David Demaree

Principal at @bitsandletters, a tiny consultancy helping startups & brands scale their websites with clarity & craft. Ex @adobe, @google, @stripe, @webflow.

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

@miles_matthias Yes

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

Today I've published a new blog post on AI, productivity and agency, because there are some big differences in outcomes between teams that are excitedly diving in to try out new AI tools, and teams who are having AI forced on them by managers.

A decade ago, Google's Project Aristotle looked at years of Googlers' job performance and concluded that agency and emotional safety were crucial to individuals and teams performing their best.

Recently, Atlassian looked at the teams with the strongest AI adoption and outcomes and found a strong correlation between AI-related productivity gains and team cultures with a lot of — yes — agency and emotional safety.

This would suggest AI adoption is just like anything else at work: happy, engaged people do well.

For this and other thoughts and links about the link between human and AI performance, check out the post here: https://t.co/aILbbeODhB

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

Sorry, now it’s nothing — the AI maxed out your cards and Anthropic owns your house and your cat.

An agentic loop will come by later to escort you to the reeducation center. You’ll be training an AI model to unclog drains and cook pasta.

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

It’s not chatbots anymore, it’s agents. No, now it’s loops. Now it’s a gas town; you’re the mayor, wait, no, actually you’re God, AI is the mayor. Now it’s fabric, you weave agents into a mesh and then they weave themselves.

[Duca @big_duca]

Is anyone actually using loops with AI?

Sounds like a really effective way to funnel money out of your pocket.

And into the AI labs.

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

I bought a Mac mini M4 Pro to run a kiosk display at a conference last year, then ended up making it my home workstation. It’s the best, fastest computer I’ve owned.

If you find an AI-pilled fool selling one of these at a good price, grab it, it’s great.

[Milo Smith @mil000]

THE GREAT OPENCLAW MAC MINI SELLOFF HAS STARTED!!

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

Marketing

[Floro S. @sflorimm]

Why has Vercel become the default hosting platform for vibe coders?

There are plenty of alternatives.

What made Vercel win?

[Vineer @vineerpasam]

My vibe coder friend built multiple AI apps over the past year. He went into an interview yesterday thinking the company would be impressed by his project showcase.

The interviewer asked him the difference between Git merge and Git rebase.

My friend has never even pushed code without Claude Code's help 😭

[Amelia Wattenberger 🪷 @Wattenberger]

pretty telling that the AI interface we’re converging on is Tom Riddle’s diary

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

I’m sure this guy’s digital book is amazing but I’m not sure why anyone would pay $100-150 for a treatise on making software when established masters of design and engineering are out here blogging for free

[Dan Hollick @DanHollick]

70k words, 600+ illustrations, and 1000s of hours (so far).

Making Software is now available in early access.
https://t.co/rSfY0D6Y06

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

All of my For You content is AI skeptics dunking on AI-pilled dudes and this feels like nature is healing

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

All these fucking dorks at Anthropic do is yap about how insane their product is and how end-of-the-world it will be

Someone tell these jabronis to shut the fuck up, holy Christ they're so annoying

[JB @JasonBotterill]

Anthropic employees are fucking depressed

[Bennie🕊️ @Bennieeexyz]

A customer at the library asked me a question I wasn't prepared for.

Customer: Excuse me.

Customer: Why does this machine require flesh?

Me: ...what?

Customer: This machine.

Customer: I am touching it, but it does not work.

Customer: Is because... flesh?

At this point I was trying very hard to figure out whether I had accidentally wandered into a horror movie.

Then she held up her hands.

She was wearing gloves.

Me: Oh!

Me: The touchscreen.

Me: Right.

Me: Yeah, it probably can't detect your fingers through the gloves.

Customer: Ah.

Customer: Okay.

Customer: Sorry to bother.

Me: No, no.

Me: That's the best thing I've heard all week.

She laughed.

The machine worked.

And I thought that was the end of it.

It was not.

Now whenever one of our library computers stops working, someone inevitably says:

Staff: It requires flesh.

Staff: The machine must be fed.

Another staff member: Who's volunteering?

So thanks to one perfectly innocent question, our library now sounds like a cult every time the self-checkout freezes.

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

We achieved perfection in 1995 and have been falling from grace ever since #trackballs4eva

[Michael Timbs @michael_timbs]

Anthropic after 6 months of zero progress : "We think we need to slow down because capabilities are accelerating"

Lmao ok. Are these capabilities in the room with us right now?

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

Is it possible Claude is a boring pedant that uses 400 words yet says nothing because that’s how its parents write? Or did Claude write its own dense, inscrutable paragraph about how Claude may be useless?

[Mo @atmoio]

Anthropic is questioning whether AI may turn out to be altogether useless. This is the single most honest thing Anthropic has ever written.

“But achieving recursive improvement alone does not suggest an immediate change in how industrial production occurs, societies organize, or markets function. More intelligence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elections sooner than a constitution dictates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a weekend. For most people, the felt pace of this future will still be set by the bottlenecks, even if the laboratory upstream runs at the speed of compute. That collision, where recursive intelligence building itself ever faster meets the world of humans, relationships, and governance, is another part of this future we can’t predict.”

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

It shouldn't be an "if true." LLMs ARE NOT ALIVE. Chiang's example is a simple way to explain something that we shouldn't need to explain. We trust that planes fly because we see them go fast, then lift off, then climb. Why would the world's worst coding bot suddenly become conscious?

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

This piece by Ted Chiang — which is fantastic — about why (deep existential sigh) AI is not conscious, reminds me of moon landing truthers and why we can be so confident that people have walked on the moon. https://t.co/ocxDPlr8Mb

[David Demaree @ddemaree]

If Claude is conscious, there's unimaginable power in having created Claude, and having the keys to his data center. Anthropic has been saying for years that their product, which writes poorly and forgets how to code every few months — might disrupt _everything_. As they say, huge if true.