Claude Fog

The same AI that will end all of humankind isn't able to solve some reasonable challenges. Let me preface this with a reminder that I'm just your average middle-aged Claude user. So..sure..maybe this is your typical ID10T situation. But, I'm thinking not. Two examples...

1. My mom's car lease is about to end. She's used 20% of the miles included in her 3-year lease. The car is in perfect condition. This is an attractive asset to her dealer. It's a great pre-owned resale. She gets a letter in the mail from the entity that financed her lease. They want to buy the car from her for $30k. She doesn't own the car. What's up? I guide her through the process of asking Claude to help figure this out. Claude provides a confident long-winded answer. I'll spare you the details. It was wrong and missed the whole dynamic of the situation. It took one text to a good friend who had been through the same situation with his stepmom to provide a coherent answer - my mom would only be getting the difference between the buyout price in the lease and the offer from the financing entity. The buyout price is always based on an expectation that all the miles have been used (in my mom's case 10k/yr). So, if you've driven the car a lot less (she has), it's worth more than the buyout price. Thank goodness for people brains.

2. My interaction with Claude (when doing anything EXCEPT coding/building) is like my interaction with a junior analyst or strategist that works for me. I was working with Claude to develop a framework to map the power orchestration space (what that is doesn't matter for this story). Again, Claude CoWork was very confident in its approach and narrative. As I dug into the framework and analysis, I found multiple explanations that were just gobbledygook. The kind of stuff that you read over and over to try to understand and then realize makes no sense. I also found logic errors in the framework and how Claude categorized companies in the framework. Eventually, we got there. I’d give Claude a B-.