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Workaccount2yesterday at 9:14 PM2 repliesview on HN

Frequency vs. convenience will determine how big of a deal this is in practice.

Cars have plenty of horror stories associated with them, but convenience keeps most people happily driving everyday without a second thought.

Google can quarantine your life with an account ban, but plenty of people still use gmail for everything despite the stories.

So even if Claude cowork can go off the rails and turn your digital life upside down, as long as the stories are just online or "friend of a friend of a friend", people won't care much.


Replies

soiltypeyesterday at 11:00 PM

Considering the ubiquity and necessity of driving cars is overwhelmingly a result of intentional policy choices irrespective of what people wanted or was good for the public interest... actually that's quite a decent analogy for integrated LLM assistants.

People will use AI because other options keep getting worse and because it keeps getting harder to avoid using it. I don't think it's fair to characterize that as convenience though, personally. Like with cars, many people will be well aware of the negative externalities, the risk of harm to themselves, and the lack of personal agency caused by this tool and still use it because avoiding it will become costly to their everyday life.

I think of convenience as something that is a "bonus" on top of normal life typically. Something that becomes mandatory to avoid being left out of society no longer counts.

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yencabulatoryesterday at 10:26 PM

I mean, we were there before this Cowork feature started exposing more users to the slot machine:

"Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268222

"Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database, faked data, told fibs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632575

"Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103532

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