alt Hacker News100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefiting from the productive gains of these systems.
Replies
I think anthropic will succeed immensely here because when integrated with Microsoft365 and especially Excel it basically does what co-pilot said it would do.
The moment of realisation happen for a lot of normoid business people when they see claude make a DCF spreadsheet or search emails
claude is also smart because it visually shows the user as it resizes the columns, changes colours, etc. Seeing the computer do things makes the normoid SEE the AI despite it being much slower
IMO Copilot was "we need to give these people rope, but not enough for them to hang themselves". A non technical person with no patience and access to a real AI agent inside a business is a bull in a china shop. Copilot Cowork is the closest thing we have to what Copilot should have been and is only possible now because models finally got good enough to be less supervised.
FWIW Gemini inside Google apps is just as bad.
This isn't my experience. I see many non-software people using AI regularly. What you may be seeing is more: organizations with no incentive to do things better never did anything to do things better. AI is no different. They were never doing things better with pencil and paper.
I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical.
For my team at least, the productivity boost is difficult to quantify objectively. Our products and services have still tons of issues that AI isn't going to solve magically.
It's pretty clear that AI is allowing to move faster for some tasks, but it's also detrimental for other things. We're going to learn how to use these tools more efficiently, but right now, I'm not convinced about the productivity gain.