N=1, but Claude etc. have made a huge difference to my life personally.

Built a bunch of software tools to streamline my small ecommerce business - while also running it - and things have turned around from "losing money and ready to pull the plug" to "looking at our best financial year on record" in the span of about 8 months.

I could imagine it wouldn't make a huge difference to the life of someone deeply entrenched in a traditional tech role, trying to get an extra 9 of reliability in a service or roll out a new carefully planned and QA'd feature.

But for tech-adjacent people, it gives us something "good enough", instantly, and basically for free.

That doesn't include the other things I've got it to do (gave Claude SSH access and got it to successfully debug a hang on my Ubuntu server, chucked Codex in a folder full of financial data and got it to find every piece of misclassified payroll transaction data)

Genuinely the biggest breakthrough for "casual" tech users since Excel.

The joke used to be “be nice or I’ll replace you with a small shell script” - Claude lets you actually get those scripts written which often aren’t replacing anyone but are automating away part of the daily hassles.