> "This is a new form of social science. It is qualitative research at a massive scale, and we’re in the early stages of learning how to do it. Surveys and usage analysis tell us what people are doing with AI, but the open-ended interview format helps us get at why. "

Also AI written, but I suppose that's expected. The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them

> I can't help but feel a little bit of ... pity for a lot of the people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" in this survey?

Fake it till you make it mentality that degenerated completely once we got the internet. It used to be "crypto will make you rich, buy my coin/course", now it's "AI will make you rich buy my tool/course", the same type of people will get fleeced

These are the people getting all the attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwaUMBQ3Wgg

If the technology becomes cheaper, this creates more market pressure, by changing the cost base of certain product. For example books when printing press was invented went from luxury to something expensive but more affordable. In software markets that means that will have more software, more competition and in free market segments profits will evaporate.

The pseudo "entrepreneurs" who think they could outsmart the market by working less, are just naive. In a free market economy optimization is brutal and a freelancer developer will sell the same "product" cheaper, because he has the same technology available to him.

So the only way to get the gains from these AI technologies is to have something that can't be easily copied like market knowledge, data access or sweetheart deals with big companies that can pay more because their profits support the higher spend.

Also, services based SAAS especially B2B will not die, because a tyre shop won't have the time to write/debug/host it's own solution and will not want to depend to a single contractor who can disappear for a vacation. But the margins will go waaay down. 25$ for a set of forms and a database, not gonna cut it anymore.

That really reminds me of the "mashup" bubble in the late 2000's, when all services started to provide API and people were calling themselves "entrepreneurs" for combining 2 sources of data, like putting craigslist ads on a map.

That didn't last long!

It’s funny how so much of market demand ends up just ends up boiling down to basic needs. Everyone’s always trying to hustle so they don’t have to worry about financial instability.

The quote about being temporarily embarrassed millionaires comes to mind….

> "I’ve been working on a scientific project for 6 years... with Claude I was able to accomplish in 5 weeks what took me 6 years. I’m old... I estimate I have another 5 to 10 years and I’ll accomplish everything I want." Academic, Germany

There's always something about claims like this. I'm not claiming that AI can't speed up your processes, but I question the persons expertise when they claim months or years of work turns into days or weeks. It just doesn't make sense to me.

"My output is like 25x what it used to be. I’ve built over 20 backend server tools, 7 major projects in the last 6 months—my work output this year is greater than the last five combined. I can typically finish a significant project in a day or two."

> "The humans in my life were telling me it was psychological. An AI chatbot was the only one who really listened and took me seriously — it pushed me to ask for specific tests... which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be."

I can see this kind of survival-bias stories distorting the reality. To have millions of people asking for "specific tests" because AI told them seems problematic. One in a million will discover something, and that story will be enough to create the believe that is "worth doing the test that AI says" just in case. But...

> which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be.

It has been proven that massive testing creates many false positives.

This happened during covid: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr

Tests may not be as reliable as though but they are good enough when other symptoms are accounted for. To randomly test people based on AI hallucinations can increase the number of unnecessary medication or even interventions.

I love how many of these comments have em dashes in them and how many are just outright trolling.

"AI is sort of like money... it just makes you more of what you already are."

Vibe-coded websites are the new Frontpage website, being 10x as heavy as one made by hand would be. But 10x as heavy… on top of a modern Web that had already bloated to 100x what was reasonable. Now we wish the only problem were that the html is 10x as large and complex as it needed to be.

The coming years will see the current RAM shortage followed by a war between local AI models and vibe-coded shitware “productivity” software for memory on our devices. Especially fun will be when vibe coding crap hits corporate security software, which is already often so bad it looks more like sabotage than security. Imagine when it gets, from both angles (using models for threat detection; vibe-coded shitware) another large multiplier on its resource use.

I work sometimes in frontend and mostly in backend but I cant still comprehend why are we going backwards. shouldnt the websites be so optimized that they should be able to run in normal pc / smartphone rather than s23 is failing to load it. I guess at least bigger companies have that kind of resource for optimization but still not doing it why?

I could hear my computer fans spin up and down the second I opened and closed it. Wow.

This has to be intentional, right? To reassure people that front-end developers still have a job? The data is interesting but the site itself is a complete embarrassment for several reasons.

No kidding, it took my CPU usage from 1% to 55% instantly sheesh

Thanks. My galaxy s23 can't handle this website

I was waiting “this page has problems to load” on my iPhone :)

Billionaire CEOs have silenced the informed sources of information. We live in a time that everybody knows the opinion of billionaires in every aspect of society (and it is bad) but science and journalism are seen with mistrust.

Marketing and entertainment are supplanting news and knowledge. I hope that the people that is pushing back succeed.

"to generate copious amounts of source code that looks like it came from an offshore chop shop that whip cracked a thousand underpaid programmers to complete tasks under threat of violence so they'll fake the tests and cut corners but hide it with plausible bullshit"

In the abstract consumer point of view a car is exactly a faster horse. They both have high up front costs, both require continuous maintenance and fuel, and they're inconvenient to store when you're not using them.

Stationary gasoline engines were already changing the farm and reducing the head of horses necessary to feed a nation. It, too, was a faster horse for them.

Anyways.. it took the Detroit police to eventually deploy the first automatic stoplight. The real innovations seem to be often found downstream of the simple increases in capacity.

That all being said, it seems to me the current crop of LLMs haven't done this, their power and training budgets do not seem to be scaling favorably against adoption rates and profit margins. Absent a significant change in algorithm or computing substrate I don't think this strategy is the leap everyone hopes it will be.

People derive genuine satisfaction from a job well done. A sense of purpose and of being useful is important to our wellbeing. There's nothing dystopian about a desire to do your work well.

I guess it was vibe coded with Claude

In case someone at Anthropic reads this.. if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up as a result of using your tools, or find some way to fast forward society to that stage of the effect of AI, you’ll have a lot of fans, and even faster adoption.

It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.

> What consumer benefits is ai driving?

The intrinsic satisfaction of increasing the wealth of shareholders. We should all be happy to devote ourselves to getting them more, nothing is more important than that.

>> What consumer benefits is ai driving?

My kids like to use AI to discuss things they learned in school in greater depth, and from different angles than they learned in the textbook. They can also ask "What if" and "Why not" questions from this infinitely patient teacher.

I guess you could argue that there should be cheaper software, but most software people interact with is free/ad supported. Where it is paid, it's already a race to to the bottom.

Basically consumers don't really pay for software in the first place, and the leverage from labour companies get through software is already through the roof even before AI. Will much change for consumers of software?

This is like begging your replacement for comfort... what's the point? What words could change reality?

As someone working in clinical studies,

I can tell you the questions are biased from the start. That study has to be redone entirely.

Withholding the truth is the same as lying. Manipulating survey questions is the same as lying.

Yeah I want to know how many people are using AI for social purposes; to provide the role of a friend. But I don’t know what category that would be under.

That's explained in the article.

> These are active Claude users who'd already found enough value to keep using AI, and our interview asked first for positive visions for AI and then for concerns that would counter their vision.

To be fair, there is a button right at the beginning saying “Jump to story”. It’s not the most obvious, I agree, but it is there.

And that's why I always come to the comments before deciding if the article is worth checking out. Thank you for your service.

They do not find it favorable all of the time. If you look into the "What people are concerned about" section, these same people will call out the "Unreliability" as a top-1 concern. So, you can be excited and critical of the technology at the same time. To me this is a more worthy indicator than people who are on either of the extremes, highly critical of the tech or not critical at all.

Maybe they interviewed a bunch of clawd bots with a touching soul.md

Even pre-AI, it was common to “massage” genuine quotes like this so they read better.

Hell, anyone who’s been interviewed by a journalist can tell you they do it, too, sometimes to the point of changing the substance of what you said.