Monday AI Brief #8
People continue to lose their minds about Claude Code. We’ll begin this week’s newsletter with a look at what people are using it for and where they think it’s headed. Here’s my short take: Claude Code’s present usefulness is 30% overhyped. A lot of the amazing things people are reporting are genuinely amazing, but they’re quick working prototypes of fairly simple tools. But…
Sometime in the past couple of months, AI crossed a really important capability threshold. By the end of 2025, it was clear to any programmer who was paying attention that our profession has completely changed. By the end of 2026, I think that same thing will be true for many professions. Most people won’t realize it right away, and it may (or may not) take a few years for the changes to really take hold, but the writing is now very clearly on the wall.
As always, you can get this by email or in a longer and more technical version.
Shakeel Hashim: Claude Code is about so much more than coding
I have absolutely zero coding experience. But in the past two weeks, I’ve had Claude Code go through my bank statements and invoices to prepare a first draft of my tax filing. (It got everything right.) I asked it to book me theater tickets: it reviewed my calendar, browsed the theater’s website for ticket availability, and picked a date that had good availability and suited my schedule. It built me a series of automation tools that will collectively save the Transformer team about half a day of work each week. It planned a detailed itinerary for a forthcoming vacation, including extracting hundreds of restaurant recommendations from my favorite influencer’s Instagram highlights.
How AI Is learning to think in secret
Nicholas Andresen’s piece on how AI Is learning to think in secret is long, but it’s really good. It does a great job of explaining multiple important AI safety concepts in detail but without excessive technical jargon.
Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning is the reason AI became so much more capable in late 2024, and through an incredibly lucky happenstance it also provides us with one of our best tools for monitoring AI for misbehavior. Andresen explains how CoT works, how it’s used for monitoring, and why we’re in danger of losing that capability.
Raising the floor
GenAI will not replace human ingenuity. It will simply raise the floor for mediocrity so high that being "pretty good" becomes economically worthless.
The second sentence nails it: the floor is going to rise, and there will be a moment when human ingenuity is worth more than ever, but being pretty good is economically worthless. The first sentence is pure cope: obviously the floor will keep rising, until even the most capable and ingenious humans are economically worthless.
Advancements In Self-Driving Cars
If you haven't been paying close attention, you may not realize just how good self-driving cars have gotten. Zvi’s roundup is great: 10/10, no notes. The same is not true, unfortunately, for much of the discourse in the mainstream press.
(Semi) autonomous combat drones
From the New York Times, a look at partial autonomy in combat drones in Ukraine.
What sort of post-superintelligence society should we aim for?
Will MacAskill makes the case for “viatopia”:
Viatopia is a waystation rather than a final destination; […]
Similarly, we can identify what puts humanity in a good position to navigate towards excellent futures, even if we don’t yet know exactly what those futures look like.
Yes.