WSJ: “A small but growing number of executives have done just that, creating AI versions of themselves that offer a glimpse of future workplaces where one person’s output is no longer limited to one person. Here is how it works: An AI system analyzes how an executive writes, speaks and thinks, by studying everything from work emails the person has written to his or her speeches and interviews. Then, the AI double takes on various jobs for the executive—like answering questions from subordinates—that use the human’s knowledge and communication style. Sometimes, with a video-based version, these AI twins even speak at conferences or make presentations.”
Rebecca Winthrop: “Brainstorming is the work that’s fundamental to writing. As a researcher studying A.I.’s effects on education, I have concluded that these tools only superficially improve writing. The bigger and more alarming impact they have is to constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas — what we call creative thinking. This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories. The erosion of creative thinking means young people will struggle to navigate uncertainty. Workers will strain to adapt to a shifting labor market. And society will miss out on the new ideas that can solve complex problems and enhance lives.”
Fernando De Leon: “There are always little lies that are told by the incumbents in an industry. If I can create a better mousetrap, because I’m observing something that has just been accepted, and I can do it better, then I will go into that industry. We have done it, you know, 17 different times.”
Boris Cherny (Anthropic): “Claude Code has been 100% written by Claude Code for over six months. That’s true for Cowork and a lot of other products too, and we’re hearing it more from customers. I was doing a talk for the latest Y Combinator batch [recently] — a fireside. I used to start every talk by asking people to raise their hand if they used Claude Code. Now everyone does, so I stopped asking. Instead I ask people to raise their hand if 100% of their code is written by Claude Code. These are the most cutting-edge startups — usually a few people each — and half the hands went up. Then I asked people to raise their hand if none of their code is written by the model, and out of a couple hundred people, one hand went up. Everyone else was somewhere between 50% and 100%. So coding is getting solved for a bigger and bigger percentage of the code we write. Our team is an early indicator of what’s happening in engineering, and engineering is an early indicator of what happens everywhere else. The shift started six months ago, and it’s accelerating.” More on Claude Code from Wired.
