Chat, create a new landing page for the company!

"Sure! And since you were asking me about lobsters yesterday, I'll make it red and seafood themed!"

I like keeping their memory separate.

When casually a friend asks you to ask your Claude something about topic you chatted about earlier and then Claude brings back a secret you didn't want anyone to know yet.

Yes you can set up a project and then ask a question, but this is tedious.

I don't actually disagree, and advocate that for now the thing to do is use both.

You need to use frontier models to understand where the puck is going, but also to use local ones for anything remotely sensitive.

I turned off Anthropic properly and switched all of that over to OpenAI yesterday.

Same, just a while longer ago.

I much prefer how OpenAI models write to Anthropic's, will probably revisit Anthropic in a generation or two. Context size is more limited, but no critical forgetfulness due to compaction so far, though I also like having plan files around both for future reference and improving chances of success at long form work.

Also tried out Kimi K3, was nice but slow (and apparently routed some requests to Claude anyways), GLM 5.3 was faster and still pretty good but the token allowances were kinda limited.

Opencode Go.

codex (their app) is pretty good and lots of banked resets, luna is cost effective and Astra seems better than Fable for many tasks. Most important one is less refusals and I can use it the way I want without the fear of getting banned. I do like Claude Code a lot when it comes to pure coding use cases but the work often touches outside code and I don't want to keep switching

Do you think ChatGPT UX is better (after they merged everything recently)?

Genuinely curious.

A change for the better. The distinction made it unnecessarily complex for users. The ChatGPT desktop app inherited the same separation. Having to change between ChatGPT for day to day questions, to Codex for everything else always seemed too cumbersome.

Agree, and it allows ordinary users to have a taste of both worlds, instead of being like: "eww, what is this black box and why doesn't my mouse work"

Isn't that expected since LLMs are inherently non-deterministic?

Yes the point is that they wouldn't have to adjust unless they are merged into one. Precisely because one size can't fit all, yet they insit on one size now.

I hope not Chat is still all you can eat and Work uses Codex tokens. I can see why they would want people to think they wanted this without thinking about how it currently works. If Chat starts eating tokens then there is not much reason to use Chat other than most people don't live in the command line like developers. Claude Chat / Cowork already eats tokens either way so not much of a change really. I have never used Work since if I want access to local files the CLI is a much better interface combined with an IDE, but can see the appeal to non-developers.

weirdly enough, that aligns exactly with my life.

Two years ago, I had no commute, and presentations were tedious ( i was NOT a good google slides user ), I kinda prefer this world for now

Exactly! Imagine if it booked like a 3000 dollar 1st class flight because it thought it was providing you with "the most comfortable and hospitable experience as possible."

idk I thought the same until I got personal amex support at work, now it’s my roofline on how useful/trusted an agent could be. Now I book all my travel through them, and it’s an absolute blessing

It aligns with me pretty well. Not exactly presentations, but it’s great to be able to do stuff on the go when an idea or motivation strikes.

You are not the typical office worker.

I wish I knew, but I've definitely seen it happen.

"What does this bit mean?" "I dunno."

True but that’s not the same, think of it like a git but for AI related, I just open whatever harness, I authenticate to that centralized server, and it pulls everything and continue from where I was done last time, seamless and secure. Right now personally I have multiple machines, and I use key managers for the secret API, git for the skills, and sessions? Manually imported/exported. The alternative is using ssh (or herdr or others) and remotely accessing a specific machine where it has everything you need, but it’s not always reliable and better to avoid single point of failure too if anything goes wrong.

I haven't found this yet but want to.

There are several projects that injest coding sessions from lots of agents, but for the chat side I haven't found much, except replacements for Claude Desktop. Jan, for example.

The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick.

Honestly, that fills me with fear. LLMs exist to make money to their companies, and said companies are not gonna turn around and say, "you know what, go are going to make an android for each elderly person, that can not only help them with their medications, but that can actually make their medications, tailored to their biologies." Instead, they are going to go for the low-handing fruit of "you know Bob, the guy who makes jokes in meetings but who is grumpy about delivery timelines? Well, we are going to make an android to replace Bob. MetalBob will make even better jokes. The blue model will be able to explain in excruciating level of detail why timelines aren't reasonable. The red model will walk through the cubicles with a whip to ensure everybody keeps working all the time, and nobody goes to pee."

Perhaps we could see a Yahoo Pipes style interface and feature set, handled by LLM (when simple transforms aren't an option).

Doubling the tediousness does not solve the interface problem.

The great confusion for Anthropic and OAI is how to break out from pure chat without signalling you in fact intend to eat all of your customer's business too.

I solved this with task management and got work trees.

The downside of course is branching in got, but I usually don’t go of course more then a handful of tasks.

I had to engineer my own ticket management to keep opus on target. It’s been great for managing work, history, audit trails and commits are tagged with the task id.

I implemented subtasks to deal with the way Claude likes to stage its own objectives.

Then I made enforcement logic in the task manager so tasks can’t be closed out until reviewers have consensus on the same sha.

The adhd that is Anthropic demanded I build it and now I’m knocking out issues faster than Batman.

It's funny to me that instead of moving existing tech to a word in word out paradigm, people are dropping millions getting the chat to work with the existing paradigm.

Probably inevitable, but seems like a lot of disruption could happen there.

My personal hot take is that the product people (engineers too probably) at these companies are just straight up lazy. Yes, a new UI paradigm is hard, but it's been painfully obvious that chat just absolutely sucks. It's also obvious that some DSL-ish thing is possible, something that just does token juggling and the end-user sees some UI behavior.

I know this all sounds abstract. I've been mulling over it for the past year and it's very hard; and LLMs are super janky and inconsistent so it's 100% not trivial. So in some sense I understand why a lazy bottom-of-the-barrel "chat interface" has become the de facto standard.

Before OpenAI dropped ChatGPT, nobody knew chat would be such a hit. Several labs had versions of these things, Google engineers were getting finessed by a rudimentary model just like in the movie Ex Machina that came out 10 years prior which was satirizing Google

But I don't agree that they aren't product-ized. There are many applications doing calls to LLMs behind the scenes and are hits, leveraging structured data very heavily and not having conversations with users at all. I would say that there is a predictable scope creep from executives to surface a conversational aspect though. We need to bring representation to that so we can point to some other best practice to push back

IMO no one knows what LLMs are capable of yet and the goal post keeping moving every few months that building any specific UIs right now risks rendering them obsolete or too slow.

e.g. We went from somewhat smarter code autocomplete, to asking chatgpt copy paste, to cli agent running inside your project, managing session, to GUI to manage that, to projects where you talk to a "Chief of Staff" agent that manages other sessions, to who knows what's next.

I think the right interfaces for LLMs right now need to be very simple and easy to change/evolve. And chat still seems to be the best default solution.

It’s not surprising.

Technology folks don’t really understand people and what they need.

This always happens. This is why woz needed Steve.

Steve Jobs is sorely missed tbh. For all the shit he got - he was a true visionary. He lived at the intersection of technology and the humanities… he kept preaching this. And now we are seeing why.

One Claude one damn.

"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I love this

Claude's mobile app wouldn't show any Cowork initiated conversations, even if those conversations didn't leverage cowork specific features

Most normal users have no idea whether to choose chat or cowork. This makes sense for 95% of customers.

Really excited to try the gsuite replacements, which seems like the bigger announcement than the title suggest

It's funny how they keep trying to add more interfaces and everything keeps coming back to chat. And of course it would, natural language is the simplest interface there is. Anything they add beyond chat, that isn't placed within chat, that isn't some artifact of chat, is friction.

I really appreciated that the users that I administrate had an option where Claude was not going to get carried away and orchestrate workslop, I will have to completely re-write my usage guides after testing how prompts are routed now.

Feels like the same "let us do _all_ of the thinking for you" messaging that Microsoft has with Copilot.

Will there be a Claude Sheets too? I find myself using Claude to work with spreadsheets more than almost any other document type. It does okay now, but feel like it could be even better, especially with visualizations and formulas.

I liked the ability to explicitly only chat, without the possibility of Cowork activating since I have never wanted that. It's unclear how I can still guarantee that now.

They could have figured that out before launching Cowork to everyone.

Basically DOA in healthcare, even with a BAA I don't want Claude Cowork enabled in our workstations, ever.