I read the title, I read the article and there’s nothing in the article that supports the claim made in the title.
Also about a tool being overly conplex. Something like find, imagemagick, ffmpeg,… are not complex in themselves. They’re solving a domain that itself is complex. But the tools are quite good the evidence is their stability where they’ve barely changed across decades.
and yet the tools are still difficult to use. I could Read The Fine Manual, web search, stackoverflow, post a question on a Bulletin Board, or ask the Generative Artificial Inference robot. A lot of this seems like our user interface preferences. For example, my preference is that I just intuitively know that -i followed by a filepath is the input file but why can't I just drag the video icon onto ffmpeg? What might be obvious to me is not necessarily exposed functionality that someone else can see right away.
What you’re asking is the equivalent of “Why can’t I just press a button and have a plane takeoff, fly, and land by itself”. You can have a plane that does that, but only in a limited context. To program the whole decision tree for all cases is not economical (or feasible?).
ffmpeg does all things media conversion. If you don’t want to learn how to use it, you find someone that does (or do the LLM gamble) or try to find a wrapper that have a simpler interface and hope the limited feature set encompasses your use cases.
A cli tool can be extremely versatile. GUI is full of accidental complexities, so unless your selling point is intuitiveness, it’s just extra work.
What you’re solving with Claude Code. All I could gather was … something with your notes. Would you mind clearly stating 2-5 specific problems that
you use Claude Code to solve with your notes?
I love obsidian for the same basic reason you do: it’s just a bunch of text files, so I can use terminal tools and write programs to do stuff with them.
So far I mostly use LLMs to write the tools themselves, but not actually edit the notes. Maybe I can steal some of your ideas!
Tbf I haven't played much with it, but I have generally found that I don't like the permission model on Gemini CLI or Codex anywhere near as much as Claude Code.
That's fair. But it's what I believe. I spend a lot of time inside giant companies and there are too many people waiting for stone tablets to come down the mountain with their use cases instead of just playing with this stuff.
I think it's the pengiun approach to risk management -- they know they need to jump in the water to get where they need to go, but they don't know where the orcas are. So they jostle closer and closer to the edge, some fall in, and the rest see what happens.
BTW, I probably shouldn't have only commenting on the small part at the end that annoyed me. I'm fascinated by the idea that LLMs make highly custom software feasible, like your "claudsidian" system... that people will be able to get the software they want by describing it rather than being limited to finding something preexisting and having to adapting to it. As you point out, the unix philosophy is one way -- simple, unopinionated, building blocks an LLM can compose out of user-level prompts.
> I think it's the pengiun approach to risk management -- they know they need to jump in the water to get where they need to go, but they don't know where the orcas are. So they jostle closer and closer to the edge, some fall in, and the rest see what happens.
Great way to describe the culture of fear prevalent at large companies.
I've seen a bunch of big companies have edicts sent down from the top, "all employees should be using LLMs, if you're not then you're not doing your job". But many employees just don't have much that it applies to. Like, I spend a huge amount of time reviewing PRs. (Somebody, who actually knows stuff, has to do it.) Some of the more data-sci guys have added LLM review bots to some repos, but they're rather dumb and useless.
(And then the CISO sends some security tips email/slack announcement which is still dumb and useless even after an LLM added a bunch of emojis and fun language to it.)
I've always been an old-fashioned and slow developer. But it still seems to me, if most "regular" "average" developers churn out code that is more of a liability than an asset, if they can do that 10x faster, it doesn't really change the world. Most stuff still ends up waiting, in the end, for some slow work done right, or else gets thrown away soon enough.
I think that a lot of very basic LLM use cases come down to articulating your need. If you're not the sort of person who's highly articulate, this is likely to be difficult for you.
I'm personally in the habit of answering even slightly complex questions by first establishing shared context - that is, I very carefully ensure that my conversational partner has exactly the same understanding of the situation that I do. I do this because it's frequently the case that we don't have a lot of overlap in our understanding, or we have very specific gaps or contradictions in our understanding.
If you're like many in this industry, you're working in a language other than what you were raised in, making all of this more difficult.
No, that’s not what it means. You can read what I’ve written about this for the last three years and I’ve been very consistent. In the enterprise too many people are waiting to be told things and whether it’s good for my business or not I’d rather be honest about how I feel (you need to just use this stuff).
I'm trying to engage with you on this, but I'm really not sure what you're getting at. You originally stated "I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me."
I agree that's the job of marketing, but I'm not someone who markets AI, I'm someone who helps large marketing organizations use it effectively. I agree that if my goal was to market it that wouldn't be an effective message, but my goal is for folks who work in these companies to take some accountability for their own personal development, so that's my message. Again, all I can do is be honest about how I feel and to be consistent in my beliefs and experiences working with these kinds of organizations.
I agree, I was very skeptical until I started playing around with these tools and repeatedly got good results with almost no real effort.
Online discussion with randos about this topic is almost useless because everybody is quick to dismiss the other side as hopelessly brainwashed by hype, or burying their heads in the sand for fear of the future of their jobs. I've had much better luck talking about it with people I've known and had mutual respect with before all this stuff came out.
Exactly this. I actually think it’s exactly the opposite of assuming your audience is a stupid: it’s respecting them enough to do the work yourself instead of offloading to them. I’ll die on the hill that 19th century referring to the 1800s is fundamentally unintuitive.
