Leverage

Quote reply to the previous tweet that captures most of my thoughts well with lots of examples.

Excerpts:

(On design): When designing productivity software, conceptualize it as a medium first and foremost, and a tool secondarily.

(On chatbots as UI): Its browsing, code interpreter, and Dall-E tools are testament to this upside-down design philosophy: the tools go to work first, only thereafter you see some output.

With the exception of code interpreter, interactions with ChatGPT are largely stateless and transactional. Manipulations are indirect.

hate to admit it, but this tracks. ui design starts becoming more important the moment you have a sufficiently capable data structure/model in place

users will ask for features when what they actually want is a specific view

this probably explains notion » coda

• notion has very good views and is adding automations after the fact

• coda has very good automations and is adding views after the fact

my hunch is most people are visual learners. they prefer to have information laid out the right way and only then can they reason about it.

automations are reasoning before seeing

this is also why cli tools, chatbots, and other text based ui paradigms are niche or quickly fall out of favor. too much reasoning without the requisite framing.

There is beauty to naturally occurring material… and thought

llms are trained on internet-scale datasets, but their effects are not like the internet.

calculators — or tables that can be calculated on (llm + rag) — are better analogs.

the rise of spreadsheet applications allowed professionals to migrate their tables to spreadsheets. eventually, they put even fancier wrappers around their spreadsheets in vertical applications.

This talks about value capture by focusing on the most critical point of leverage

And the uncredited bioweapon

AI adoption and capabilities are distributed bimodally across industries.

Writing-heavy professions like writing, law, software are feeling it first. It doesn't feel that way because other industries are still untouched. That may continue for long or it might not.

It's always calmest before the storm

Convenience can indeed become a burden