Jason Sich

This is one of the better litmus tests for whether you’re pushing your use of AI enough or not. Up until maybe six months ago probably the best you could do with AI was pull off something you already would produce, but just doing it a little faster. But now we’re entering a point where the output of working with AI can and should dramatically exceed what you would been able to do before, in a fraction of the time. The product prototype should not only be fully functional and interactive, but it should probably have meaningfully better features than it would have had before. The engineering architecture should be able to deliver performance gains that you wouldn’t have been able to go after otherwise. The research for a project should consume every single fact on the subject across every dimension of analysis possible. The business process you implement with AI should operate entirely differently and learn from all its past failures in a way no human could. We’re unquestionably entering a period where AI will be smarter than us on most axes. Perhaps not on every dimension that matters (intelligence is still very jagged), but at least on enough dimensions that when we combine it with what we’re good at, you get qualitatively different outcomes. So the simple test is: if you could have done what you’re doing before AI, you’re likely not pushing it enough.

It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now. The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way. But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now. I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either. With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.

I'm starting to sense a divide in the tech industry: - People thriving on autonomy who are reinventing how they work and what tools they use with AI: LOTS of work, but they're enjoying it and getting very efficient - People used to being mentored / trained / or simply told what to do and how. Frustrated with the lack of guidance from management on what to do with AI; also frustrated by seeing some of their peers thriving; increasingly bitter about AI and the state of the industry, as a whole Neither group seems to be aware that there's another group, or have empathy for the other group

Never let Claude run wild on the privacy policy or legal pages on your website. Opus 5.5, and other Claude models in general, are so knee deep into moral policing it can genuinely land you in hot water. > it will get way too specific about how your work happens internally > it will add promises and guarantees you didn’t want enforced > it went as far as adding my name in the policy page > it listed out all the third party tools that we have integrated too, basically showing our entire stack It is built to write from the customer side by default, it said so when I pressed it. Just be careful.

Don't forget: you're no longer working with humans