Feels like Magic
Claude can be used for all sorts of things, but it really excels at coding prompts. I am not much of a programmer myself since I am more of a data scientist and writing the syntax for a program has always been a bit painful. Sure, there are the forums one can browse through and the official help guidelines, but it is painstakingly slow to get code to work in this way. For anyone that has gone through this process and remembers the "old ways", the new AI tool - and this really isn't an overstatement - are like magic.
I had to step back several times when using Claude to realize just how much of a game changer this tech is. Stuff that used to literally take days or even weeks, can now be done is a couple of prompts taking a fraction of that time. Ever since it has been possible to upload data or screenshots of data it has been even easier too work with. It's essentially at a level where anyone can work with it and do complex data analysis. But, one still has to understand what one (or the AI) is doing of course. At least that part of the equation still takes a human and I honestly love it since the hard work is completely outsourced and I am left with the "fun stuff".
The magical feel also comes from the quality of interaction with the AI. It really feels just like working with another person. You can ask questions and give it all sorts of details which it remembers and then ask for an output that actually works (!). One secret lies in the chat itself. By being able to feed info into the chat the sophistication grows with every input. And this is also where the free version has its limitations.
Sign up works as simple as giving an email address. One then gets a certain amount of free prompts, but more importantly one has only access to a limited chat length. At a certain point the chat then terminates and one has to start a new one. The problem with that is that all the info is then lost and one has to start all over again. This is especially problematic when one has fed the AI with a large dataset and has tweaked all sorts of details which then have to be once more fed into the system.
One way to get around this is to continue to tweak the main prompt that one can then use for another chat. But one will eventually run out of "space". So far this has been enough for me, but I can easily see why one would need to buy the pro version to keep going and streamline the process. Nevertheless, it's amazing that all of this is free. As long as no personal or sensitive information is being fed into the system I don't really see a downside to this.
Conclusion
This tech is life changing or perhaps career changing. In my case it has actually helped me to improve my work by several orders of magnitude, so I really feel it is a very helpful tool and not something that is threatening my employment (yet). Who knows what could come out of this in a couple of years. Probably AI Agents will be the next big thing until we truly get AGI.
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