One of the things about the AI hype train that really got me was how many of the stories of wonderment were about the things that have always been trivial on a computer if you actually use it for computing instead of just running somebody else's proprietary magical spell. Obviously it's capable of nontrivial things, but I heard so many stories of like "I would have had to manually rename 100 files to a different naming convention, but claude wrote a 20-line python script in 30 seconds that did it write away" and you hear what the renaming was and instantly know how to do it in one trivial line of bash. In other words, stories about it doing things that computers have always been good at, that have been taken away from you by the notion that computers are for begging the avatar of a corporation to work some magic.

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james_marks 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Which points to the UX barrier of the average user to write that line of bash.

That’s the magic; the barrier is down.

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topaz0 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The ux barrier is in your mind, man. This is what I'm saying.

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Fwirt 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Really, the ux barrier is how much "free" time you have to devote to training your mind to overcome the ux barrier. While many of us live and breathe this kind of abstraction, the "average" person does not want to learn a new kind of mental gymnastics to accomplish everyday tasks.

You can study for a lifetime to become Yen Sid and teach the broom to fetch water for you without lifting a finger, or you can just fetch the dang water yourself in 10 minutes.

	▲	james_marks 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		See also: Tourists, Bears, and Trashcans
	▲	topaz0 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Claude (or whatever bloated proprietary software you are using it to circumvent) is the magic broom, notwithstanding the fact that you weren't the one teaching it. bash is fetching the dang water yourself. We're not talking about inventing novel algorithms here, or writing some masterpiece of code that will always guess your intention correctly. Back before mass-marketed consumer software, plenty of regular people made it work without a computer science degree or a particular genius.