7 Ways How We Use AI Is Changing

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

The way we use AI is changing. First, we were prompt engineers, then context engineers, then harness engineers, then loop engineers. And while it's tempting to view all of these things as just one silly buzzword giving way to the next, the reality is that we are all together on this journey, figuring out just the best way to use a completely new technology that is changing both how we do our current work and opening up new possibilities of what work we can even do. Today, we're talking about seven ways that how we use AI is changing.

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Today's episode is about a bunch of patterns that are shifts, I think, in how, on average, we interact with AI on a daily basis.

One thing that's been true since the very beginning of ChatGPT is that our patterns of interaction with AI have never been static for long. At the beginning, it was people discovering new ways to prompt the AI that had better or worse results, which was then communicated through hundreds of articles, posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, and courses. But over time, the interaction pattern shifts have gotten more significant and more substantive. Over the last week or so, I saw a number of announcements that really reinforce some fairly big shifts in these interaction patterns. While I don't think that how we use AI will ever be truly static, I do think that some of these shifts, which I'm going to cover in this show, are fairly fundamental and likely to stick. Thus, of course, if one is trying to be efficient with their time, maybe more worthy of attention.

First up is an interaction pattern that is not so much us changing how we interact with AI but product design decisions that are shifting the options that we have to interact with AI.

Very clearly, there is a push towards simplification and integration and user experiences that have less rather than more cognitive decision making for the end user. One thing that's been interesting for me, sitting in this seat that I have, is the extent to which early AI has tended to defy traditional Silicon Valley logic that users won't show up unless you give them an incredibly simple and clear experience. In fact, quite the contrary of that, a lot of the early adopters, not just from tech circles, but from broader knowledge work circles, have, rather than resisting complexity, thrown themselves in head first. A great example of this for me was when 9,000 people, most of whom weren't even close to engineers or really technical in any way, signed up for the free claw camp program I put out earlier this year, which basically had them crawling through glass to figure out how to build their own agents. And yet it appears that perhaps, even if the portion of people who were willing to do that part of hard work has been higher in AI than in other past tech sectors, there are still a lot of folks who want that simplicity. Certainly, simplicity is one of the watchwords for the new Metamuse product and something that even the power users, who fully have the capability of dealing with complexity, are lauding in the product. How IAI's Claire Vo has discussed in numerous places how well thought out she thinks the Muse design is, specifically around what it does and doesn't obfuscate from the user.

Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, who again, certainly has no shortage of complexity capability, also shouted out Muse for having nailed the simplicity. Wrote technologist Tom Goodwin, the beauty of Muse is that they've managed to introduce it in a very accessible way. Don't tell me how you work, just show me how to do things. David Herman wrote, I think Muse is going to win the casual AI race. I showed my dad who is nearly 70 and it clicked. He was amazed that I could have it create an entire contract for me update things on it, then e-mail and send it to a customer all through texts. Claude, OpenAI are great, but so far I'd say less than 1 percent of the population gets what these models are. Meta just made it all super easy, and it's clear that this was intentional. Meta Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang wrote, a big part of the team's focus when building Muse was to make something that just worked. So much work went into all the little details to make the product simple and easy to use. Of course, the thing that makes this a trend, not just a design decision from the Meta team, is that this sort of simplification is showing up everywhere. One of the biggest product updates that we got this week came when Anthropic announced that Cloud Cowork and Chat are no longer separate things. Cloud is careening towards an experience where instead of it being fragmented and full of decisions for the user before they even get started, instead a single unified experience.