Wow, thanks Claude
The tl;dr is that you can read someone’s viral blog post here, and it basically argues in ten different ways that generative AI is revolutionary and that GPT-5.3 is a game-changer (though it refrains from ever actually using the term “game-changer,” so that boosts the quality a lot). The post has caused quite a stir – you can read responses to it by big names in the tech industry here. So regardless of who Matt Shumer is and what his qualifications are, enough people resonate with his words for this to be taken seriously.
Whenever something goes viral like this, assuming it was not written by Elon Musk (who could write a single-character post of an eggplant-emoji and it would impact the S&P500), I think one thing people tend to overlook is the writing quality.
Let’s go:
The Writing Quality
This kind of blog post is easy to dismiss because of what it DOESN’T do. It DOESN’T actually explain in a proper level of detail how a coder could use something like Claude code in their day-to-day life. It DOESN’T explain how an aspiring writer could finally put up a novel with the aid of AI that does not get flagged as low-quality. It seems to be targeted at people who do not use generative AI on a regular basis, and maybe that is why so many people who do are posting their opinions about it.
Here’s what I think it does well:
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
—From Shumer’s post
This nonfictional blog post has a likable protagonist. Prior to reading it, I had no idea who Matt Shumer was. We, the readers, can clearly see that he is a humble insider who possesses information that very few have access to. He is concerned about our futures, and so like any ethical human being he is providing us with unsolicited advice about how to live our lives.
You may have detected a subtle hint of sarcasm – I am not trying to be snarky, I am just trying to highlight the writing style.
Generative AI and Coding
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
—Same article by Matt Shumer
This is where an embedded video or picture may have been useful, and I am impressed by Shumer’s ability to maintain so much traction with what looks to be a text-only blog (but at least he has a clean interface…jeez I am not a fan of WordPress). HackerNews has actually been hit by TWO viral posts in the last week – the other one is We Mourn Our Craft. “We Mourn Our Craft,” I think, is a lot closer to coding. The person who wrote it has years of experience programming professionally, and though I cannot say for sure if Shumer can top this author’s coding contributions I can relate to a programmer a little more than I can relate to a CEO (though the CEO seems to really enjoy blogging, so maybe it is a tie).
“We Mourn Our Craft” is just a really, really short essay that essentially says, “This is it.” It’s over. Professional programming as we knew it is gone, we have been replaced, and all we can do is mourn.
This is arguably even more absolute and less substantive than Shumer’s post, but I think “We Mourn Our Craft” is important in context. It is not the ramblings of some junior intern who has coded for six weeks, but the words of a software engineer who has worked at Microsoft, Salesforce, and SquareSpace.
Now…is it true?
Well, at least for me personally, I find auto-writing “tens of thousands of lines of code” and then not reviewing them to be problematic. The idea that it works perfectly (again, just in my personal experience) only applies if you can verify the lines…otherwise, you could discover an issue later on. But yes, something like Claude (which we are currently only allowed to use in our spare time) can write thousands of lines of code and then actually open a shell and execute commands itself. Yes, it asks for permission first…
Is this useful? Data point of one, but I say yes the hype is real. From the tiny bit of Claude Code I have seen so far, it is tremendously useful to give an AI the ability to actually execute its own commands until I get rate-limited and beg Anthropic to let me write clickbait in exchange for tokens.
The Concerning Part
Will AI replicate deep human empathy? Replace the trust built over years of a relationship? I don’t know. Maybe not. But I’ve already watched people begin relying on AI for emotional support, for advice, for companionship. That trend is only going to grow.
—Shumer
Okay, we’ve been down this road before…right?
Here’s a post about someone who got engaged to marry AI, posted on a subreddit with over 50,000 followers under the topic of being in love with AI. Yeah, there are a lot of people upset about losing 4o because that was their soulmate.
Explaining why this is concerning would devolve into philosophizing and navel-gazing. Maybe something about how AI has no real soul and just generates words with the logic of probability distributions or something.
But…relying on AI for companionship? Why are tech CEOs pushing this like it is somehow a good thing?
Closing Thoughts
At best, this is a warning by someone with valuable insider information on how we can 10x our opponents and use AI to become unkillable gods instead of drowning in the coming big thing.
At worst, this is marketing publicity by someone with a financial stake in generative AI.
At absolute worst, this was 100% written by Claude and not by Matt Shumer.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. This is a fairly eloquent, accessible essay that says a lot of true things, but also does not go in very much depth and carries out the impossible task of predicting where we will be in the next five years.
Whether or not Shumer had ulterior motives in writing it remains to be seen.