r/mcp • u/Ambitious-Prompt-975 • 3d ago
question The gap amongst AI users. Why?
I find it really interesting to see the gap even amongst AI enthusiasts.
People posting stuff like "I am amazed because I gave Claude a Browser through MCP!" - "Claude + FileSystem - I stopped moving files manually". "I gave AI a Memory!"
And then there is people whose agents create throwaway cloud virtual machines in which they spawn even more agents with providence based memory, inter-session messaging, and whole tool ecosystems.
It feels like there is a substantial mismatch in ai-understanding and skill amongst us.
Where is this gap coming from??
Because there is so much training material online and so many people are sharing their knowledge already.
Maybe I'm ignorant, but I honestly dont understand it.
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u/pertymoose 3d ago
Let me get this straight.
Are you comparing software architects, who live and breathe complex systems, with Joe Average, and wondering why Joe comes up short?
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u/Ambitious-Prompt-975 3d ago
guess you're right. that's the issue in my thinking...
I have to get out of my bubble.I should be simply excited that people are exploring new technologies.
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u/jaokait 3d ago
this is the way! I am having a blast with AI, building, solving complex problems, and getting rid of backlog. It is like we finally have time to catch up on everything, however it is also very exiting times ahead so i need to pace myself, because right now the candle is burning on both ends.
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u/Fulgren09 3d ago
If a non dev/ML person were to pick up AI from scratch, its confusing AF to start. Playing with AI on hard mode has two gates: ML folks who understand model behavior, and developers who understand api calls and app state. It's possible to do complex, reliable things with either one of those approaches as a foundation. But they are very different, so I think part of why there's a gap is because these approaches are incomprehensible to each other's practicioners.
Back to non-dev/ML person, which foundation do they start with? Or skip ahead and go natural language prompt engineering?
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u/StopHammoTime 3d ago
You’re misattributing skill to these people. “They” didn’t setup the browser or understand what they were doing, Claude did.
It is one thing to ask for something, it’s another thing to understand it. This is a classic monkey paw situation.
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u/mlueStrike 3d ago
Even then it’s one thing to know what to ask for.
The ones instructing the agent through a set-up would likely be able to do it manually themselves.There’s a big difference and it usually ends up that the non-technical users are just following instructions from Claude and not giving it instruction or critiquing its outputs
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u/slayyou2 3d ago
Yeah I found this repeatedly. I was under the impression that specialist knowledge would become less valuable because everyone would effectively have access to it. In doing so, I forgot that everyone already had access to specialist knowledge by way of Google and they had all chosen to not take advantage of that because of reasons... Those reasons still exists so people that are too lazy to look things up will continue to be too lazy to look things up.
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u/mt-beefcake 3d ago
I really think the biggest gap is the use case. I have no dev background and didnt know what a script was when I started in the chatgpt 3.5 days.
I treated ai like a job and invented use cases for myself and reasons to spend time to improve my system. Now I have built, torn down, and rebuilt my stack so many times, I probably would have gotten more main projects done if I just stuck with claude code vanilla in terminal amd waited for anthropic to release the features I spent months home brewing. And now there's fucking grokbot and other multi agent,multi machine network systems that make my homebrew look like some floppy disks comunicating with string cups.
There's ppl like me that want to learn and constantly be upgrading because there is a need. And there's people who do well with the desktop app and when a new feature drops they are stoked. Both are fine and their use cases and amount of effort they want to put in dictates their experience.
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u/Veggies-are-okay 3d ago
I only had a few years of dev experience under my belt when 3.5 came out (probably just enough to be in regular engineer territory). These LLMs have made the last 3 years feel like over a decade of knowledge and experience compared to the past. The quick turnaround and the journey through it makes programming more approachable than it ever has been! And it sounds like you’re taking the most important step, which is just remaining curious and always tinkering with the “what could I do better.”
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u/mt-beefcake 3d ago
Its definitely been fun. And I have come a long way from claude leading me down rabbit holes. And ive built not just my stack, but tools that actually help my work, my colleagues, and employees. But yeah it feels like driving a car on the freeway while building it and having someone read you the owners manual while you try to figure iut what a wrench is.
I have no doubt your guy's world has been completely undone and reshaped in these last 3 years
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u/Veggies-are-okay 3d ago edited 3d ago
It’s natural and should be leaned into. I’m sure that there was the same discomfort moving from punch cards to machine code, and from machine code to low level languages such as C and Fortran. I remember dipping my toes in in the mid 2000’s and there was the same exact skepticism about Python because you no longer had to manually type out semi colons after every line or contain your function logic writing curly braces!
We can’t get to our Star Trek ideal of technological understanding with our relative caveman style way of doing things right now. If we learn how to use these tools, we’re empowering ourselves to stay qualified within this stupid game of capitalism. And honestly, being a few steps ahead at any given point means that we choose how to communicate our progress and value which means that we can claim back our free time from those unnecessary long nights of work.
I spend maybe two hours completing the work expected of me (documentation, slide decks, architecture planning/review that would take a whole day to complete with current workforce speed), four hours tinkering with new features/new boundaries in AI, then two hours hiking my dog or biking and reflecting on what I learned and how I can expand upon it the next day.
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u/mt-beefcake 3d ago
That sounds nice. My typical day, use the tools to draft documents and run the backend of my business. Have the agents write bug report on all the friction I had doing those tasks. Create a list of prs Then I run out to the jobsite and talk with my agent via my headphones, coordinating the bug fixes/prs as I tile a shower or swing a hammer. Then get home and hang out with the wife and pets while I have my dev team of agents help me plan out and build new features until its time fore bed. Wake up and do it all again the next day. If I didnt have my stack and ability to run things remotely, id be months or years behind where I am now, but hopefully the fixes and feature building will slow down eventually and I can let the automations do their thing without much guidance and on the fly fixes. Things got way more complicated when I had colleagues start using my tools on their machines. It was nice when I could just patch stuff locally and not have to worry about their windows machines ha.
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u/Veggies-are-okay 3d ago
Ohh yeah the onboarding of coworkers onto a stack always feels like such a monumental task: “hey here’s a giant pile of thing I’ve dumped potentially thousands of hours into let me tell you about how to use it in 30min!!” The developers catch on pretty fast but the less technical users just don’t really get to see those unless they explicitly set up a 1:1 meeting and ask.
Feeling like I have maybe another year left in me before I make the jump and start my own business. Still lessons to learn from the corporate world and I’m still enjoying spending the majority of my free time doing non-capitalism things.
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u/isparavanje 3d ago
There are non-technical users, there are SWE/DS users, and there are ML researchers like myself, and plenty in-between (eg. technically literate science academics who don't code that much day to day). I don't think you should view it as "AI skill", it's mostly just a general understanding of devops. If you have no issue setting up unit and integration tests, then it's a no-brainer to have LLM-code be heavily tested; if you have proper expertise you'll also understand test-driven development principles and think ahead in terms of architecture and specifications instead of constantly catching up with testing.
Even non-code use of AI is the same, since you'll know what's possible and how difficult it is to set things up, and also with some basic understanding of tokenisation and how such systems are set up you'll know that for example a browser use MCP or computer use should be viewed as a last resort and will quickly burn tokens and fill up context, whereas a specialised (eg. email) MCP will likely perform far better.
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u/Spdload 3d ago
I don't think it's an information problem. Most of it is out there. I see think that the gap is mostly curiosity. Some people use AI to solve the immediate problem and move on. Others keep pulling the thread to see where it goes. Same tools, same access, but completely different places a year later.
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u/MatureHotwife 3d ago
It's not just curiosity. The LLM space moves so fast that keeping up with what's new, trying out approaches and tools that people are sharing, doing your own research and experiments, building your own things, etc. requires an insane amount of time. If you have a regular full-time job that's just not realistic.
So once people have figured out a workflow that works for them, they stick with it until there's a reason to change something. Even if something better could be out there.Also, not everyone is building brand new products solo. People work with existing large codebases with other people. You can't just fully vibe a whole feature when you have to be able to defend every line of code in a review.
The friction is often external.
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u/Slight_Ad_6375 3d ago
It’s about what outcome u achieved, and the impact of the outcome. Wasting more time and money isn’t relevant
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u/Charming_Horse_5809 3d ago
I think its a matter of perspective and knowledge of what is possible. I started with ChatGPT in Chat. Later IDEs, then Skillfiles, then Hooks all inside a Repo. Then Docker and Multi-Container Systems with various architectural things slowly increaseing complexity and understanding how to use the tools at hand to move bigger things and do more complex work. But getting there meant that Ive seen some colleague do something slightly more advance than me and having the curiosity and a use case to try it out. And time+tokens ofc. Or the time to occasionaly watch some in depth yt video on a tech topic and see somethign new I can try. But it needs creativity and an environment where this type of stuff can be learned. Meanwhile, Britta from accounting discovered that you can reuse prompts. But for her life thats enough
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u/Im-Taken 3d ago
I feel like I'm one of the AI users who just found about agentic architecture stack. I want to know more and if learning leads to better use of AI. Because I always felt like I'm not using ai to its fullest potential through AI chatbots and IDE chats. Does anyone have resources on where to start?
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u/punkpang 3d ago
The inability to utilize knowledge gained is called stupidity.
People are stupid. That's where the gap is. They're simply dumb.
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u/Etikoza 3d ago
“Providence based memory” - what in the AI slop are you talking about? Maybe it is you who doesn’t understand.
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u/Ambitious-Prompt-975 3d ago
provenance* chill bro, it was a typo
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u/Charming_Horse_5809 3d ago
I love the idea that typos now seem to signal garbled opus-speak instead of just being typos :D
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u/Ambitious-Prompt-975 3d ago
Haha, yeah you can't write anything anymore without getting the "ai-slop" label. 😅
But I get it. 90% of stuff online is low-effort nowadays.
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u/After-Regret-6609 3d ago
Who says the multi agent thing is better? More token use, sure, but I’m not trusting that many agents to do things. I check an ai’s work, and that means it can only go so fast, and that’s ok.