Of course it matters. If you used Claude just to accelerate production, let's say it makes you twice as productive. That means if you budget 30 minutes to do something, if Claude stops working, it means it'll take you 60. Or you just use the 30 and its half as good, not as polished, any number of things. Particularly if you know claude is really good at repetitive tasks, such as making sure all the font are the same size so you leave that until the end so you can focus on content.

The example are contrived, but still very real.

[delayed]

why stop there? i hear Boris Cherny has thousands of instances running in parallel, he can do it in milliseconds

People with more budget than me give the task of polishing up the powerpoint to an assistant. They don't hire 20 assistants to have the work done 20 times as fast, but that does not negate that having one assistant do it does free up some of their time

Responsible use of Claude behaves much the same, just within my budget

Huang needed to have a baby in 3 months, so,

Oh, please. All this snark but you’d lose your mind if someone took away syntax highlighting or your Aeron chair.

I don’t think that’s quite the same

Oh no, my syntax highlighter that charges me per token is offline! and my chair’s seat is missing because the cloud-based seating provider has an outage!

Asinine argument. Are you outsourcing your thinking to the compiler because it gives you warnings, instead of getting an error two hours into your punch card programs's runtime?

People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way? Please

My compiler does not require billions of dollars of opearational infrastructure to work, except for the electrical grid.

And even in the case of outage, I can keep my computer running on a battery or a backup generator.

One claude instance also doesn't need billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work.

Its great that you can keep your computer running, 1/3 of my information is ithe cloud (which is not a problem at all, even today) and 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud.

Its not a problem at all, that a service has an outage. My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke. Took 2 days to fix so what

> People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way?

Yes. Not completely unable all at once, but they certainly get worse at it fast.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1...

Losing skills die to over reliance on technology is not a new phenomenon and not exclusive to LLM use, but they of course exacerbate it by so pervasively touching so many areas.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m...

Yes it matters regardless of how much thinking you offloaded. Having the tools you’re using vanish would stop anyone. Imagine if your favorite editor or other tools vaporized and you had 30 minutes left.

If the OP had hours they’d probably be fine.

My different smug answer is: I bought a laptop with 64G of RAM before the RAM bubble and would try throwing qwen3 or gemma at it.

> Imagine if your favorite editor or other tools vaporized and you had 30 minutes left.

A bit off-topic, but "I" just created my own editor yesterday, maybe took 5 hours and it does everything I need, and I no longer need to swap between VS Code and Zed.

If my favorite editor disappeared I would literally be fine.

Why stop at Claude? Forget computers, bring the good ol' slider projection machine thingie and do super old school.

Even better, if cave painting was good enough thousands of years ago it is good enough today.

No need to be so dramatic. There are a lot of things you can do with just speaking supported by a whiteboard with markers.

When I was still teaching, I’d do this sometimes. Just do a lecture with a whiteboard and draw data structures and algorithms. It’s often much more engaging than prepared slides.

Yes, I know it doesn’t work for every possible presentation, but for many it does.

Totally. But today, the room will not be well set up for it, markers may be dry, whiteboard covered in old, settled in diagrams, etc. All solvsble, but not in 30 min.

And for larger work presentations the expectation even 30 years ago was not whiteboards; that is very inefficient. It was transparencies. But try printing those in a pinch. And finding a projector.

It's much easier to anticipate dry markers (keep a small stock) than outage of Claude or Microsoft.

(Yes, I know that the slippery slope is in jest.)

Or whiteboards and blackboards.

Are you people seriously so helpless they can't stand up and talk about what they've been getting paid to do anymore? If so y'all need ai detoxes, you arent even people anymore.

Only Claude understands their codebases... so they probably are not.

[delayed]

If you completely stop being able to work with without Claude, then I say a deep analysis of the root cause is needed and it may have some uncomfortable findings.

But for many, they use it as a productivity multiplier. They can still get the job done, just slower. The problem is that the rest of the supply chain likely doesn't care, management deadlines likely don't have 'do without AI' timelines any longer, so if we define the "job" as needing to meet the deadlines and not just complete the task eventually, people will find themselves unable to do their "job" without AI.

These both can be simplified as "not being able to do your job without AI", but I propose we have little to gain and a decent bit to lose by doing anything that treats these two situations as the same.