[gradus_ad]

Claude Code is extremely easy to set up and use. I suspect its saturation among software professionals is at the majority of the addressable market.

What if there are no other killer apps for Enterprise? Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.

The Enterprise market is not as substantial as the rapid success of CC makes seem.

[TheDong]

What about "cowork", aiming to be the claude code of excel files and pdfs and screenshotting your desktop to tell you what's wrong?

Like, that feels like it's also a huge amount of token churn ("sure, I can search every xls file on your machine to find the 2023 invoice from that company"), and very early in its adaption curve.

Most people are still using AI as a webpage chatbot to ask questions to and copy+paste between, but running an "openclaw" like assistant, which can access your files, email, and opens you up to wild security attacks, that seems like a really big killer app.

Cowork to me also seems like it'll take longer to reach the broader market since the models are less good at "use the mouse and keyboard to do this repetitive task" than "write code", but I see it as having killer-app potential with lots of token churn.

[dagamer34]

I think The Verge said it the best. Taking advantage of these tools to the maximum requires you to have "software brain" which the average person does not have. They struggle to set up a simple automation in their smart home platform of choice. There is little reason to believe they will take the leap to use such tools to simplify daily tasks because it requires people to think about which daily tasks can be simplified and automated.

[nopinsight]

I don't think 'software brain' is required for non-coding tasks. Rather, it requires 'manager brain', the ability to delegate, direct, and review the output. Manager brain is more prevalent than software brain and likely learnable by many knowledge workers who don't yet have it.

[hgoel]

I think you still need software brain, because ultimately, this stuff still has limitations driven by software constraints, and having the AI try to explain it to them doesn't necessarily help.

I think we all have had experiences with people treating their computers as magic boxes and not understanding why certain requests simply are not possible to satisfy.

[nopinsight]

A growing number of non-technical managers are now using Claude Code to build small custom software. A larger share will use Cowork to automate routine business tasks. Claude Cowork will become easier to use and more automated over time, as it learns the user's preferences, just like a good executive assistant does.

Granted, it's possible that a majority of people will not acquire proper 'manager brain' either and we'll see how that pans out. Evolutionarily, managerial skills are much more aligned with what many hunter-gatherers might learn as they mature and become more of an advisor than a doer.

Even if only 10-20% of people end up using multiple autonomous agents regularly for their work and business, that will change the economy. Contrast this with <1% of people who develop software professionally.

[SpicyLemonZest]

You have to recognize that it's a problem to delegate in the first place. One example I love to trot out is, do you have any toilet seats in your life that kinda slide around bit and don't seem securely attached? It's absolutely trivial to fix this, and it's really annoying when it happens, yet with shocking frequency I encounter people who've just been dealing with the annoyance because they didn't process it as something they could solve.

[hattmall]

It's not that easy to fix, and it can be kinda gross, and once it happens once, it tends to happen again in fairly short order. I'm someone that's fixed those loose seats countless times, and continues to do so, but the gap between me noticing it and fixing it is consistently growing.

[hattmall]

You also need the brain of not giving up after 2/3/10 tries. I don't know what the exact numbers are but if something doesn't work properly after the second or third try a huge percentage of people give up.

[bpt3]

How do you delegate, direct, and validate results if you have no idea what you're looking at?

This is the same issue many managers of people have for the same reason.

[digitaltrees]

You’ve never tried to train the average admin.

Basic forms can be a challenge. Even things like selecting a dropdown menu or pushing a button can be surprisingly hard.

[grtteee]

Most people here have no idea what works for the majority of people - who don’t want to spend time figuring stuff out.

I’m sure many here live in delulu land wondering why everyone doesn’t find the open claw stuff as fascinating as they do.

[digitaltrees]

Yes. And that’s not a criticism of average people. Tools should fit the user not the other way around. Designs systematically removed shadows and visual clues. Developers render buttons off the screen requiring a scroll to submit. Hard to criticize the user under those circumstances. But there are people with art brains, and math brains, and software brains. So it may be the case that AI adoption is limited by how it expects the user to relate to the tool

[grtteee]

The whole point of click and point (gui) was that one barely had to engage the brain vs using a terminal.

The ideal experience is where one’s resources are able to be allocated such that one can achieve some goal with minimal effort. We are very far away from this ideal with llm’s and absurd amounts of money has already been spent.

[sbierwagen]

The point of AI is that it's supposed to be intelligent. Why silo it in an app? Instead of telling it what to automate, shouldn't it sit at the OS level, watch everything you do, and figure out what to automate by itself?

[Gagarin1917]

Most people don’t have good enough hardware to run a decent model. I’m not even sure if any local models can handle image input (but I’m by no means an expert in local models).

So if you’re going to need the data center to process it, then you run into the same issue Microsoft did when they announced the OS feature where they took screenshots of your desktop all the time for advanced search or whatever. People consider it to be a privacy issue.

[altmanaltman]

> shouldn't it sit at the OS level, watch everything you do, and figure out what to automate by itself?

Read that again and really ask yourself if you want a private company to have access to all that and the ability to do whatever it wants with your system at the OS level.

[sbierwagen]

On a smartphone, you're trusting Apple or Google to make the OS. They already can do anything they want with your system. Do you read every line of code in every security update?

[tadfisher]

Humans do not want something sitting at the OS level, watching everything you do. Microsoft, famously, tried this and the backlash was immediate and intense.

If you believe you can do better, then build it! I don't think the tide has changed though.

[Spooky23]

Cowork is a dead end. Most people can’t operate onedrive.

Tools like Claude are best at answering things when the user understands the question.

[grtteee]

Why did they even bother putting resources into that project? Bizarre.

It’s telling how scarce vision is.

[Spooky23]

It’s an incredibly useful product for the people who can use it.

It just isn’t the next Microsoft Office. A market of 10M people vs 2B!

[majormajor]

"Push buttons for me" in the most common ways I see it used ("add this ticket to Jira so I don't have to") is a nice timesaver for being lazy but it's not a 10x multiplier to justify the subscribe-forever cost.

I think it's more likely that the companies that employ large numbers of people to perform manual push-the-button-then-the-other-button workflows will replace the tools that need button-pushing with other sorts of automation.

And outside of work I wouldn't spend any money on something to save myself the ten minutes of logging in to pay my credit cards or check my bank statements once a month or so. I have no real need for an always-running assistant and even the things that it seems most useful for today (beating unassisted humans to the punch for limited-quantity things) are only something it could help with as long as only a very few people have access.

[jasomill]

An AI that consumes every document on the system in response to a simple search request is going to be fired just as quickly as a human who does the same thing not long after replacements able to use conventional search tools to efficiently accomplish the same task are widely available.

Similarly, customers who rely on AI cowork tools will come to favor systems and applications that expose AI-friendly interfaces, which shouldn't be difficult to implement in most cases under the assumption that the models in question are already good at consuming API documentation and writing code (and, for that matter, writing API documentation, refactoring, and generating relatively straightforward wrapper code).

I have less faith in the market's ability to effectively respond to security threats in a timely fashion, alas.

[stingraycharles]

> What about "cowork", aiming to be the claude code of excel files and pdfs and screenshotting your desktop to tell you what's wrong?

I’ve been using these types of functions for a while for some specific use cases, and it’s super useful for this. Eg go into my budgeting app and explain to me why a certain discrepancy between forecast and actual occurred, which would otherwise cost me a huge amount of time.

I’ve also been using Cowriter AI, which actively learns from what you’re doing by taking screenshots of your screen every few seconds.

These types of utilities are just starting, they’re underexplored, and will definitely burn lots of tokens (while creating value).

[echelon]

Missing the Claude Code market was the biggest swing and miss ever.

Too busy trying to make TikTok for preteens with $4/generation videos that lost their novelty the minute IP was off the table. Didn't even identify the professional market in video was the correct place to invest, like Kling and ByteDance did.

Chasing consumer killed their ascendency.

Sam is a ruthless leader and knows how to build an empire, but he's also a distracted leader who chases too many flights of fancy. Without a golden goose like Zuckerberg, every mistake is a knife wound.

[vwvcxv]

They get exactly what they deserve imo.

Its pretty embarassing how they have blown the lead. Instead of finding a pathway toward selling tokens in volume (software production) they spread themselves thin and tried to hype up research, sora, web browser... blah blah.

Again - they get what they deserve.

[bickfordb]

What evidence is there that he knows how to build an empire outside of fundraising?

[hedmundson]

The 750+ million users of ChatGPT might count for something...

[tpm]

If they are able to monetise them.

[Leynos]

It amazed me that no one picked up on Codex last summer when it was effectively unlimited. I must have burnt through £10k worth of inference whilst still paying £20 a month

[distances]

Last summer it was good for certain tasks, but letting it run wild was a recipe for a huge mess where you'd spend more time unraveling it than writing the whole thing by hand. That was my experience, at least.

[dyauspitr]

It’s still great. I’ve pumped out 5 apps this month on the $200.

[timmmmmmay]

it's been pretty funny seeing people who did not predict Claude Code's success and previously said the whole sector was a nonsense dead end now saying, well okay there's one massively successful killer app, but what if that's the only one ever?

[Gagarin1917]

It’s the second killer app. The first was AI Chat. It was genuinely game changing and still is.

[majormajor]

The scrutiny is because the actions of the company suggest that the company itself has no idea what another killer app could be. Let alone enough to reach a 1T valuation.

[jcgrillo]

The whole sector is still quite likely a nonsense dead end.

[groceryheist]

Claude Code is rare product that is both beneficial and economically addictive, where its use increases demand for itself, at least in the supply / demand range for code we are accustomed to. It makes making software so much easier that Claude coding custom software becomes a solution to all sorts of past annoyances. Maintaining the software is easy enough thanks to Claude code.

[echelon]

> Claude Code is rare product that is both beneficial and economically addictive,

I'm in the film and engineering spaces, and I can honestly say the same about image and video models.

There is so much fun in all of these tools, and the productivity gains are insane.

I shoot film, but I never would have been able to do anything like this before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDdsKJl92H4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U

Today, I saw AI OR DIE with this banger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNbmoVdirxw

Gossip Goblin is doing incredible work as usual. Dude is a savant and would have killed it in Hollywood if he'd had a chance before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rzl7nUdEs4

Corridor Crew is leaning in and building new tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Dfw969itU

There's just so much incredible stuff being made by really brilliant people that never would have had the chance before. And these tools are literally brand spanking new. We're just getting started.

[bobajeff]

That's my view too. I love what people are doing with this stuff. I really want to get a decent rig to start doing this stuff locally someday.

[ericd]

Thanks, these are a real trip, especially loved Pi Hard.

[dyauspitr]

Uh, how is this possible? Is this all Veo 3? How are they getting such fantastic continuity across clips?

[echelon]

Veo 3 is one of the weaker video models, surprisingly!

Google and OpenAI are both really far behind the Chinese at this point. Perhaps Google will unveil something groundbreaking at Google I/O, but both companies have been trailing for well over a year at this point.

One of the reasons OpenAI gave up was not only were they losing money, but they were also ridiculously far behind (11th or below in the rankings).

The models most professionals use are Kling o3, Kling 3.0 and, more recently, Seedance 2.0. These are all Chinese models.

Seedance 2.0 stands out as an almost order of magnitude improvement over everything else in the industry. It's truly the SOTA model. It blows everything else out of the water, and it's truly remarkable to experience it in use.

On April 30th, Alibaba's new Happy Horse model rolls out. They poached folks from Kling to build it. It's supposedly 2-5x cheaper than Seedance 2.0, and its ELO scores rank it as the new highest performing model.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/video/leaderboard/text-to-vide...

https://artificialanalysis.ai/video/leaderboard/image-to-vid...

[margalabargala]

They aren't one shotting these.

[echelon]

You would be surprised.

Some shots are indeed impossible to one shot, but others can serendipitously turn out better than you wanted.

I'd say it averages 2.5 generations per shot. A lot of single one off one shots, and some (few) shots that just won't work no matter how hard you prompt.

That said, it's likely you'll find usable footage even in the losses. Videos are meant to be cut. A failed generation might still have salvageable contents you can cut to/from.

Editors are the super powered folks in AI video.

[bostik]

I have now witnessed first hand what the unexpected benefits might be. I expected CC to be a boon to overburdened teams, because it's now possible to spend $2 on compute and have it write a mostly-one-off tool that nobody would ever otherwise have the capacity or time for.

Sure, that's happening too, but to a lesser degree than I thought. CC with a number of "enterprise integrations" (really: corporate MCPs) is a pretty hefty force-multiplier for operations teams. "Go summarise and dissect this weird client request for me. Documentation is spread across at least $THESE_ENTERPRISE_DATA_SILOES." Saves a bunch of time pinging the different people across continents who happen to know intimate details. That was not entirely unexpected.

It's the technically minded but not necessarily otherwise technical people who keep surprising me in weird and wacky ways. People are building themselves and their immediate peers disposable dashboards. Who needs a service to pull data for a real-time display when CC can collect the necessary information and construct a local, static HTML file with all the info neatly in one place? I'm sure there will be a hangover because the compute cost for doing these in JIT fashion will surely feel like death by a thousand cuts at some point, but the ability to really quickly validate whether certain types of data aggregations are useful is proving to be ... a positive development.

I disagree about the ease of maintaining the software, though. You still need the skills to really understand what the code is doing, and with the original "why" possibly lost in the adrenaline haze, the maintenance effort floor has shifted.

[utopiah]

> Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.

Are they actually driving any profit? I mean actual profit, not "tokens" or users or profit but ignoring inference costs, same ignoring training, R&D, etc. I'm not arguing against how useful it is, nor how popular, just the basic total spent - total earned.

[operatingthetan]

Us devs have shiny object syndrome. We will use whatever we perceive to be be best at the moment and move on. People are already souring on Opus 4.6 due to what appears to be opaque changes to it by Anthropic. For any of these companies to be successful they need to get to a point where their models stop growing and compute gets multiples cheaper.

[torginus]

What is incredibly disgusting for me, is the idea that there can be only one winner in the stock market, which spits in he face of free market competition.

This is not an AI thing, this is a stocks thing, which Ive been complaining about incessantly.

If a given domain, like AI, has competition, that means you have to sell things at cost + margin, and rush ahead or be crushed by competitors. Will definitely make you good money, but wont make you a king.

This is not the kind of money people involved with these kinds of companies are looking for.

AI right now looks like a competiton, with many horses in the race, which are more or less building the same product.

It will hard to squeeze and enshittify this considering people can just jump to another vendor, thus if the current market structure were to prevail, investors would go.

Thus competition has to go.

Altman knows this, and tried to position OpenAI as the obvious winner in this competition, but I guess in the process he managed to alienate people, so now he's not doing so well.

But who knows what the future will bring?

[tim333]

I don't think it's true there can only be one winner. Lots of industries have multiple successful large companies.

[torginus]

Well, monopolies or cartels are better at extracting wealth from the market, while fierce competition destroys margins thus profits.

That means a monopolistic company is great investment vehicle, while one that sells goods at cost is a crappy one.

[teaearlgraycold]

HN is a bubble. I hear people from outside of Silicon Valley that only just started trying out Claude Code recently. There's still a ton of developers yet to jump on board.

[_3u10]

CC kinda sucks compared to opencode & kimi / minimax. It’s slow and annoying and the UI is subpar.