I don't think "attempting to communicate" - or especially not "attempting to LISTEN" as in the title here - would be the stated reason for many meetings. "Pitching people on your shit" or "making sure shit gets done the way management wants it to" is much more accurate for most corporate dev and B2B/B2C sales/product meetings.

For the typical "agile" process for software:

- standup: this fits, attempting to communicate status and request help with blockers

- backlog grooming: attempting to figure out what to do with artifacts of generally-async communication (tickets from a backlog, either created by you in the past or by others). attempting to fit them into the process best. Communication is often seen as a necessary evil, and this process often goes faster with fewer people. if people bring up questions, there may be some attempts to communicate in explanations.

- sprint planning: work assignment and time management/estimations. similar to above, questions could spark attempts to communicate, but it's not the primary purpose.

- sprint retro: improve the team dynamics and the flow of the process. communication is usually assumed here, but in practice it's "people saying things, they get written down, then the next sprint happens same as the last." there often isn't effective communication to the people who could change things

I think if the goal of meetings was more specifically "we are going to communicate until our mental pictures are exactly the same" you'd end up with faster/better actual work from everyone on the team.

But in big orgs that's usually not even what's wanted. If the plan sucks, but it's a VP's pet project, it's not good for various whole teams in that org to all effectively communicate with each other to realize it sucks but not have the political skills or pull to change the VP's mind...

I wonder if they're optimizing for metrics that look superficially-worse if the system asks questions about ambiguity early. I've had times where those questions tell me "ah, shit, this isn't the right path at all" and that abandoned session probably shows up in their usage stats. What would be much harder to get from the usage stats are "would I have been happier if I had to review a much bigger blob of output to realize it was underspecified in a breaking way?" But the answer has been uniformly "no." This, in fact, is one of the biggest things that has made it easier to use the tools in "lazy" ways compared to a year ago: they can help you with your up-front homework. But the dialogue is key.

Or they're optimizing for increased revenue? If Claude goes down a completely wrong path because it just assumes it knows what you want rather than asking you, and you have to undo everything and start again, that obviously uses much more tokens than if you would have been able to clarify the misunderstanding early on.

I get this feeling sometimes, like it is so unreliable at referring to context and getting details right it feels like deliberate random rewards to create the equivalent to a gambling addiction. About half my tokens feel wasted on trivial errors that i gave it the context for, on average. And any meta discussions / clarifications result in Claude telling me I did all the right things and there is nothing more I can do and it should have gotten it right from the provided input - which is disempowering but to be fair is at least better than chatGPT gaslighting users about improving prompts over and over to get no better result in the end.

IME "don't ask questions and just do a bunch of crap based on your first guess that we then have to correct later after you wasted a week" is one of the most common junior-engineer failure modes and a great way for someone to dead-end their progression.

Eh, Lightroom didn't exist when Apple released Aperture. OS X had been well supported for a couple years at that point, and Apple never went for Photoshop directly.

Yeah. It has literally never been easier to find good niche music, and that's been true for over a decade.

Don't confuse the people playing the marketing game to try to win big with the whole world out there.

It has also never been easier to find bad niche music. The problem is the work required to separate the two.

That's the core of the issue, isn't it? If you're not willing to do the filtering and judging, you depend on somebody else to do it, and those somebodies probably don't have your best interests at heart, nor would they share your specific tastes.

(On a totally unrelated note, calling your potentially-shady marketing firm "Chaotic Good" is genius and pretty funny.)

> I don't think Cursor was _that bad_ in it's time. But the 'psyop' here is that anyone is using an AI-IDE going forward at all. I see people who say they are still using them and are so excited, but then I talk to engineers I actually know and it's all CLI tools.

This is just the old "surely nobody actually likes Lady Gaga, all the people I actually know think her stuff sucks, it's just all bought and paid for" reasoning trap all over again...

You couldn't even keep your analogy straight. I didn't say the people I know said anything at all about Cursor.

If someone is clear about offering an anecdote, it's dishonest to pretend as if they were making a real and reasoned argument.

Quibi doesn't seem like a good example. It wasn't marketed as the next big thing. It was a trial balloon that popped.

The scrutiny is because the actions of the company suggest that the company itself has no idea what another killer app could be. Let alone enough to reach a 1T valuation.

"Push buttons for me" in the most common ways I see it used ("add this ticket to Jira so I don't have to") is a nice timesaver for being lazy but it's not a 10x multiplier to justify the subscribe-forever cost.

I think it's more likely that the companies that employ large numbers of people to perform manual push-the-button-then-the-other-button workflows will replace the tools that need button-pushing with other sorts of automation.

And outside of work I wouldn't spend any money on something to save myself the ten minutes of logging in to pay my credit cards or check my bank statements once a month or so. I have no real need for an always-running assistant and even the things that it seems most useful for today (beating unassisted humans to the punch for limited-quantity things) are only something it could help with as long as only a very few people have access.