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

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Vibe coding....it gets you 80% of the way there. Some folks think that's good enough/don't know to check, others see this as full employment to fix. And this is only going to keep getting better.

I do not think vibe coding gets you 80% of the way there. I do not think vibe coding even gets you 60% of the way there for something minor. And I say that as someone who has used AI to code little tools for myself at work a lot. You have to understand logic and troubleshooting to even use AI to code anything. Coding is really, really complex and there are lots of security requirements and client requirements. AI is good for structured language and giving you snippets that you can use.

A lot of the “news” we are reading about AI feels like a scam.

I can tell you didn't read the article.

No, I did, and I think he’s lying. I think most of the people trying to sell AI are lying. It is a transformative tool, but these people are scammers.

For example, this dude writes:

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect.

I'm not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

Very cool! What app is this? Where is it? Can we use it? Where are these apps written by AI?

I don't think you're seeing the forest for the trees.

Ok. Let me say this more plainly.

Can you name anything AI has done? Any jobs it has fully replaced? Any books written by AI? Any apps? Any notable content?

I use AI enterprise tools every day- they are great! But it is still a lot of work to verify, review, and rewrite what AI gives me. I can’t comment on these magical exclusive tools that will replace workers but I’m pretty sure they don’t exist.

So, you use AI enterprise tools every day, but you don't know what AI has "done?" Make up your mind.

Again, it's clear you didn't read the article. Your whole position seems to be "he's lying, because it doesn't align with what I'm seeing." But what he's saying is he sees things at much more advanced stages than you. The entire POINT of the article is people will dispute what he's saying because they'll say. "I'm using AI now and it's all that." But they're not actually using the latest models.

You're making his point for him.

His other point is people are leaving the field because of concerns of what it's about to do. See, e.g. the departure of Zoë Hitzig or Mrinank Sharma. These are not people who stand to gain by "lying" about this. How would they? They left the field.

Maybe they are leaving the field because they got huge salaries and payouts, a lot of them work with slimy people, and they are probably super overworked/burned out.

Like other Silicon Valley millionaires before them, maybe they feel the call to go build elementary schools in the Himalayas or buy that Hawaii oceanview dream home and stare at the sea until they feel whole again.

[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.

Have you used it? I’ve been using it lately at my work, and it’s doing 99% of my job completely correctly.

I absolutely do use it, which is why I am not worried about it replacing me.

I don’t know what kind of job you have that 99% of it can be done by an app that hallucinates 40% of the time. Yesterday I asked Claude to rewrite a paragraph for me in a memo and it produced convincing-sounding nonsense.

I had your view. Very senior attorney here. A colleague introduced me to 5.2 and 5.3, and I've gone from "AI is a mediocre legal assistant/flimsy associate," to "This can do in ten minutes what took all of us decades to develop." For the first time in all of this, I am concerned about massive and rapid job displacement. The short-term will tolerate human-AI integrated work. The long-term? I don't see how even the most senior among us will be able to monetize ourselves.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Vibe coding....it gets you 80% of the way there. Some folks think that's good enough/don't know to check, others see this as full employment to fix. And this is only going to keep getting better.

I do not think vibe coding gets you 80% of the way there. I do not think vibe coding even gets you 60% of the way there for something minor. And I say that as someone who has used AI to code little tools for myself at work a lot. You have to understand logic and troubleshooting to even use AI to code anything. Coding is really, really complex and there are lots of security requirements and client requirements. AI is good for structured language and giving you snippets that you can use.

A lot of the “news” we are reading about AI feels like a scam.

I can tell you didn't read the article.

No, I did, and I think he’s lying. I think most of the people trying to sell AI are lying. It is a transformative tool, but these people are scammers.

For example, this dude writes:

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect.

I'm not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

Very cool! What app is this? Where is it? Can we use it? Where are these apps written by AI?

I don't think you're seeing the forest for the trees.

Ok. Let me say this more plainly.

Can you name anything AI has done? Any jobs it has fully replaced? Any books written by AI? Any apps? Any notable content?

I use AI enterprise tools every day- they are great! But it is still a lot of work to verify, review, and rewrite what AI gives me. I can’t comment on these magical exclusive tools that will replace workers but I’m pretty sure they don’t exist.

This is one of the frustrating things that makes it impossible to either agree or argue with these articles. (I've had this discussion in real life too.) "So far, AI available at work doesn't seem to be able to solve the problems I'd actually like it to solve, it doesn't seem like a replacement for humans yet." "Well, you're only able to use the crappy AI. Trust me, the models you DON'T have access to are MUCH better and really can do everything."

It just boils down to "trust me" and it's usually coming from someone trying to sell it.

I'm thinking through this and my initial observation is that it is quite expensive to give AI access to information about the physical world, to get it to link with various computer systems that are non-standard, and to come up with ideas on what to do or make next.

If people don't adopt it, it doesn't matter how awesome the capabilities theoretically are.

Part of the marketing of AI is definitely to encourage trial.

I have been doing some tasks with it. So far, it frees up a little time. So I can do more meetings. TBD if that makes me more productive overall.

[Anonymous]

So what does AI tell us about what white-collar workers are supposed to do with their lives once their jobs are no longer needed?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Vibe coding....it gets you 80% of the way there. Some folks think that's good enough/don't know to check, others see this as full employment to fix. And this is only going to keep getting better.

I do not think vibe coding gets you 80% of the way there. I do not think vibe coding even gets you 60% of the way there for something minor. And I say that as someone who has used AI to code little tools for myself at work a lot. You have to understand logic and troubleshooting to even use AI to code anything. Coding is really, really complex and there are lots of security requirements and client requirements. AI is good for structured language and giving you snippets that you can use.

A lot of the “news” we are reading about AI feels like a scam.

I can tell you didn't read the article.

No, I did, and I think he’s lying. I think most of the people trying to sell AI are lying. It is a transformative tool, but these people are scammers.

For example, this dude writes:

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect.

I'm not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

Very cool! What app is this? Where is it? Can we use it? Where are these apps written by AI?

I don't think you're seeing the forest for the trees.

Ok. Let me say this more plainly.

Can you name anything AI has done? Any jobs it has fully replaced? Any books written by AI? Any apps? Any notable content?

I use AI enterprise tools every day- they are great! But it is still a lot of work to verify, review, and rewrite what AI gives me. I can’t comment on these magical exclusive tools that will replace workers but I’m pretty sure they don’t exist.

So, you use AI enterprise tools every day, but you don't know what AI has "done?" Make up your mind.

Again, it's clear you didn't read the article. Your whole position seems to be "he's lying, because it doesn't align with what I'm seeing." But what he's saying is he sees things at much more advanced stages than you. The entire POINT of the article is people will dispute what he's saying because they'll say. "I'm using AI now and it's all that." But they're not actually using the latest models.

You're making his point for him.

His other point is people are leaving the field because of concerns of what it's about to do. See, e.g. the departure of Zoë Hitzig or Mrinank Sharma. These are not people who stand to gain by "lying" about this. How would they? They left the field.

Maybe they are leaving the field because they got huge salaries and payouts, a lot of them work with slimy people, and they are probably super overworked/burned out.

Like other Silicon Valley millionaires before them, maybe they feel the call to go build elementary schools in the Himalayas or buy that Hawaii oceanview dream home and stare at the sea until they feel whole again.

Could you do the most basic of googling before inventing untrue scenarios?

Mrinank Sharma literally said he thinks “the world is in peril”.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/11/business/openai-anthropic-departures-nightcap

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Vibe coding....it gets you 80% of the way there. Some folks think that's good enough/don't know to check, others see this as full employment to fix. And this is only going to keep getting better.

I do not think vibe coding gets you 80% of the way there. I do not think vibe coding even gets you 60% of the way there for something minor. And I say that as someone who has used AI to code little tools for myself at work a lot. You have to understand logic and troubleshooting to even use AI to code anything. Coding is really, really complex and there are lots of security requirements and client requirements. AI is good for structured language and giving you snippets that you can use.

A lot of the “news” we are reading about AI feels like a scam.

I can tell you didn't read the article.

No, I did, and I think he’s lying. I think most of the people trying to sell AI are lying. It is a transformative tool, but these people are scammers.

For example, this dude writes:

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect.

I'm not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

Very cool! What app is this? Where is it? Can we use it? Where are these apps written by AI?

I don't think you're seeing the forest for the trees.

Ok. Let me say this more plainly.

Can you name anything AI has done? Any jobs it has fully replaced? Any books written by AI? Any apps? Any notable content?

I use AI enterprise tools every day- they are great! But it is still a lot of work to verify, review, and rewrite what AI gives me. I can’t comment on these magical exclusive tools that will replace workers but I’m pretty sure they don’t exist.

So, you use AI enterprise tools every day, but you don't know what AI has "done?" Make up your mind.

Again, it's clear you didn't read the article. Your whole position seems to be "he's lying, because it doesn't align with what I'm seeing." But what he's saying is he sees things at much more advanced stages than you. The entire POINT of the article is people will dispute what he's saying because they'll say. "I'm using AI now and it's all that." But they're not actually using the latest models.

You're making his point for him.

His other point is people are leaving the field because of concerns of what it's about to do. See, e.g. the departure of Zoë Hitzig or Mrinank Sharma. These are not people who stand to gain by "lying" about this. How would they? They left the field.

Maybe they are leaving the field because they got huge salaries and payouts, a lot of them work with slimy people, and they are probably super overworked/burned out.

Like other Silicon Valley millionaires before them, maybe they feel the call to go build elementary schools in the Himalayas or buy that Hawaii oceanview dream home and stare at the sea until they feel whole again.

Could you do the most basic of googling before inventing untrue scenarios?

Mrinank Sharma literally said he thinks “the world is in peril”.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/11/business/openai-anthropic-departures-nightcap

PP. I already read that CNN article before I responded above. Have you ever left a job because you were burned out and had sketchy coworkers? That's how I read this.

"Sharma’s letter made only vague references to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot. He didn’t say why he was leaving but noted it was “clear to me that the time to move on has come” and that “ throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions.”"

Our world has already somewhat been in peril thanks to tech bro creeps like Elon Musk (no AI necessary). Of course AI has potential to screw up. But this guy maybe doesn't want to end up with his name tied to suicides or a stock market crash or AI enhanced porn.

If one thought the world was in peril, there are better ways to try and fix it than leaving it.

You need to Google better. Read the actual letter. The guy says he's going to leave to get a poetry degree and contemplate the deep questions of interest to him. Also says the "peril" is not just AI but a whole bunch of stuff combining into a polycrisis/metacrisis according to "David J. Temple". Dude sounds like a burned out tech bro millionnaire to me.

https://archive.ph/hUAmz

P.S. Here's what AI says the metacrisis is.

"David J. Temple is a pseudonym for a collaborative authorship team at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion addressing the "metacrisis"—the core, systemic, and value-based collapse of modern civilization. Temple argues this existential risk is caused by a profound loss of shared meaning, proposing "CosmoErotic Humanism" as a new framework to restore value and guide humanity's evolution."

[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.

Index funds aside, no one is saying AI can’t do things… some of us are saying it can’t do things well.

Sure, AI can write a BS LinkedIn post, but can it write a BS LinkedIn post better than a #girlboss?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

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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.

Have you used it? I’ve been using it lately at my work, and it’s doing 99% of my job completely correctly.

I absolutely do use it, which is why I am not worried about it replacing me.

I don’t know what kind of job you have that 99% of it can be done by an app that hallucinates 40% of the time. Yesterday I asked Claude to rewrite a paragraph for me in a memo and it produced convincing-sounding nonsense.

I had your view. Very senior attorney here. A colleague introduced me to 5.2 and 5.3, and I've gone from "AI is a mediocre legal assistant/flimsy associate," to "This can do in ten minutes what took all of us decades to develop." For the first time in all of this, I am concerned about massive and rapid job displacement. The short-term will tolerate human-AI integrated work. The long-term? I don't see how even the most senior among us will be able to monetize ourselves.

I mean, most of us know lawyers are useless people who have made an entire career out of arguing over stupid paperwork with their fellow useless people.

It’s not shocking that you’re easily replaced by a poorly trained bot.

[Anonymous]

I am in journalism. We have an AI tool we are encouraged to use to write headlines and summaries.

I write the specs, than hit the suggestion button.

Haven't changed my originals yet.

There are interesting uses for AI, but it's not trustworthy and you can often spot it a mile away.

[Anonymous]

TL;DR (like I did). It’s marketing, and so are many of the creepy posts in this thread.

[Anonymous]

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.

Have you used it? I’ve been using it lately at my work, and it’s doing 99% of my job completely correctly.

I absolutely do use it, which is why I am not worried about it replacing me.

I don’t know what kind of job you have that 99% of it can be done by an app that hallucinates 40% of the time. Yesterday I asked Claude to rewrite a paragraph for me in a memo and it produced convincing-sounding nonsense.

I had your view. Very senior attorney here. A colleague introduced me to 5.2 and 5.3, and I've gone from "AI is a mediocre legal assistant/flimsy associate," to "This can do in ten minutes what took all of us decades to develop." For the first time in all of this, I am concerned about massive and rapid job displacement. The short-term will tolerate human-AI integrated work. The long-term? I don't see how even the most senior among us will be able to monetize ourselves.

Are you talking about Claude? What did it do for you that was so impressive? Claude is a decent writer but I have not seen it do advanced legal reasoning. It writes a lot of sensible sounding nonsense. I actually like Westlaw CoCounsel for legal research but you can draw a direct line from the casecite system to cocounsel. I'm not sure that there are real technical advancements being made in these apps.

[Anonymous]

Can anyone point me to an AI-written legal brief involving a somewhat complex issue that is considered a good example of how AI can replace lawyers?

[Anonymous]

Journalist Ed Zitron helpfully annotated the piece: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qw6k5c3m575cq21p7jjac/Something-Big-Is-Coming-Annotated.pdf?rlkey=qlr0mgnlpjifo5xkon2crhrhw&dl=0

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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

Thanks for posting this - it seems like an important counterpoint and I found it valuable.

[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?”

That is not the point of the article, at all.