Fine article but a very important fact comes in at the end — the author has a human personal assistant. It doesn't fundamentally change anything they wrote, but it shows how far out of the ordinary this person is. They were a Thiel Fellow in 2020 and graduated from Phillips Exeter, roughly the most elite high school in the US.

The screenshots of price checks for a hotel charging $850 a night is what tipped me off. The reservations at expensive bay area restaurants, too.

I have a guess for why this guy is comfortable letting clawdbot go hog-wild on his bank account.

Kind of funny to say you helped make the Harvard CS curriculum and then dropped out. Your own curriculum was not good enough for you? Probably extenuating circumstances, but still seems funny.

When I saw them buying $80 Arc'teryx gloves that was enough for me.

Exeter had a hella good policy debate team back in the day. Probably still do; I've been out of the loop for a while.

Sure, but that also means they’re well-positioned to do a comparison.

Yeah, I've found AI 'miracle' use-cases like these are most obvious for wealthy people who stopped doing things for themselves at some point.

Typing 'Find me reservations at X restaurant' and getting unformatted text back is way worse than just going to OpenTable and seeing a UI that has been honed for decades.

If your old process was texting a human to do the same thing, I can see how Clawdbot seems like a revolution though.

Same goes for executives who vibecode in-house CRM/ERP/etc. tools.

We all learned the lesson that mass-market IT tools almost always outperform in-house, even with strong in-house development teams, but now that the executive is 'the creator,' there's significantly less scrutiny on things like compatibility and security.

There's plenty real about AI, particularly as it relates to coding and information retrieval, but I'm yet to see an agent actually do something that even remotely feels like the result of deep and savvy reasoning (the precursor to AGI) - including all the examples in this post.

You do understand that is who you’re competing with now right?

My daughter is a excellent student in high school

She and I spoke last night and she is increasingly pissed off that people who are in her classes, who don’t do the work, and don’t understand the material get all A’s because they’re using some form of GPT to do their assignments, and teachers cannot keep up

I do not see a world in the future where you can “come from behind” because all of the people with resources are increasingly not going to need experts who need money to survive to be able to do whatever they want to do

While that was technically true for the last few hundred years it was at least required to deal with other humans and you had to have some kind of at least veneer of communal engagement to do anything

That requirement is now gone and within the next decade I anticipate there will be a single person being able to build a extremely profitable software company with only two or three human employees