Yes it's surprising to see so much cynicism for something that has a real possibility of making so many people so much more productive. My mental model of the average excel user is of someone who doesn't care about excel, but cares about their business. If Claude can help them use excel and learn about their business faster, then this should make the world more productive and we all get richer. Claude can make mistakes, but it's not clear to me why people think that the ratio of results to mistakes will get worse here. I think there are many possible reasons why this could not work out, but many of the comments here just seem like unfounded cynicism.

Yes I feel that when to apply certain techniques is frequently under-discussed. But I can't blame people for err-ing on the side of 'do everything properly' - as this makes life more pleasant in teams. Although I think if you squint, the principle still applies to your example. The further you get from the 'core' of your platform/application/business/what-have-you, the less abstract you need to be.

This is true of an idealized perfect free market with perfectly rational consumers, but not so much in the real world. The simple fact that profits on phones haven't been competed to zero is enough to show it's not a perfect free market. I don't think the average consumer spends much time considering the long-term health of the app ecosystem when they purchase a phone. Maybe the wisdom of the crowds is correct here and it's truly not important or beneficial, but to me it seems more likely that it's outside the bounded rationality of most consumers. Markets have blind-spots and they tend to be short sighted.

As a counterpoint, I bought a kobo (clara?) two years ago, and ended up hating it. It was a lot of minor things that added up. Spuriously turning on in my pocket/bag constantly and ruining progress (the power-on button was poorly placed and very sensitive). Forcing a single font for every book. Page turns were often noticeably slow. Libby/Overdrive integration often spuriously re-downloaded books and lost my progress. It was never clear to me whether I got unlucky with a bad device or not. But none of my issues screamed 'broken' rather than just 'annoying' so I assumed it was normal. I dislike the kindle ecosystem as much as the next person, but I've found the hardware so much better and more reliable that I ended up going back to kindle. The positive vibes in these comments are leading me to reevaluate and think that maybe something was indeed wrong with my device.

Maybe it's just semantics, but it doesn't feel so wrong to me. The main nuance is that this statement needs to be true over time as the spec changes. Developers try to write maintainable code so that their code will still work/adapt to spec when the spec changes. Maintainable code feels less important in a world where AI can rewrite a growing portion of your code quickly. I find myself accepting a much lower bar for non-critical parts of my projects with the knowledge that claude can rewrite it quickly if needs change. But disclaimer: I haven't yet used this technique in teams. The norms on usage aren't there yet.