These kinds of updates always have this romantic scenario of someone having Claude develop a presentation or something on their way to work between multiple devices, which actually feels a little sad and does not align with what happens in my life at all.
I get to work, go straight to the meeting room, and pull up what it made to present.
It's barely coherent nonsense. Lots of irrelevant details, buzz words, wrong charts or confusing phrasing. Obviously LLM output.
I read it out.
When I'm done, I get a question about one of Claude's incorrectly inferred details.
The shame instantly kills me.
This is a scenario I've seen play out with coworkers. Except that last part, instead of dying or owning up to the mistake of trusting LLM output they waffle. Their shame circuit is broken.
Someone I know does this, and seems to think it's a flex, because he bragged about it being "the first time I've actually seen this presentation" a few times during the presentation.
At my previous company, a distinguished engineer did this. Used generated slides he hadn't looked at until presenting to the entire staff+ engineer group. The slides weren't good and he mostly ignored them.
A Canadian politician did this during a speech in front of the house/parliament or whatever. In the middle of the speech the LLM wrote "Here's a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech" and he read it verbatim and then continued on, not even realizing what he just read.
Previously having a deck was basically a signal that said “I took some time to prepare for this meeting and put together some coherent talking points” even if the deck itself was just a bunch of of text outlining what the speaker was saying.
Now that people are generating decks with AI, they’re basically worthless. I don’t need a bunch of bullet points you didn’t take anytime to think about on the screen while you talk about something you didn’t prepare for.
Why even have a meeting? That's just a waste of time when agents are much better at reviewing plans anyway. You don't even need presentations anymore. Executive officers can just create a review agent with a "special sauce" prompt (essential to justify their high salary) and auto sign off on a plan if it passes the crucial test: "is this plan good?" Finally we can have true business automation and people can go back to much more important things, like looking at KPI reports and being impressed or unimpressed.
That is incredibly frustrating for a coworker to do that. Even if you do use an LLM to generate all the slides it is your job as a presenter to go through and make edits and actually practice the presentation.
If you are just presenting it for the first time after seeing it you are going to just be reading off the slides, which is a waste of everyones time.
Defaults matter a lot. Before you had to intentionally be lazy to put together garbage and call it a day. Now your boss is telling you to use AI to "speed up." The tool you're pointed to presents like it can make the slide for you and claims to do so. Every signal is screaming that you're supposed to be a lazy fraud, and people will, on average, take the path of least resistance.
I'm attending a conference that I also attended last year, and it's night and day.
This year, a good 40% of workshop slides are fully LLM generated, incomprehensible, and almost not matching what the speaker is talking about at all. Last year, while there were some poor presentations, standards were much higher.
Because nobody actually knows what anybody else’s job consists of. But everyone is familiar with how jobs work in the ‘romcom job universe’ where workplace stakes are generally driven by ‘I have this really important make-or-break presentation due Friday!’
I suspect it’s because writers don’t normally have jobs and the only time they are ever in offices it’s to deliver a pitch for a project.
These are modern infomercials. Concrete pains ("planning a vacation is hard!"), shallow solutions that don't stand up to real-world use, and, in the end, a promise left unfilfilled. (And a thing in your drawer that takes up space.)
honestly, one day i will understand why these guys go so hard on planning vacations.
one of the best parts of vacations is actually planning it! trying to find restaurants, organizing your days, trying to fit activities -- that makes you look forward to your time off.
really, i want to automate the boring parts of my life (did i really pay rent this month?) not the things that make me happy.
Social media has fried some people’s brains so much that it is incredibly anxiety inducing to make many typically mundane or routine choices, for fear of missing / missing out on something.
I think they're grabbing at universally-understood frictions that people associate with pleasure or anxiety … or, most powerfully, identity.
We all know the feeling of wanting to be successful, or to go on a great vacation. Showing these scenarios creates strong emotional response in the audience - we're now the people winning at work, going on a great vacation. This is especially important when you're selling something dull. See: insurance.
"Find a primary care physician in my area who is taking new patients and accepts my insurance. Give me your top three candidates, and book an appointment within the next six weeks with your top choice."
idk I thought the same until I got personal amex support at work, now it’s my roofline on how useful/trusted an agent could be. Now I book all my travel through them, and it’s an absolute blessing
Exactly! Imagine if it booked like a 3000 dollar 1st class flight because it thought it was providing you with "the most comfortable and hospitable experience as possible."
I've found basically all of the release presentations are completely irrelevant and seem to target a very narrow subset of the population. They're always reserving something like a restaurant or a sports venue or generating a new slide deck for their business meeting. Perhaps these companies would do better if they could make a use case for regular people. You know, the 90% of the folks out there working normal jobs and not spending infinite money. I don't think I know a single person who has made a restaurant reservation more than once or twice (mostly never) in their entire life. Maybe I'm the weirdo here, but I can't relate to any of these demonstrations.
I regularly make restaurant reservations and create slide decks for my work, and both of those seem quite common among people I know. What would be a normal people use case for Cowork in your view?
I'm probably about 90%ile income for my household but live in a HCoL area and have two children in daycare. I rent, don't own, and I have enough that I can buy a coffee without thinking, but will be sending my kids to public school, can't just up and go on a vacation.
I make restaurant reservations 7-8 times a year? My wife and I go on dates and you simply aren't getting a table where I live if you don't. Fyi we typically spend $120 or so on those dinners.
Here in Bangalore, you can usually book directly from the Google Maps listing. Or sometimes click a link that will open in Swiggy/Zomato, and you just book from there.
At least in this city, reserving a table using the apps you already have on your phone is faster than using an LLM. Maybe these products are for people who know about the existence of Claude and ChatGPT but not Google Maps?
If I'm booking a restaurant I'll probably be discussing the date/time options with the people I'm going with, and I can't see how adding a chatbot to the mix is meant to help?
I'm retired and write code as a hobby, not presentations or docs, but it fits how I use exe.dev to make a code change. I will have a conversation with the AI, then say "Please go ahead" and close my laptop to do something else. Since I use web browsers exclusively for this, I can check on its progress from my phone, tablet, or laptop.
(They have iOS and Android apps too, but I've never bothered to install them.)
VPS is production. Linux dev box is my local big box. Macbook just lets me move about and do iOS development. Orca lets me run agents either on linux box or locally on the macbook depending on how I'm feeling, and Orca handles all the worktrees & sub-agents for me (via Opencode). Everything runs in a tailscale network, ssh connects all the things.
My github repos all have CONSTITUTION.md files that keep multi-agent dev grounded. Production runs trigger github actions that automatically check logs daily, file bug reports, etc. I launch Orca and literally just type "checking in" and the CONSTITUTION.md file governs the scanning of github issues and prioritization of which issues need to be addressed. Another process prioritizes and bundles them. When I type "checking in" the Orca worktree handles the launching of sub-agents that fix things. Occasionally I weigh in with an opinion or pick a recommendation. If I'm in the mood to pay attention I'll ask it to find another round of bugs and let's keep going. Often I just let it close after the first round. When I tell it "done?" it does a full regression and a production box review. Code auto-deploys to production twice/day. I don't regularly push to production manually.
On Fridays the CONSTITUTION.md kicks off a strategy and roadmap review when I type "checking in". As I have ideas I add them to the roadmap in one of the worktrees. Generally nothing happens until they're reviewed on Fridays together, unless I push one manually.. which happens.
Hermes runs on the production box. I have a few skills and quick commands that lets me check in on production runs and the status of things. It's read-only by design, basically my version of a dashboard. If I have a thought, idea, research link, or question it'll write to a github issue and we'll deal with it in the next check-in.
Orca lets me do all this remotely from an iPhone, and I talk to Hermes via Telegram. I generally don't INITIATE new work using either of these. I report issues/ideas and let the process do the things. But I can, and have.. I just tend not to. The whole thing churns, and so my inclination to "jump in and do a thing" is less than before. My inclination now is to toss things into the machine and let the machine work the schedule. I'm at a point where I could easily automate 80% of this and do my manual things 1x/2x week and I think progress would stay steady. I'll get there at some point, but I like the level of engagement I'm participating in now.
Occasionally I use Claude Code as a watchtower review of things, or do a wholesale code review, or do a review of logs. But deepseek is much better at building this machine -- I built something manually over time and through a ship of theseus process it got ugly. Deepseek reviewed the situation and wrote the CONSTITUTION.md and designed the processes independently. It favors deterministic scripts for process but launches them via LLM and monitors for exceptions; also, no memory system which also disqualifies Claude from being at the center of this. Memory plugins didn't work well because instructions start accumulating all through the chain of instruction files (AGENTS.md, memory, etc) and that gets very undeterministic very quickly. Instructions are written once, reviewed/audited intentionally.. it's best not to let LLMs learn and write their own dynamically (yet).
I've since used it as a template for other projects I've started -- they work the same. Currently building the GTM agent that will handle all SEO, marketing, keywording, etc for my projects -- it'll be a significantly autonomous Hermes agent. Don't really need Claude for any of this and my Deepseek bill is $50-100/mo.
A lot of dev tools now support remote execution, even those used in corporate environments. And for orgs that need locked down dev instances under regulatory control, these tools fit that bill too. I don't think I'm operating outside of norms that are used across all kinds of industries. It may not be the most common config yet, but these tools are building for customer bases that exist.
If you're re-writing emacs at all, it's because you believe that a Lisp interpreter is the best way to extend a text editor. Or, at the very least, you want to execute pre-existing elisp.
I can see moving some core functionality currently implemented in elisp into Rust (or whatever typed intermediate implementation language). But there is a cost to having stuff in the core - user can't step into C functions with the elisp debugger.
Given how fast computers are these days there is probably not much overhead in having emacs run as the interpreter for an incrementally compiled language with HM types
I mean emacs has way more bugs than modern editors. Types would help you fix that and let you optimize code more since they help with "proving" that your code is correct.
I feel like emacs could be way better if e-lisp was typed but I write Rust for a living and Haskell/Lean for fun so maybe I'm biased
I've been seeing lots of demos like this, especially with games. Yes, they are impressive, but I'm surprised nobody is talking about some of the things I've noticed with GPT-6: the code it writes, by default, is surprisingly messy and obviously unmaintainable. It's also very...not human. No human would write code like it does. I get the sense that the optimization of these models on benchmarks is causing their behavior to morph into a very brute-force type of approach. It makes you think: when code is suddenly very cheap, does good style and organization even matter as much? Or were those just important for humans? (I think they still do, for the record).
I haven't looked at the code honestly, but it's a interesting observation. My impression of the way OpenAI is going is instead of making a larger model smarter, they're going wide with just extremely high effort and a lot of parallel agents to get towards a goal.
For example, for design and architecture, I prefer fable, but for pull requests I like GPT because it's so pedantic about things.
I agree that this is an example of interesting and good AI usage. The person who made it obviously put thought into it. Unfortunately a lot of vibe coded sites do not have that same level of care
Without your typical tech/startup/vc/corporate bloat those sales will carry reasonable sized team very far. And it is really about what is reasonably sized team and what is not.
yes! I think it's yet another fad that is slowyly dying. I wish my company hadn't spent a whole team working for like 6 months creating an MCP server that no one will ever really use at scale
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