LessWrong posts by zvi

Claude Code does a lot more than code, but the name and command line scare people.

Anthropic realized a rebrand was in order. Two weeks later, we have Claude Cowork, written entirely by Claude Code.

Did you know that chat interfaces were always (mostly) secretly a command line?

This is still very much a research preview, available only for Claude Max users on Macs with a bunch of bugs and missing features. It will improve rapidly over time.

Cowork combines a lot of the power of Claude Code with the ordinary chat interface, giving it access to a folder on your computer and to Claude Code's planning and agentic capabilities. It can use that folder as context, to download, to organize and create files, and it can be paired with Claude for Chrome and use your existing connectors.

Anthropic: Introducing Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work.

Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code.

In Cowork, you give Claude access to a folder on your computer. Claude can then read, edit, or create files in that folder. Try it to create a spreadsheet from [...]

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Outline:

(02:23) Early Takes

(05:51) Minimum Viable Product

(07:04) Maximum Viable Product

(08:16) Backup Your Directory

(08:38) Meanwhile In Claude Code News

(15:49) You Are The Bottleneck

(18:07) Claude Code Upgrades

(19:30) Oh No

(20:23) I'm In Danger

(20:54) In The Beginning Was The Command Line

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The game is asymmetrical. Life is not fair. Doesn’t matter. Play to win the game.

You’re Single Because Your Emotions Gave Her The Ick

Ah, the ultimate ick source. A man expressing their emotions is kind of the inverse of the speech in Barbie about how it's impossible to be a woman.

It's easy. A man must be in touch with and transparent about his emotions, but must also be in conscious control over them, without repressing them, while choosing strategically when to be and not be transparent about them, and ultimately be fine, such that we will also be fine if all that information we shared can then be shared with others or used as a weapon.

Express your emotions. No, not those, and definitely not like that. But do it.

That's the goal. If you say that's not fair? Well, life it's fair, I report the facts rather than make the rules, and the whole thing sounds like a you problem.

Kryssy La Reida: Serious question for men…what is it that makes you feel like you are in a relationship with a woman that you can’t express your feelings to? Or [...]

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Outline:

(00:19) You're Single Because Your Emotions Gave Her The Ick

(05:03) You Are Still Single Because You Don't Know When To Show Emotions

(07:58) You're Single Because You Don't Have Enough Gendered Energy

(09:29) You're Single And I Have To Praise You Like I Should

(12:17) You're Single Because You Guessed Wrong On Paying For The Date

(15:02) You're Single But Not Because You Make Too Much Money

(16:35) You're Single Because You Gave Someone A Ride

(19:15) You're Single Because You Left The Price Tag On But It's For The Best

(20:37) You're Single So You At Least Get To Keep Your Upgrade

(22:13) You're Single Because You Tried To Problem Solve

(23:50) You're Single Because You Were Actually A Crazy Stalker

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Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is so hot right now. The cool kids use it for everything.

They definitely use it for coding, often letting it write all of their code.

They also increasingly use it for everything else one can do with a computer.

Vas suggests using Claude Code as you would a mini-you/employee that lives in your computer and can do literally anything.

There's this thread of people saying Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is AGI in various senses. I centrally don’t agree, but they definitely have a point.

If you’d like, you can use local Claude Code via Claude Desktop, documentation here. It's a bit friendlier than the terminal and some people like it a lot more. Here is a more extensive basic discussion of setup options. The problem is the web interface still lacks some power user functions, even after some config work Daniel San misses branch management, create new repository directory via ‘new’ and import plugins from marketplaces.

If you haven’t checked Claude Code out, you need to check it out.

This could be you:

Paulius: ​whoever made this is making me FEEL SEEN

Table [...]

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Outline:

(01:32) Hype!

(06:26) My Own Experiences

(11:35) Now With More Recursive Self Improvement

(13:06) A Market Of One

(13:46) Some Examples Of People Using Claude Code Recently

(20:25) Dealing With Context Limits

(21:08) The Basic Claude Code Setup

(23:14) Random Claude Code Extension Examples I've Seen Recently

(25:09) Skilling Up

(31:23) Reasons Not To Get Overexcited

(37:33) Get Pretty Excited

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Claude Code is the talk of the town, and of the Twitter. It has reached critical mass.

Suddenly, everyone is talking about how it is transforming their workflows. This includes non-coding workflows, as it can handle anything a computer can do. People are realizing the power of what it can do, building extensions and tools, configuring their setups, and watching their worlds change.

I’ll be covering that on its own soon. This covers everything else, including ChatGPT Health and the new rounds from xAI and Anthropic.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:46) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(01:18) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(01:52) Language Models Have All The Fun

(02:57) Huh, Upgrades

(03:42) On Your Marks

(04:12) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(07:39) Fun With Media Generation

(07:55) You Drive Me Crazy

(10:10) They Took Our Jobs

(13:35) Get Involved

(14:08) Introducing

(16:46) In Other AI News

(18:31) Show Me the Money

(20:30) Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

(21:32) Quiet Speculations

(24:25) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(27:32) AGI and Taxation

(31:29) Chip City

(31:46) The Week in Audio

(31:54) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(33:17) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(34:27) The Lighter Side

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Going Full San Francisco

Waymo goes Full San Francisco West Bay except for SFO:

Jeff Dean: Exciting expansion! @Waymo now serves the whole SF Bay Area Peninsula from SF to San Jose and is taking riders on freeways.

They can serve SJC, and SFO is almost ready, employee rides are in place and public rides are ‘coming soon.’

Brandan: Would be nice if @Waymo comes across the bay to Berkeley!

Jeff Dean: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!

Going Down The Highway

Waymo is going to start using freeways in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco. That's a big deal for longer rides, but there is still the problem that Waymos have to obey the technical speed limit. On freeways no huamn driver does this, so obeying the technical speed limit is both slower and more dangerous. We are going to need a regulatory solution, ideally that allows you to drive at the average observed speed.

Looking For Adventure

This is all a big unlock, but it depends on having enough cars to take advantage.

At this point, aside from regulatory barriers in some places like [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Going Full San Francisco

(01:03) Going Down The Highway

(01:33) Looking For Adventure

(02:38) And Whatever Comes Our Way

(05:38) It's Coming

(06:20) Who Stands In The Way

(08:59) My One Weakness

(11:20) The path forward

(15:59) Cruise Control

(18:24) Growth Rates

(20:02) The Competition

(21:21) They Took Our Jobs

(22:44) Bikers As Winners

(23:21) The Elderly As Big Winners

(26:19) Save The Cat

(29:24) It's Going To Be The Future Soon

(31:12) In-Context Old Man Yells At Self-Driving Car

(32:07) The Safety Case

(34:12) Keep It Classy

(34:39) The Lighter Side

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The central message of the fertility roundups has always been that we have a choice.

If we do want to raise fertility, we can do that. People respond to incentives. That means money, especially if paid up front, and it also means time, lifestyle and respect.

If we do it purely with cash, it would be expensive, but a well-designed version of this would still be net profitable to the state. On the order of $300k per additional live birth would get this done in the United States, depending on how you structure it. This is not money spent, it is money transferred, and it helps the kids quite a lot.

If we do it by dealing with the Revolution of Rising Requirements, by providing non-cash advantages or changing the culture, that's a more complex intervention, but we have options that let us do far better.

Those who disagree have tried almost nothing, and are all out of ideas.

Selection

Alex Strudwick Young: Today parents can, for the first time, access polygenic embryo testing for IQ and many diseases through a routine test (PGT-A) done worldwide and in 60% of US IVF cycles.

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Outline:

(01:05) Selection

(02:22) Surrogacy

(02:46) IVF

(08:05) Technological Versus Social Solutions

(09:32) Dakka

(10:51) All The Dakka

(12:24) Insufficient Dakka Works Insufficiently

(14:35) The Effectiveness of Dakka

(17:47) The Wrong Dakka

(18:52) Dakka Does Not Disproportionally Motivate The Poor

(21:25) Is That a Lot?

(25:23) Alternative Dakka

(26:38) The Housing Theory of Everything Is Undefeated

(35:58) Happiness

(37:16) Negative Dakka

(38:44) Mother's Day

(39:41) Status

(43:34) Hungary

(46:20) Audio

(46:26) NatalCon

(46:50) Housing Discrimination

(47:20) Your Own Quest

(49:36) Hope

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This week, Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel wrote Capital in the 22nd Century.

One of my goals for Q1 2026 is to write unified explainer posts for all the standard economic debates around potential AI futures in a systematic fashion. These debates tend to repeatedly cover the same points, and those making economic arguments continuously assume you must be misunderstanding elementary economic principles, or failing to apply them for no good reason. Key assumptions are often unstated and even unrealized, and also false or even absurd. Reference posts are needed.

That will take longer, so instead this post covers the specific discussions and questions around the post by Trammell and Patel. My goal is to both meet that post on its own terms, and also point out the central ways its own terms are absurd, and the often implicit assumptions they make that are unlikely to hold.

What Trammell and Patel Are Centrally Claiming As A Default Outcome

They affirm, as do I, that Piketty was centrally wrong about capital accumulation in the past, for many well understood reasons, many of which they lay out.

They then posit that Piketty could have been unintentionally [...]

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Outline:

(01:02) What Trammell and Patel Are Centrally Claiming As A Default Outcome

(03:15) Does The Above Conclusion Follow From The Above Premises?

(03:30) Sounds Like This Is Not Our Main Problem In This Scenario?

(07:31) To Be Clear This Scenario Doesn't Make Sense

(13:51) Ad Argumento

(14:44) The Baseline Scenario

(16:31) Would We Have An Inequality Problem?

(20:57) No You Can't Simply Let Markets Handle Everything

(22:22) Proposed Solutions

(25:55) Wealth Taxes Today Are Grade-A Stupid

(28:27) Tyler Cowen Responds With Econ Equations

(30:29) Brian Albrecht Responds With More Equations

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There are two sides of developments in fertility.

Today I’m going to focus on news about what is happening and why, and next time I’ll ask what we’ve learned since last check-in about we could perhaps do about it.

One could consider all this a supplement to my sequence on The Revolution of Rising Expectations, and The Revolution of Rising Requirements. That's the central dynamic.

Household Composition

What is happening? A chart worth looking at every so often.

Timing

Michael Arouet: No way. WTF happened in 1971?

This is United States data:

The replies include a bunch of other graphs that also go in bad directions starting in 1971-73.

Developmental Idealism

Lyman Stone, in his first Substack post, lays the blame for fertility drops in non-Western countries primarily on drops in desire for children, via individuals choosing Developmental Idealism.

Lyman Stone: Five Basic Arguments for Understanding Fertility:

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Outline:

(00:46) Household Composition

(01:06) Timing

(01:37) Developmental Idealism

(04:47) Pessimism

(05:51) Baby Boom

(06:53) Paperwork

(08:24) Car Seats As Contraception

(11:14) You Can't Afford It

(12:23) Yes The Problem Is Often Money

(12:57) Housework

(15:13) Greedy Careers

(18:24) The Appeal of Child-Free

(19:30) Motivation

(22:06) Grandparents

(25:26) Expectations of Impossibility

(28:04) Isolation

(30:00) Decoupling

(31:45) South Korea

(39:20) World

(39:54) Various Places in Trouble

(40:51) China

(44:25) Russia

(44:39) Europe

(45:34) America

(46:43) Kazakhstan

(47:10) Israel

(48:56) Consequences

(49:49) Unfounded Optimism

(50:56) History

(51:44) Implications

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The Rationalist Project was our last best hope that we might not try to build it.

It failed.

But in the year of the Coding Agent, it became something greater: our last, best hope – for everyone not dying.

This is what 2026 looks like. The place is Lighthaven.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(00:30) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(01:34) Claude Code

(08:49) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility

(10:04) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(12:17) Fun With Media Generation

(12:47) You Drive Me Crazy

(13:39) They Took Our Jobs

(17:46) Doctor Doctor

(18:46) Jevons Paradox Strikes Again

(20:52) Unprompted Attention

(22:42) The Art of the Jailbreak

(23:22) Get Involved

(24:09) Introducing

(24:30) In Other AI News

(25:56) Show Me the Money

(26:14) Quiet Speculations

(29:38) People Really Do Not Like AI

(32:23) Americans Remain Optimistic About AI?

(33:40) Thank You, Next

(36:36) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(39:42) Chip City

(42:54) Rhetorical Innovation

(43:29) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(44:25) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(44:45) The Lighter Side

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It's that time. It's been a hell of a year.

At the start we barely had reasoning models. Now we have Claude Code and Opus 4.5.

I don’t code. Yet now I cause code to exist whenever something about a website annoys me, or when I get that programmer's realization that there's something I am planning on doing at least three times. Because why not?

The progress has simultaneously been mind bogglingly impressive and fast. But a lot of people don’t see it that way, because progress has been incremental, and because we were reasonably expecting to often get even more than this.

The public conversation and debate, even more than before, was full of false narratives and active attempts to make the situation worse. The same goes for attempts to shape Federal policy towards AI, and OpenAI's conversion into a for-profit.

It's been, as they say, one battle after another, with many wins, many setbacks and a lot of things in between.

This includes the key developments in AI, and also other blog posts from the year that I consider memorable looking back.

This is only our corner of the world's [...]

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Outline:

(01:26) January

(03:50) February

(06:58) March

(08:15) April

(09:24) May

(11:06) June

(12:02) July

(13:04) August

(15:23) September

(15:50) October

(18:39) November

(20:12) December

(21:39) Questions For Next Season

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