flâneur

Public Experiments | Varun | Substack

varunshenoy.substack.com · 2,043 words · saved by 3 readers

I’d consider my close friends and I to be far in the left tail of the distribution above: eager to try new tools and adopt them into our day-to-day routines. We only use a few AI tools on a daily basis: ChatGPT. Mostly for code generation and basic Q&A. Copilot. The UX for Copilot is perfect. It stays out of your way until you need it. This means your efficiency is, at worst, as bad as it was pre-Copilot1. I also use the following, but much more infrequently. I find Claude to be better than ChatGPT at summarization and explanations. It’s more “human” in its responses. I’ve been reaching for Perplexity more often in the last few weeks. It feels less like a Google replacement and more like a better Quora.2 Unfortunately, I don’t find it very sticky as a product. Cursor is awesome, and while I’ve been using it more than vanilla VSCode, I don’t use the built-in AI tooling often. But when I do, it’s magical. Depending on the task, AI tools save me 5-25% of my time. This is a huge deal. I sp

How has AI changed the way we work, collaborate, and live? I’d argue most people have been yet to be impacted by any sort of AI whatsoever. The promise of an AI augmented future, if it is ever coming, isn’t here yet. I’d consider my close friends and I to be far in the left tail of the distribution above: eager to try new tools and adopt them into our day-to-day routines. We only use a few AI tools on a daily basis: ChatGPT. Mostly for code generation and basic Q&A. Copilot. The UX for Copilot is perfect. It stays out of your way until you need it. This means your efficiency is, at…

saved by

related reading