i think a lot of us are kind of sitting back and seeing what dark horse rises up. it's such a non-deterministic outputting technology that's still in discovery mode and the resources expenses/constraints are outta control, the companies leading the charge are eating themselves and can't guarantee jack squat. down in the trenches people have built these things up to be critical dependencies in either their day to day life or their work, my eyes are mostly glazing over hearing about how people are using claude to do whatever grand array of things with no oversight. the way we benchmark this shit is all over the map, the goalposts are just teleporting randomly at this point.

my claude usage has drastically dried up as i've personally realized the real bottom of this stuff is always gonna be genuinely learning and becoming excellent at a thing. i think claudes not bad for helping me get through early stages of that process, and for actual work i think claudes great for just ripping out something im too lazy to do, but something i know so well that i can catch him slippin. absolute coinflip on if it's worth the pain, many times now ive said "i shouldve just done this myself".

i've got my fingers crossed for like llm's to reach some sort of proverbial opus 4,5 territory here. even if thats gonna cost me a bit in hardware, that's kind of my personal bench mark for "good enough, i'm unplugging from all this craziness".

one thing is for sure, anthropic needs to stop adding _features_. claude code or vscode extension was their bread and butter reliability that garnered them a lot of goodwill from people who were willing to pay good money for a good service. seeing them launch their design thing just has me rolling my eyes. they're kind of microsoft'ing themselves here by trying to do too much, and they'll end up delivering a lot of subpar services that aren't best-in-class at any one thing. we're already seeing that i think.