There are several different types of work they can do, each one of which has a different hourly rate. The time of day affects the rate as well, and so can things like overtime.
It's definitely a bit of an unusual situation. It's not extremely complicated, but it was enough to be annoying.
Jesus, are you ok? Can’t you just, like, give em a 20 when you get home?
I find it quite funny you’ve invented this overly complex payment structure for your babysitter and then find it annoying. Now you’ve got a CLI tool for it.
GP has provided an anecdote with no supporting evidence, nor any code examples. So it is as fair to assume the story is a fabrication as much as it is to assume it has any truth to it
I am really shocked at the response this trivial anecdote has gotten.
I could state it much more generically: we had an annoying Excel sheet that took ~10 minutes a week, I vibe coded a command line tool that brought it down to ~1 minute a week. I don't think this is unusual or hard to believe in any way.
I didn't choose the payment structure, and the point is that a CLI is not a high bar. Something that we used to spend ~10 minutes a week on with spreadsheets is now ~1 minute/week.
Why didn’t you work out a more manageable billing structure with them?! Or to put it another way: if it took you 10 minutes a week with spreadsheets to even figure out what their bill is, how on earth did they verify your invoices were even correct? And if they couldn’t—or if it took more than 10 minutes each week—why wouldn’t they prefer a billing system they could verify they were being paid correctly?
I’m not trying to give advice, I’m just curious about their arrangement. When I did consulting, I hated billing, and would have wanted a system that was as easy as possible.
All the programmers getting paid vast sums of money out there are providing no value? I get what you are trying to say, but it is a misguided notion. As a basic example, if I go and fix the code on someones WordPress site and they pay me for it, that's because I provided a valuable service for them.
And that service is the working product, not any extract of code from it. Thus humans will always be valuable and needed in the loop. We have nothing to fear from sharing our code and everything to gain as AI agents get better at that grunt work.
It's not any practical problem if it's not used for training and product improvement. It's also not a legal problem if contracts have such provisions and are compatible with laws in relevant jurisdictions.
For me, I recently wanted to assemble a “supercut” of my videos of attempts at learning to bunny-hop a bike. The tool was able to craft a python script that used ffmpeg to edit out the no-motion portions of the videos and stitch them together.
This would have taken ages to do by hand in iMovie, and probably just as long to look up the needed parameters in ffmpeg, but Claude code got it right in the first try, and worked with me to fine-tune the motion detection threshold.
From the release page, this seems like a pretty big deal in terms of office jobs at some point in the future:
"Spreadsheets with formulas: Generate Excel files with working VLOOKUP, conditional formatting, and multiple tabs"
There are so many office workers who just shuffle data between systems. Not sure about the error rate though but it is not like the error rate is going to be worse a decade from now.
I don't use a Mac so can't run Cowork, but the normal Claude CLI is pretty good at general automation tasks (as is Codex-CLI and Gemini CLI.)
Most recent example: I wanted to try out GLM-image when it dropped the other day, but didn't feel like spending an hour dealing with multifile, multidirectory HuggingFace downloads and all the usual Python dependency headaches. So I made an empty directory, ran Claude Code, and told it "Please download all files from https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-Image/tree/main into this directory and test the model." An hour later, I tabbed back to the console window and there was the sample image file.
Looking at the transcript, sure enough, it ran into all the usual headaches and hassles... but the difference is I didn't have to deal with them.
Note that I didn't tell it "Use uv to test the model" -- I just YOLOed it with my system Python installation. If I later find that it broke something else, oh, well... that sounds like a job for Claude, too.
Another thing that's nice about these CLI tools is that they hide the differences between terminals pretty effectively. I ran this particular task in a Windows DOS box, but could just as easily have used PowerShell, a Mac, or a Linux terminal. The idea of not having to care what OS I'm running is an alluring one, given the steady enshittification of Windows.
Personally, I feel like tech companies have already taken over so much of our lives and culture that I don't want them to take more. Corporations have weaseled their way into almost every facet of our lives at this point. Letting them take over human expression and become a substitute for human creativity just feels beyond the pale. When do people say enough is enough?
These comments are a bit scary. It feels like LLMs managed to exploit some fault in the human psyche. I think the biggest danger of this technology is that people are not mentally equipped to handle it.
The fault is well known: chatbots are bootlickers. They always praise users and never criticize them, so chatbots are quickly promoted to the personal advisor position. The AI of Sauron of technological age.
This is a very real worry for the AI rollout for the general population. But are folks here using AI to blow smoke up their asses as a sibling comment stated? I'd like to believe we're using it to ask questions, prototype, and then measure... not just blow smoke up there...
What I don't understand is, will every company really want to be beholden to some AI provider? If they get rid of the workers, all of a sudden they are on the losing end of the bargaining table. They have incredible leverage as things stand.
I tried Siri once when it first came out to play a song while I was driving and instead it started calling my ex-girlfriend. After that I swore it off for good.
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