My aha moment: why I’m actually so excited about AI

I’ve been using Claude a lot for personal projects for a while now, and today I finally realized why it grabs me so much. The usual take, “it saves time” and “it can code”, doesn’t fully explain it for me. Everyone has those topics they get completely absorbed in, even though hardly anyone else cares about them. You spend entire evenings on some tiny detail that must look ridiculous to outsiders, and you’d rather not bring it up in a bigger group. AI, on the other hand, just jumps right in. It knows the jargon, gets what I’m going for, suggests options I hadn’t even thought of, and sometimes takes it one step further. It never gets bored, never checks teh clock, and takes the fifth refinement just as seriously as the first. And its safe: nobody rolls their eyes, nobody talks behind your back afterwards. That’s it! AI isn’t a friend, I know that. But it feels a bit like a buddy with exactly the same nerdy interests, one you’d never have found otherwise. I think that’s what a lot of people subconsciously love about it, on top of the actual capabilities. On top of that, my ideas no longer die just because I can’t build them myself. You do have to keep it on track, since the AI goes off on a tangent now and then, but that’s well known (and maybe partly the fault of my lazy prompts). The biggest win in the end is clearly the result. But having someone along the way who just nerds out with you is, for me, an underrated part of the fascination. Anyone else feel the same?