I'm a millennial. I refuse to use voice controls. Never used them in my life and hope I never have to. There's a block in my brain that just refuses to let me talk to a machine to give it orders.

Though I'll gladly call it various foul names when it's refusing to do what I expected it to do.

I'm another millennial that doesn't like them. I type pretty fast, around 100 WPM, so outside environments where I can't type (e.g. while driving), I just never saw the appeal. Typing has a way of helping me shape my thoughts precisely that I couldn't replicate with first thinking about what I want to say, and then saying it precisely.

But I can appreciate that sitting down in front of a keyboard and going at it with low typing speed seems unnatural and frustrating for probably the majority of people. To me, in front of a keyboard is a fairly natural state. Somebody growing up 15 years before (got by without PCs in their early years) or after me (got by with a smartphone) probably doesn't find it as natural.

The only AI feature I want added to WhatsApp is transcribing voice messages!

I’m the same. I love that writing allows you to think while typing so that you can review and revise your thoughts before letting them out in the world.

And don’t get me started on video vs text for learning purely non-physical stuff like programming…

I would agree but i use voice heavily with AI agents and here is why: no matter how fast i can type, i can speak much faster, and while i do other tasks.

It's practice... Consciously try using the voice input for a while and see how you feel after a few days. I ended up liking it for some things more than others. This is typed via voice with minor edits after. This relies on the new models though - the older systems just didn't work as well.

Voicemail universally sucks. However, when you're having a synchronous conversation with actual people, do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?

receiving audio = slow

sending audio = fast

I don't know. I'm 40 but I do like pair programming so…

One advantage is speaking is generally faster than typing. Imagine instead of talking to a bunch of AI you’re talking to a room full of coworkers about the architecture to develop.

Or a massive increase in the amount of software that gets written.

If the cost of writing software goes down, demand for it will presumably go up...

How hard do you really think the job of “technical product manager” is? I'm not asking in a childish "management doesn't do anything" sort of way, but want to frame the question "if software engineers needed to retrain to be technical product managers, how many would sink, and how many would swim?

> that means a massive reduction in software engineers

That's exactly what everyone is hoping for. Well, everyone except software engineers, of course

The valuable skills will be creativity, taste, curation, prioritisation etc.

All those skills can be applied to engineering as well. What makes Fabrice Bellard great? Its not just technical skill I think.

I think some of the most successful people will be a subset of engineers but also Steve Jobs types and artists

Yes.

All that’s really needed for this to work is a team of writers and plot conveniences.

Sure but the same thing would apply to the original comment, only that it's a locally hosted LLM that you're buying electricity for. That's different than paying rent for the privilege of using those commands and being at the mercy of the providers who choose to modify or EOL those commands as they see fit.

Claude Code is closed source and Anthropic does take downs of decompilations.

In the age of hallucinations and AI summaries, actually getting news from the source is a revolutionary concept.

I tried aider today with a Gemini API key and billing account. It’s not close to the experience I have with Claude Code on Saturday which was able to implement a full feature.

The main difference is I interact with Claude Code only through conversation. Aider felt much more like I was talking to two different tools, the model and Aider. For example, constantly having to add files and parse the less than ideal console output compared to how Claude code handles user feedback.

Surely at that point the CEO would be AI as well.

The owner (human) would say "build a company, make me a billion dollars" and that would be the only valuable input needed from him/her. Everything else would be derived & executed by the AI swarm, while owner plays video games (or generally enjoy the product of other people's AI-labor) 100% of the time.

I'd argue GPT4 (2022) was already AGI. It could output anything you (or Tim Cook, or any other smart guy) could possibly output given the relevant context. The reason it doesn't right now is we are not passing in all your life's context. If we achieve this, a human CEO has no edge over an AI CEO.

People are figuring this problem out very quickly, therefore the explosion of agentic capabilities happening right now even though the base model fundamentally does the same stuff as GPT4.

> A single CEO, (maybe) a lawyer...

Of all the professions that are at the risk of being downsized, I think lawyers are up there. We used to consult our lawyers so frequently about things big and small. We have now completely removed the small stuff from that equation. And most of our stuff is small. There is very little of the big stuff and I think LLMs aren't too far from taking care of that as well.

Keep going, the end end goal is that even the customers are AI. And the company doesn't sell anything or do anything, it just trades NFTs and stocks and digital goods. And the money isn't real, it's all crypto. This is the ideal, to create nothing, to sell nothing to no one, and for somehow that to mean you created "value" to society and therefore should be rewarded in material terms. And greatly at that, the people setting all this up expect to be at the tippy top of the social ladder for this "contribution".

This is I guess what happens when you follow capitalism to its logical conclusion. It's exactly what you expect from some reinforcement learning algorithm that only knows how to climb a gradient to maximize a singular reward. The concept of commerce has become the proverbial rat in the skinner box. It has figured out how to mainline the heroin drip if it just holds down the shock button and rewires its brain to get off on the pain. Sure it's an artificial high and hurts like hell to achieve it, but what else is there to live for? We made the line going up mean everything, so that's all that matters now. Doesn't matter if we don't want it, they want it. So that's what it's going to be.

Because of human factors, no complains, can do overtime as much as electricity is on, no unions, and everything else that a good CEO to the whims of exponential growth for their shareholder likes to do so much.

Including the management team?

That will be the next step.

Thing is, LLMs are already better than people at the "architecting a plan" and "figuring out what the product should be" in details that go beyond high-level vibes. They do that even better than raw coding.

In fact, that's the main reason I like developing quick prototypes and small projects with LLMs. I use them less to write code for me, and more to cut through the bullshit "research" phase of figuring out what code to write, which libraries to pick, what steps and auxiliary work I'm missing in my concept, etc.

Yeah, that’ll be the product-oriented engineers / engineer-oriented product folks.

We will drop the narrow-minded deadweight that can only collect naive requirements, and the coding side that can only implement unambiguous tickets.

In that timeline, it wouldn't matter anymore since the people complaining about the poor JIRA tickets would be gone.

Anyone working on offshoring projects already knows how fun this happens to be.

You can disable the automatic commits, but you cannot disable the automatic modification of files. One nice thing about Claude Code is that you can give it feedback on a patch before it is even applied.

they probably wouldnt share so i didnt ask

But that doesn't really explain things. You're making an active effort to reduce your costs. Anthropic engineers get unlimited API usage for free.

I was listening to this podcast yesterday and I also did a double take when I heard the $6 per day number.

Great advice, thanks.

Thanks, this is helpful. I tried Claude Code, and thought it had a lot of potential, but I was on track to spend at least $20/day.

For a tool that radically increases productivity (say 2x), I think it could still make sense for a VC funded startup or an established company (even $100/day or $36k/year is still a lot less than hiring another developer). But for a side project or bootstrap effort, $36k/year obviously significantly increases cash expenses. $100/month does not, however.

So, I'm going to go back and upgrade to Max and try it again. If that keeps my costs to $100/month, thats a really different value proposition.

Thanks, I was just commenting on "- anthropic employees, with unlimited claude, average to $6/day of usage".

Can you clarify what you mean here? Are you saying I can use Claude Code for a flat rate of $100/month? What are the limits? What if I use more than $100 worth of Code in a month? Their website doesn't seem to make it clear.

Edit:

Found the answer to my own questions

> Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours[1]

Damn. That's a really good deal

[1] https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-cla...

Windsurf is about to lose its ability to use other models since it got bought by OpenAI. Still very cool tool though!

OpenAI have had a bad one for a couple of years. It looks something like this:

  pip install openai
  export OPENAI_API_KEY="..."
  openai api completions.create \
  --model gpt-4.1-mini \
  --prompt "tell a joke about a fish"