There are so many things happening around us, and one of the biggest things that separates people is knowledge. A non-technical person who puts in the effort to learn technology becomes a technical person. The only way to become good at something is to actually do it and practice.
Someone who still doesn't know what AI is also doesn't know what is possible in the world today. My mom is a good example. She comes up with a lot of ideas and tells me about them on calls. Recently I told her, "Just tell ChatGPT. It can probably build a lot of what you need." But even that sentence isn't enough for her to understand what I mean, because she doesn't yet have a mental model of what AI can actually do. She simply isn't aware of its capabilities.
I'm going home in a few days and will be staying with her for a couple of weeks. I'm actually going to try an experiment: teach her some of these tools and see what happens. Can someone with essentially no technical background learn to use AI effectively and actually build something meaningful within a few weeks?
She already has a good job and doesn't really need to become technical, so there is no practical necessity for her to do this. But I think it would be a fascinating experiment.
That’s the gap between a skilled AI user and everyone else. Take a non-technical marketing person and someone fluent in agents and tool use. The agent-fluent person can watch the marketer work for an hour and immediately see a dozen things to automate, delegate, or reinvent, including things the marketer hasn’t even tried yet. But put the most intelligent tool in the world in front of the marketer, and they’re staring at a blank prompt, unsure what to type. All that intelligence, and no way to see it.
> Most of them hang out at r/BetterOffline.
Top submission right now: "Anthropic science lead: There's a >10% chance our product will kill all humans"
Is there any subreddit/forum/community that kind of sits in-between all these extremes? You either have LocalLlama which is astroturfed by all the AI labs and individuals singing the praise of Q2 quant of Qwen 3.8 27B, or places like BetterOffline which contains hyperbole the other way. Is there really no community that is at least pretending to be level-headed about all this stuff?
For example, in IntelliJ I can switch between maybe a dozen models with a drop-down but the only time I do it is when whatever model I'm currently using has an outage.
Another example, our product has some ai features (not coding related). I use spring-ai and so I can change models just in the config file. But I stick with deepseek because it's more than good enough and is super cheap.
The harness matters. None of my super-powered CLI + skills stuff worked like how it does in a more powerful harness like Codex or Claude Code.
Try telling someone to imagine it could do something amazing, if they switch to a completely different tool.
Then it turns out they were on the free logged-out version, writing the most obtuse, confusing and contradictory prompts, and they're trying to do "real work" like this.
We're all having very different experiences with AI right now, and when people talk to each other about it, we're not nearly specifying what environment, tools, weights, etc are used, for these discussions to actually be valuable, because people are comparing apples to oranges everywhere.
In most cases you don’t even need them. In some cases they give quite inaccurate answer with high confidence.
Correct. It's like believing in a particular religion, or having a certain fashion sense. When I was younger, I had a particularly handsome friend who spent as much time as possible half-naked, and he was happier than me and didn't have a religion, a fashion sense, and definitely not a need for AI. Had the world listened to my wishes, my friend would have stayed young and carefree forever. Instead, all I could do was to convince my friend to get into college so that he didn't have to sell his labor harvesting rice by hand, under the sun of Central America. Later in his career, he used AI to have to clock less time at work and have more leisure time; though I forever regret he didn't stay young and carefree.
> In some cases they give quite inaccurate answer with high confidence.
Meanwhile, I studied computer sciences, worked many technical jobs, and even got a PhD on the matter. Just yesterday, at my request, an AI re-created a piece of code that I have been able to create in the past. It took it 20 minutes; it took me much longer to exactly imagine what I wanted. It would have taken me a week had I implemented the thing by hand, if I had managed, because I still have to spend my days in this world working a senseless job so that I can pay for food and a roof. All the while I keep thinking that I would boil the oceans to keep my friend young and carefree forever. He died of cancer this year.
AI appears to be empowering non-technical users, but whether it's making them more productive or actually answering their questions is a completely different matter.
If I know how LLM work, and what it is trained on, I don't have to "explore" it to understand what it can do for me. The only variable is how deeply one knows how "LLMs" work, and that makes up all the on going arguments by lay people...