salespeople are a cult, so…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pp who works with AI agents - np above is on point. The author is on the inside and frankly doing a public service

Claude skills and cowork has rocked a lot of companies this January. Everyone is sprinting to adopt - it’s not hype or futurist predictions anymore.

This post is such transparent marketing hype. This is all a desperate attempt to make AI happen as these overvalued companies are hemorrhaging money in this silly endeavor.

I’m the np above. Look, I get it, I’m skeptical and lean towards being a Luddite. And AI can do dumb things. One of my co-workers described it as like working with an eager intern who needs to be reined in sometimes. But the changes are real. The improvements in its quality are exponential.

I don’t really know what this means for the future of work, especially for my kids who are still in high school, but this isn’t smoke blowing. Disruptive change is coming.

Ok but what ARE the changes? What are the exponential improvements? Where can I look and see for myself something completed with AI that is really mind-blowing? People keep talking about AI doing things but provide no evidence of AI actually doing the thing. This is not coming from a place of skepticism; it’s just a basic question that no one seems able to answer.

Again, if you read the article, it explains it well. Most people who "use" AI are using older models that are still a bit buggy. There's a new generation, as in the last month, that doesn't just do stuff 80% of the way -- it's 100% now. It's perfect. These two are GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT).

The leap, according to the article, is "I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave."

He then goes on to say you can try it for yourself, but you have to pay the $20 and be sure to be using the latest version. "Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude."

So, your question, "Where can I look and see for myself." It's right there. He tells you how to do it.

NP. I know plenty of people paying for the best models who are rolling their eyes at this article. The article itself is marketing slop.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
This is alarming, but not alarmist. It is making the rounds this week. It’s a must-read to understand what it about to happen. Not in 10 years, more likely in the next one-to-two.

Maybe I will retrain to be a plumber or something.


https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening?fbclid=IwZnRzaAP6pfdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeg3Oij6mY1B_GCLqt_RggOSduVkePMwV6HKnMwZemWFZSzQFbaN3FPSKRUgI_aem_MRW-NPtQq1TktuKMS-kdUg

Now read an article from someone who is good at spotting fakery and who isn’t selling a product:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

[Anonymous]

I am sure plenty of you own an Index fund correct? You know that your favorite brokerage such as Vanguard, Fidelity etc will sooner or later use AI in their decision making correct?

So be skeptical of AI all you want, the folks managing your money will soon be using AI.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am sure plenty of you own an Index fund correct? You know that your favorite brokerage such as Vanguard, Fidelity etc will sooner or later use AI in their decision making correct?

So be skeptical of AI all you want, the folks managing your money will soon be using AI.

Do you know what an index fund is? I'm pretty sure you don't need AI to structure a fund that follows a PUBLISHED index

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am sure plenty of you own an Index fund correct? You know that your favorite brokerage such as Vanguard, Fidelity etc will sooner or later use AI in their decision making correct?

So be skeptical of AI all you want, the folks managing your money will soon be using AI.

Do you know what an index fund is? I'm pretty sure you don't need AI to structure a fund that follows a PUBLISHED index

I think what PP is saying is that people are being skeptical while the stocks selected in their retirement funds are probably going to be selected using AI.

So people are saying AI can't do this can't do that, but it surely can/will select which stocks go into their index funds.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am sure plenty of you own an Index fund correct? You know that your favorite brokerage such as Vanguard, Fidelity etc will sooner or later use AI in their decision making correct?

So be skeptical of AI all you want, the folks managing your money will soon be using AI.

Do you know what an index fund is? I'm pretty sure you don't need AI to structure a fund that follows a PUBLISHED index

I think what PP is saying is that people are being skeptical while the stocks selected in their retirement funds are probably going to be selected using AI.

So people are saying AI can't do this can't do that, but it surely can/will select which stocks go into their index funds.

That’s not how an index fund works. Please look up “index funds” on Google.