Since LLMs were introduced, I've been of the belief that this technology actually makes writing a *more* important skill to develop than less. So far that belief has held. No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

There may be a future AI-based system that can retain so much context it can kind of just "get what you mean" when you say off-the-cuff things, but I believe that a user that can think, speak, and write clearly will still have a skill advantage over one that does not.

It takes a certain amount of expertise to use LLMs effectively. And I know that some people claim otherwise but they simply aren't worth listening to.

Just because Claude Cowork is for "other" kinds of work, not just software engineering, doesn't in any way change that. It's not like other kinds of knowledge work aren't being done by intelligent professionals who invest time into learning how to use complicated software and systems

That is to say, I don't know who the "target user" of this is, but it is a $100/month subscription, so it's presumably someone who is a pretty serious AI user.

But that's how literally all software adoption curves work...

The 1980's version of simonw was explaining to people how to use Excel, too.

(though 40 years later, things are still pretty bad on the Excel front, hah)

One part I like about LLMs is that they can smooth over the rough edges in programming. Lots of people can build pretty complicated spreadsheets, can break down a problem into clear discrete tasks, or can at least look at a set of steps and validate that solves the issue they have & more easily updated it. Those people don’t necessarily know json isn’t a person, how to install python or how to iterate over these things. I cant give directions in Spanish but its not because I don’t know how to get to the library its just I can’t translate precisely.

Also you may only need someone to write the meta prompt that then spits out this kind of thing given some problem “I want to find the easiest blog posts to finish in my drafts but some are already published” then a more detailed prompt out of it, read it and set things going.

Select star from blog posts where... :)

This predates Cowork, but I have started to see "non-technical" journalists start taking Claude Code seriously recently. For instance, Joe Weisenthal has been writing about this, eg.: https://nitter.net/thestalwart/status/2010512842705735948.

>Someone who works a basic desk job that requires basic competency of microsoft word.

I dont actually think there many of those people out there. And those that are, are on their way out. There are basically none of those people entering the work force. There are tons of people with that sort of computer literacy but they aren't working on computers.

The latest models work just as good with PowerShell as they do with bash, well at least that’s true for codex.

This hit the front page yesterday so you may have seen it, but figured I'd post for posterity sake

> Claude Cowork exfiltrates files https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46622328

I think you're right, but the issue goes deeper. If the productivity gains are real, the incentive to bypass security becomes overwhelming. We are going to see a massive conflict where compliance tries to clamp down, but eventually loses to 'getting work done.'

Even if critics are right that these models are inherently insecure, the market will likely settle for 'optically patched.' If the efficiency gains are there, companies will just accept the residual risk.

This is good work. When a task is of critical importance, I give two different LLMs the same task. And then ask them to review each other's output and validate all claims. I do this with Codex and Claude Code. It is very rare for them to find some valid fault in the other LLM's solution. And they are generally good about admitting mistakes and then creating a single unified solution that addresses identified issues. This result is better and ready for human review.

Given the data exfil vulnerability a few stories down HN's front page I would be extremely hesitant to ask Claude to process a document someone else produced and sent to me

> My wife double checked because she still "doesn't trust AI", but all her verification almost 100% matched Claude's conclusions

She's right not to trust it for something like this. The "almost 100%" is the problem (also consider that you're sending personal data to anthropic without permission) especially for something like this where it might mean discarding someone's resume, which is something that could have a significant impact on a person's life.

Was the double-checking done in that 30 minutes? The fact that it wasn't 100% right means that the human in the loop was still important, so I'm just trying to understand the actual time saved.

Doesn’t submitting the resumes to Anthropic violate India’s data protection laws?

> And all I did was type into a terminal for 20 minutes

Well, and learning how to do that in 20 minutes

For me, I recently wanted to assemble a “supercut” of my videos of attempts at learning to bunny-hop a bike. The tool was able to craft a python script that used ffmpeg to edit out the no-motion portions of the videos and stitch them together.

This would have taken ages to do by hand in iMovie, and probably just as long to look up the needed parameters in ffmpeg, but Claude code got it right in the first try, and worked with me to fine-tune the motion detection threshold.

I've been using Google's Antigravity (which has a similar UI) to do data analysis and making reports. Skills are really useful for that.

I don't use a Mac so can't run Cowork, but the normal Claude CLI is pretty good at general automation tasks (as is Codex-CLI and Gemini CLI.)

Most recent example: I wanted to try out GLM-image when it dropped the other day, but didn't feel like spending an hour dealing with multifile, multidirectory HuggingFace downloads and all the usual Python dependency headaches. So I made an empty directory, ran Claude Code, and told it "Please download all files from https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-Image/tree/main into this directory and test the model." An hour later, I tabbed back to the console window and there was the sample image file.

Looking at the transcript, sure enough, it ran into all the usual headaches and hassles... but the difference is I didn't have to deal with them.

Note that I didn't tell it "Use uv to test the model" -- I just YOLOed it with my system Python installation. If I later find that it broke something else, oh, well... that sounds like a job for Claude, too.

Another thing that's nice about these CLI tools is that they hide the differences between terminals pretty effectively. I ran this particular task in a Windows DOS box, but could just as easily have used PowerShell, a Mac, or a Linux terminal. The idea of not having to care what OS I'm running is an alluring one, given the steady enshittification of Windows.

He's a proponent, but that doesn't mean his analysis isn't useful. It's clear and mostly accurate and when he gets something wrong he makes it right. Does he do all that with rose tinted glasses, probably, but my experience reading him is that he's sharp, thoughtful, and entirely reasonable.

Dismissing the opportunity to learn because the person offering you knowledge is enthusiastic about his area of expertise is probably shortsighted.

id imagine someone like Simon to pick his AI products carefully enough that he doesn't waste his time on duds.