[jmull]

> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough

That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company.

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.

[skydhash]

I read the whole thing and could still not figure out what they’re trying to solve. Which I’m pretty sure goes against the Unix philosophy. The one thing should be clearly defined to be able to declare that you solve it well.

[noahbrier]

What the company is trying to solve or what I'm solving with Claude Code?

[skydhash]

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.

[noahbrier]

This is my point. Those tools are great specifically because of the simplicity of how they expose their functionality.

[mmphosis]

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.

[skydhash]

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.

[articulatepang]

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?

[noahbrier]

I was on a podcast last week where I went into a ton of detail: https://every.to/podcast/how-to-use-claude-code-as-a-thinkin...

Basically I have it sitting over the top of my notes and assisting with writing, editing, researching, etc.

[articulatepang]

Thanks, I’ll take a look.

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!

[noahbrier]

I started a repo if you want to play: https://github.com/heyitsnoah/claudesidian

[noahbrier]

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.

[jmull]

I do understand about enterprise decision-making.

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.

[eikenberry]

> 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.

[ploxiln]

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.

[zhengyi13]

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.

[Gerardo1]

> That's fair. But it's what I believe.

That response suggests you aren't interested in discussion or conversation at all.

It suggests that your purpose here is to advertise.

[noahbrier]

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).

[Gerardo1]

>No, that’s not what it means.

That's fair but it's what I believe.

...see?

Being consistent with stating your beliefs isn't the same as engaging with and about those beliefs.

Advertising isn't conversation. Evangelism isn't discussion.

[noahbrier]

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.

[tom_]

That was somebody else that said that.

[lupusreal]

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.

[ryandrake]

It's a totally backwards way to build a product.

You're supposed to start with a use case that is unmet, and research/build technology to enable and solve the use case.

AI companies are instead starting with a specific technology, and then desperately searching for use cases that might somehow motivate people to use that technology. Now these guys are further arguing that it should be the user's problem to find use cases for the technology they seem utterly convinced needs to be developed.

[clickety_clack]

I disagree actually. Saying things like “everyone else managed to figure it out” is a way of creating FOMO. It might not be the way you want to do it, marketing doesn’t have to be nice (or even right) to work.

[dsr_]

I don't want to work with people who think that's good marketing, or people who are convinced by it.

FOMO is for fashions and fads, not getting things done.

[clickety_clack]

I’m responding to a comment that talks about whether that quote is good marketing so I’m just talking specifically about whether it might work from a marketing point of view.

I probably wouldn’t do it myself either, but that’s not really relevant to whether it works or not.

[mrguyorama]

"Good marketing" doesn't have to mean "Marketing that is maximally effective"

Filling food with opioids would be great for business, but hopefully you understand how that is not "good business"

[clickety_clack]

True, but you are arguing about the merit of the actual product, which neither I nor the comment I responded to were talking about at all. Marketing tactics can be applied to good and bad products, and FOMO is a pretty common one everywhere, from "limited remaining" to "early adopters lock in at $10/mo for life" to "everyone else is doing it".

[mrguyorama]

No, I am not arguing about the merits of the product, I am explicitly saying that using FOMO as a marketing tactic is shitty and bad and should make a person who does that feel bad.

I do not care that it is common. I want it to be not common.

I do not care that bad marketing tactics like this can be used to sell "good" products, whatever that means.

[Frenchgeek]

Is "finding a way to remove them, with prejudice, from my phone" a valid use case for them? I'm tired of Gemini randomly starting up.

(Well, I recently found there is a reason for it: I'm left handed and unlocking my phone with my left hand sometimes touch the icon stupidly put by default on the lock screen. Not that it would work: My phone is usually running with data disabled.)