Anthropic released 1,250 interviews about AI at work. Their headline: "predominantly positive sentiments." We ran the same interviews through structured LLM analysis, and the true story is a bit different.
Key findings:
• 85.7% have unresolved tensions (efficiency vs quality, convenience vs skill)
• Creatives struggle MOST yet adopt FASTEST
• Scientists have lowest anxiety despite lowest trust (see ai as a tool, plain and simple)
• 52% of creatives frame AI through "authenticity" (using it makes them feel like a fraud)
The story that’s solidifying is the tech is cool, it’s useful for certain things (eg, meeting note taking), but business have run a ton of “innovation lab” pilots that have returned little to no measurable value with leaders getting frustrated at the invested red ink. In short the substance isn't living up to the hype.
Everywhere I look the adoption metrics and impact metrics are a tiny fraction of what was projected/expected. Yes tech keynotes have their shiny examples of “success” but the data at scale tells a very different story and that’s increasingly hard to brush under the carpet.
Given the amount of financial engineering shenanigans and circular financing it’s unclear how much longer the present bonanza can continue before the financial and business reality playing out slams on the brakes.
I actually think things improved substantially when compared to last year. The latest batch of sota models is incredible (just ask any software engineer about what’s happening to their profession).
It’s only a matter of time until other knowledge workers start getting the asphyxiating “vibe” coding treatment and that drama is what really fascinates me.
People are absolutely torn. It seems that ai usage starts as a clutch, then it becomes an essential tool and finally it takes over the essence of the profession itself.
Not using it feels like a waste of time. There’s a sense of dread that comes from realizing that it’s not useful to “do work” anymore. That in order to thrive now, we need to outsource as much of your thinking to GPT as possible. If your sense of identity comes from “pure” intellectual pursuits, you are gonna have a bad time. The optimists will say “you will be able to do 10x the amount of work”. That might be true, but the nature of the work will be completely different.
Managing a farm is not the same as planting a seed.
There’s a sense of dread that comes from realizing that it’s not useful to “do work” anymore. That in order to thrive now, we need to outsource as much of your thinking to GPT as possible. If your sense of identity comes from “pure” intellectual pursuits, you are gonna have a bad time.
This is 180 degrees from how to think about it.
The more thinking you do as ratio to less toil, the better. The more time to apply your intellect with the better machine execution to back that up, the more profit.
The Renaissance grand masters used ateliers of apprentices and journeymen while the grand masters conceived, directed, critiqued, and integrated their work into commissioned art; at the end signing their name: https://smarthistory.org/workshop-italian-renaissance-art/
This is how to leverage the machine. It's your own atelier in a box. Go be Leonardo.
The catch is that many professional environments have evolved values that above a certain quality floor reward quantity over quality. Even more so in the US where pointless torment is "work ethic" and pausing to think something through is "lazy" (see Bill Gate's famous quote about hiring lazy people, or "work smarter, not harder" almost being a rebel motto).
Granted, that's not everywhere. There are absolutely places where you will be recognized for doing amazing work. But I think many feel pressured to use AI to produce high volumes of sub-par work instead of small volumes of great work
I definitely understand that this is the rational way of viewing it. Leveraging these tools is an incredible feeling, but the sense of dread is always there in the corner.
You can just feel a deep sense of angst in a lot of these interviews.
In any case, I would rather have them and use them to their full extent than to become obsolete.
Becoming Leonardo it is.
> just ask any software engineer about what’s happening to their profession
I'm a professional developer, and nothing interesting is happening to the field. The people doing AI coding were already the weakest participants, and have not gained anything from it, except maybe optics.
The thing that's suffocating is the economics. The entire economy has turned its back on actual value in pursuit of silicon valley smoke.
Nothing interesting happening in the field? If you've been paying attention the trend over the last two years has been that the problem space that requires humans to solve has been shrinking. It's continuing to shrink. That's interesting. Significantly interesting.
As an engineer that's lead multiple teams including one at a world leading SaaS company, I don't consider myself one of the weakest participants in the field and neither do my peers generally. I'm long on agents for coding, and have started investing heavily in making our working environment productive not only for humans, but now for agents too.
I would love to be able to say the same but I’m literally the only last person in the company still not using AI to code (if anything for ethics reasons, but I also truly do not need it at all), and I am obviously not the only good dev in the company. The gain is highly debatable (especially in delivery, I do not trust self-reports), however there have been recent reports of morale improvement since using AI, so at least there’s that.
That’s fascinating. If you don’t mind me asking, what type of software development do you do? Have you tried any of the latest coding tools? Or even used LLMs as a replacement for stack overflow?
That's not what the data shows. Read the posting, and read Anthropic's original report. I found it a very sober, grounded report on the reality of using today's tools.
If anything, the AI bubble is reinforcing to me (and hopefully many more people) that the "markets" are anything but rational. None of the investments going on have followed any semblance of fundamentals - it's all pure instinct and chasing hype. I just hope it doesn't tear down the world for the 99% of us unable to actually reap any benefits from it.
AI is basically a toy for 99% of us. It's a long long ways away from the productivity boost people love to claim to justify the sky high valuations. It will fade to being a background tech employed strategically I suspect - similar to other machine learning applications and this is exactly where it belongs.
I'm forced to use it (literally, AI usage is now used as a talent review metric...) and frankly, it's maybe helped speed me up... 5-10%? I spend more time trying to get the tools to be useful than I would just doing the task myself. The only true benefit I've gotten has been unit test generation. Ask it to do any meaningful work on a mature code base and you're in for a wild ride. So there's my anecdotal "sentiment".
I multi task much more now that i can farm off small coding assignments to agents. i pay hndreds per month in tokens. for my role personally its been a massive paradigm shift.
Might work for you, but if I multi task too much, the quality of my output drops significantly. Where I work, that does not fly. I cannot trust any agent to handle anything without babysitting them to avoid going off the rails - but perhaps the tools I have access to just aren't good (underlying model is claude 4.5, so it the model isn't the cause).
I've said this in the past and I'll continue to say it - until the tools get far better at managing context, they will be hard locked for value in most use cases. The moment I see "summarizing conversation" I know I'm about to waste 20 minutes fixing code.
If you can predict that hitting “summarize conversation” equals rework, what can you change upstream so you avoid triggering it? Are you relying on the agent to carry state instead of dumping it into .MD files? What happens if your computer crashes?
> so it the model isn't the cause
Thing is, the prompts, those stupid little bits of English that can't possiu matter all that much? It turns out they affect the models performance a ton.
There are absolutely folks like you out there and I don’t doubt the productivity increase. The challenge is you are not the norm and the hundreds per month from you and others like you are a drop in the bucket of what’s needed to pay for all this.
To each his own, but multi-tasking feels bad to me. I want to spend my life pursuing mastery of a craft, not lazily delegating. Not that everyone should have the same goals, but the mastery route feels like it's dying off. It makes me sad.
I get it that some people just want to see the thing on the screen. Or your priority is to be a high status person with a loving family etc.. etc... All noble goals. I just don't feel a sense of fulfillment from a life not in pursuit of something deeper. The AI can do it better than me, but I don't really care at the end of the day. Maybe super-corp wants the AI to do it then, but it's a shame.
The other surprising skill from this whole AI craze is, it turns out that being able to social engineer an LLM is a transferable skill to getting humans to do what you want.
I have wondered about that actually. Thanks, I'll read that, looks interesting.
Surely Donald Knuth and John Carmack are genuine masters though? There's the Elon Musk theory of mastery where everyone says you're great, but you hire a guy to do it, and there's the <nobody knows this guy but he's having a blast and is really good> theory where you make average income but live a life fulfilled. On my deathbed I want to be the second. (Sorry this is getting off topic.)
Steve Jobs wrote code early on, but he was never a great programmer. That didn’t diminish his impact at all. Same with plenty of people we label as "masters" in hindsight. The mastery isn’t always in the craft itself.
What actually seems risky is anchoring your identity to being the best at a specific thing in a specific era. If you're the town’s horse whisperer, life is great right up until cars show up. Then what? If your value is "I'm the horse guy," you're toast. If your value is taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people, you adapt.
So I’m not convinced mastery is about skill depth alone. It's about what survives the tool shift.
I won't insult the man, but I never liked Steve Jobs. I'd rather be Wozniak in that story.
"taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people"
Taste is susceptible to turning into a vibes / popularity thing. I think success is mostly about (firstly just doing the basics like going to work on time and not being a dick), then ego, personality, presentation, etc... These things seem like unfulfilling preoccupations, not that I'm not susceptible to them like anyone else, so in my best life I wouldn't be so concerned about "success". I just want to master a craft and be satisfied in that pursuit.
I'd love to build good things with other people, but for whatever reason I've never found other people to build things with. So maybe I suck, that's a possibility. I think all I can do is settle on being the horse guy.
(I'm also not incurious about AI. I use AI to learn things. I just don't want to give everything away and become only a delegator.)
Edit: I'm genuinely terrified that AI is going to do ALL of the things, so there's not going to be a "survives the shift" except for having a likable / respectable / fearsome personality
No, they are rational. At least those with a lot of money.
> None of the investments going on have followed any semblance of fundamentals - it's all pure instinct and chasing hype
That's not what investments are about. Their fundamentals are if they can get a good return on their money. As long as the odds of the next sucker to buy them up exists it is a good investment.
> AI is basically a toy for 99% of us.
You do pay for toys right? Toy shops aren't irrational?
I use AI coding almost daily. I’m able to move my repositories into context easily through the multitude of AI coding tools and I see a massive boost in productivity. I say this as a junior dev. Often the outputs are “almost” and I make the necessary fixes to get it the rest of the way there.
To contrast with this, my org tried using a simple QA bot for internal docs and has been struggled to move anything beyond proof of concept. The proof of concepts have been awful. It answers maybe 60-70% of questions correctly. The major issue seems to be related to taking PDFs laced with images and poorly written explanations. To get decent performance from these RAG bots, a large FAQ has to be written for every question it gets wrong. Of course this is just my org so it can’t necessarily be extrapolated across industry. However, how often have people come across a new team and find there is little to no documentation, poorly written documentation, or outdated documentation?
Where am I going with these two thoughts? Maybe the blocker to pushing more adoption within orgs is twofold, getting the correct context into the model and having decent context to start with.
Extracting value from these things is going to require a heavy lift in data curation and developing the harnesses. So far most of that effort has gone into coding. It will take time for the nontechnical and technical to work together to move the rest of an org into these tools in my opinion.
The big bet of course then is ROI and time to adoption vs current burn rates of the model providers.
Yep. There are a lot of things that apply equally to human engineering teams in terms of productivity. Poor documentation and information architecture is a thing I have seen time and time again, and is always something I put time into course correcting for because it makes performing cognitive work much easier. Same goes for poorly factored codebases. They make doing any work feel like wading through mud. Throughout my career I have done a lot of work on what I would call platform engineering and product re-engineering and it's always to course correct for how difficult an environment has become to work in.
Agents are going to struggle with those same difficulties the way humans do too. You need to put work into making an environment productive to work in, and after having purposely switched my development workflow for the stuff I do outside of work to being "AI first on mobile", that's such a bandwidth constrained setup that it's really helping me to find all the things to optimise for to increase the batting average and minimise the back and forth.
This article is rife with unedited llm signals. This makes me question their methodology here. I want you believe what they found, but I don't trust this analysis. If they were this sloppy with the write up, how sloppy were they with the science?
We have a full page on the methodology we used! Let me know if you’d like access to the dataset we created for this.
The aim was not to be scientific but to flush out some deeper meanings from these interviews that typical nlp techniques struggle with.
Ps: Of course we used llm tools as a writing aid, I’d be willing to bet those “signals” probably come from my own writing though and my appreciation of Tom Wolfe. I’ve been told it can be “sloppy” sometimes.
```
Creatives have the highest struggle scores and the highest adoption rates.
```
Here is my guess for the puzzle: creative work is subjective and full of scaffolding. AI can easily generate this subjective scaffolding to a "good enough" level so it can get used without much scrutiny. This is very attractive for a creative to use on a day to day basis.
But, given the amount of content that wasn't created by the creative, the creative feels both a rejection of the work as foreign and a feeling of being replaced.
The path is less stark in more objective fields because the quality is objective, so harder to just accept a merely plausible solution, and the scaffolding is just scaffolding so who cares if it does the job.
One issue with AI for creatives is that it’s virtually impossible to get AI to create a specific vision you have in mind. It creates something, but you just have to accept whatever that is, you can only steer it very roughly. It can be useful for getting inspiration, but not for getting exact results. If AI was better suited for realizing one’s own creative vision and working in a detail-oriented fashion, creators would likely embrace it more.
"creatives" tend to have a certain political tribe, that political tribe is well-represented in places that have this precise type of authenticity/etc. language around AI use...
Basically a good chunk of this could be measuring whether or not somebody is on Bluesky/is discourse-pilled... and there's no way to know from the study.
I'm a scientist and I mostly agree with the scientist part, but I am definitely collaborating with my bot, I don't view it as "just a tool". I know this because this morning I had to do a forced reboot and my VsCode wasn't connecting to our remote servers, it took like over 5 minutes after reboot to reload my bot chat, and from like minutes 3-5 I had the distinct feeling of losing a valuable colleague.
I don't have illusions about whats going on on the other end, but we've done some deep collaborating and I 90% anthropomorphize it; much like how people on Star Trek TNG interact with Data.
Mine gets ashamed and embarrassed and goes and deletes the evidence (and my project folder! Good thing I've got backups.) when it fails. It also gets lazy and tells me to go stuff when it could do it, and I have to tell it to go do it instead of me having to go do it.
Thats wild! I have had nothing but consistent, stable experiences. It's possible they just take on the personalities of whoever theyre working with. So for me, it's become this like idealized version of a scientific collaborator. Also, I assume different models and versions have different personalities. As far as I can tell gpt-mini has no personality, whereas my claude sonnet 4.5 has a big one.
Is this any different than the adoption of any technology. I think of the transition from practical effects to CGI in Hollywood. Anxiety levels of the creative model builders was sky high at the time. It worked itself out and now there are different jobs.
I presume many are. It's a different medium, but it's still creative. We got the "Mythbusters" show out of some of the model builders who didn't want to move to CGI.
The high usage and high anxiety tracks with what I have found from taking to artists IRL. There is a sense that any any public expression that is not wholly against AI will draw vilification from a section of the artistic community.
There are a broad range of opinions but the expression seems to have been extremely chilled.
Another thing I might throw out there is that there are so many domains and niches out there that person A and person B are almost certainly having genuinely different experiences with the same tools. So when person A says "wow this is the best thing ever" and person B says "this thing is horrible" they might both be right.
Or maybe teach your LLM to fix itself. Starting rule set:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Everywhere I look the adoption metrics and impact metrics are a tiny fraction of what was projected/expected. Yes tech keynotes have their shiny examples of “success” but the data at scale tells a very different story and that’s increasingly hard to brush under the carpet.
Given the amount of financial engineering shenanigans and circular financing it’s unclear how much longer the present bonanza can continue before the financial and business reality playing out slams on the brakes.
People are absolutely torn. It seems that ai usage starts as a clutch, then it becomes an essential tool and finally it takes over the essence of the profession itself. Not using it feels like a waste of time. There’s a sense of dread that comes from realizing that it’s not useful to “do work” anymore. That in order to thrive now, we need to outsource as much of your thinking to GPT as possible. If your sense of identity comes from “pure” intellectual pursuits, you are gonna have a bad time. The optimists will say “you will be able to do 10x the amount of work”. That might be true, but the nature of the work will be completely different. Managing a farm is not the same as planting a seed.
This is 180 degrees from how to think about it.
The more thinking you do as ratio to less toil, the better. The more time to apply your intellect with the better machine execution to back that up, the more profit.
The Renaissance grand masters used ateliers of apprentices and journeymen while the grand masters conceived, directed, critiqued, and integrated their work into commissioned art; at the end signing their name: https://smarthistory.org/workshop-italian-renaissance-art/
This is how to leverage the machine. It's your own atelier in a box. Go be Leonardo.
Granted, that's not everywhere. There are absolutely places where you will be recognized for doing amazing work. But I think many feel pressured to use AI to produce high volumes of sub-par work instead of small volumes of great work
I'm a professional developer, and nothing interesting is happening to the field. The people doing AI coding were already the weakest participants, and have not gained anything from it, except maybe optics.
The thing that's suffocating is the economics. The entire economy has turned its back on actual value in pursuit of silicon valley smoke.
As an engineer that's lead multiple teams including one at a world leading SaaS company, I don't consider myself one of the weakest participants in the field and neither do my peers generally. I'm long on agents for coding, and have started investing heavily in making our working environment productive not only for humans, but now for agents too.
AI is basically a toy for 99% of us. It's a long long ways away from the productivity boost people love to claim to justify the sky high valuations. It will fade to being a background tech employed strategically I suspect - similar to other machine learning applications and this is exactly where it belongs.
I'm forced to use it (literally, AI usage is now used as a talent review metric...) and frankly, it's maybe helped speed me up... 5-10%? I spend more time trying to get the tools to be useful than I would just doing the task myself. The only true benefit I've gotten has been unit test generation. Ask it to do any meaningful work on a mature code base and you're in for a wild ride. So there's my anecdotal "sentiment".
I've said this in the past and I'll continue to say it - until the tools get far better at managing context, they will be hard locked for value in most use cases. The moment I see "summarizing conversation" I know I'm about to waste 20 minutes fixing code.
> so it the model isn't the cause
Thing is, the prompts, those stupid little bits of English that can't possiu matter all that much? It turns out they affect the models performance a ton.
I get it that some people just want to see the thing on the screen. Or your priority is to be a high status person with a loving family etc.. etc... All noble goals. I just don't feel a sense of fulfillment from a life not in pursuit of something deeper. The AI can do it better than me, but I don't really care at the end of the day. Maybe super-corp wants the AI to do it then, but it's a shame.
And yet, the Renaissance "grand masters" became known as masters through systematizing delegation:
https://smarthistory.org/workshop-italian-renaissance-art/
Surely Donald Knuth and John Carmack are genuine masters though? There's the Elon Musk theory of mastery where everyone says you're great, but you hire a guy to do it, and there's the <nobody knows this guy but he's having a blast and is really good> theory where you make average income but live a life fulfilled. On my deathbed I want to be the second. (Sorry this is getting off topic.)
Steve Jobs wrote code early on, but he was never a great programmer. That didn’t diminish his impact at all. Same with plenty of people we label as "masters" in hindsight. The mastery isn’t always in the craft itself.
What actually seems risky is anchoring your identity to being the best at a specific thing in a specific era. If you're the town’s horse whisperer, life is great right up until cars show up. Then what? If your value is "I'm the horse guy," you're toast. If your value is taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people, you adapt.
So I’m not convinced mastery is about skill depth alone. It's about what survives the tool shift.
"taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people"
Taste is susceptible to turning into a vibes / popularity thing. I think success is mostly about (firstly just doing the basics like going to work on time and not being a dick), then ego, personality, presentation, etc... These things seem like unfulfilling preoccupations, not that I'm not susceptible to them like anyone else, so in my best life I wouldn't be so concerned about "success". I just want to master a craft and be satisfied in that pursuit.
I'd love to build good things with other people, but for whatever reason I've never found other people to build things with. So maybe I suck, that's a possibility. I think all I can do is settle on being the horse guy.
(I'm also not incurious about AI. I use AI to learn things. I just don't want to give everything away and become only a delegator.)
Edit: I'm genuinely terrified that AI is going to do ALL of the things, so there's not going to be a "survives the shift" except for having a likable / respectable / fearsome personality
I doubt Jobs would classify himself as a great programmer, so point being?
> So I’m not convinced mastery is about skill depth alone. It's about what survives the tool shift.
That's like saying karate masters should drop the training and just focus on the gun? It does lose meaning.
No, they are rational. At least those with a lot of money.
> None of the investments going on have followed any semblance of fundamentals - it's all pure instinct and chasing hype
That's not what investments are about. Their fundamentals are if they can get a good return on their money. As long as the odds of the next sucker to buy them up exists it is a good investment.
> AI is basically a toy for 99% of us.
You do pay for toys right? Toy shops aren't irrational?
So you're at the "first they laugh at us" stage then.
But I will give you this, the "first they ignore us" stage is over, at least for many people.
To contrast with this, my org tried using a simple QA bot for internal docs and has been struggled to move anything beyond proof of concept. The proof of concepts have been awful. It answers maybe 60-70% of questions correctly. The major issue seems to be related to taking PDFs laced with images and poorly written explanations. To get decent performance from these RAG bots, a large FAQ has to be written for every question it gets wrong. Of course this is just my org so it can’t necessarily be extrapolated across industry. However, how often have people come across a new team and find there is little to no documentation, poorly written documentation, or outdated documentation?
Where am I going with these two thoughts? Maybe the blocker to pushing more adoption within orgs is twofold, getting the correct context into the model and having decent context to start with.
Extracting value from these things is going to require a heavy lift in data curation and developing the harnesses. So far most of that effort has gone into coding. It will take time for the nontechnical and technical to work together to move the rest of an org into these tools in my opinion.
The big bet of course then is ROI and time to adoption vs current burn rates of the model providers.
Agents are going to struggle with those same difficulties the way humans do too. You need to put work into making an environment productive to work in, and after having purposely switched my development workflow for the stuff I do outside of work to being "AI first on mobile", that's such a bandwidth constrained setup that it's really helping me to find all the things to optimise for to increase the batting average and minimise the back and forth.
Here is my guess for the puzzle: creative work is subjective and full of scaffolding. AI can easily generate this subjective scaffolding to a "good enough" level so it can get used without much scrutiny. This is very attractive for a creative to use on a day to day basis.
But, given the amount of content that wasn't created by the creative, the creative feels both a rejection of the work as foreign and a feeling of being replaced.
The path is less stark in more objective fields because the quality is objective, so harder to just accept a merely plausible solution, and the scaffolding is just scaffolding so who cares if it does the job.
"creatives" tend to have a certain political tribe, that political tribe is well-represented in places that have this precise type of authenticity/etc. language around AI use...
Basically a good chunk of this could be measuring whether or not somebody is on Bluesky/is discourse-pilled... and there's no way to know from the study.
There are a broad range of opinions but the expression seems to have been extremely chilled.