I’m someone who tried squiggle out back when you had recently announced it. I liked it, and could see uses for it, but forgot about it. Since then I’ve continued to do my thinking/modeling of this style in jupyter notebooks.
I like the AI squiggle better, although it is frustrating in some ways (not making quite what I had in mind).
I tried using it to recreate some plots Claude had made for me recently in a conversation about risk modeling. I eventually got most of what I wanted, but more slowly and with more frustration than from just having Claude directly make interactive plots for me (where I can adjust the values with sliders to aee the results on the predictions).
So, I will continue trying to keep squiggle in mind for future tasks and try it again… But I expect Claude is going to get better at making charts directly on its own within a few months… So that’s a tough race to be in.
Yea, I think it’s a challenge to beat Claude/ChatGPT at many things. Lots of startups are trying now, and they are having wildly varying levels of success.
I think that Squiggle AI is really meant for some fairly specific use cases. Basically, if you want to output a kind of cost-effectiveness model that works well in Squiggle notebooks, and you’re focused on estimating things without too much functional complexity, it can be a good fit.
Custom charts can get messy. The Squiggle Components library comes with a few charts that we’ve spent time optimizing, but these are pretty specific. If you want fancy custom diagrams, you probably want to use JS directly, in which case environments like Claude’s make more sense.
Hmm. I wonder if it would make sense with Squiggle AI to give Claude some space for “freeform” diagrams coded in JS, based on the variables from the code… Might be worth experimenting with. Maybe too soon, but it’d probably work after the next upgrade (e.g. Claude 4)
Yea, I think there’s generally a lot of room for experimentation around here.
I very much hope that in the future, AI cools could be much more compositional, so you won’t need to work only in one ecosystem to get a lot of the benefits.
In that world, it’s also quite possible that Claude could call Squiggle AI for modeling, when is needed.
A different option I see is that we have slow tools like Squiggle AI that make large models that are expected to be useful for people later on. The results of these models, when interesting, will be cached and made publicly available on the web, for tools like Claude.
In general I think we want a world where the user doesn’t have to think about or know which tools are best in which situations. Instead that all happens under the hood.
I’m someone who tried squiggle out back when you had recently announced it. I liked it, and could see uses for it, but forgot about it. Since then I’ve continued to do my thinking/modeling of this style in jupyter notebooks.
I like the AI squiggle better, although it is frustrating in some ways (not making quite what I had in mind). I tried using it to recreate some plots Claude had made for me recently in a conversation about risk modeling. I eventually got most of what I wanted, but more slowly and with more frustration than from just having Claude directly make interactive plots for me (where I can adjust the values with sliders to aee the results on the predictions).
So, I will continue trying to keep squiggle in mind for future tasks and try it again… But I expect Claude is going to get better at making charts directly on its own within a few months… So that’s a tough race to be in.
Thanks for the info!
Yea, I think it’s a challenge to beat Claude/ChatGPT at many things. Lots of startups are trying now, and they are having wildly varying levels of success.
I think that Squiggle AI is really meant for some fairly specific use cases. Basically, if you want to output a kind of cost-effectiveness model that works well in Squiggle notebooks, and you’re focused on estimating things without too much functional complexity, it can be a good fit.
Custom charts can get messy. The Squiggle Components library comes with a few charts that we’ve spent time optimizing, but these are pretty specific. If you want fancy custom diagrams, you probably want to use JS directly, in which case environments like Claude’s make more sense.
Hmm. I wonder if it would make sense with Squiggle AI to give Claude some space for “freeform” diagrams coded in JS, based on the variables from the code… Might be worth experimenting with. Maybe too soon, but it’d probably work after the next upgrade (e.g. Claude 4)
Yea, I think there’s generally a lot of room for experimentation around here.
I very much hope that in the future, AI cools could be much more compositional, so you won’t need to work only in one ecosystem to get a lot of the benefits.
In that world, it’s also quite possible that Claude could call Squiggle AI for modeling, when is needed.
A different option I see is that we have slow tools like Squiggle AI that make large models that are expected to be useful for people later on. The results of these models, when interesting, will be cached and made publicly available on the web, for tools like Claude.
In general I think we want a world where the user doesn’t have to think about or know which tools are best in which situations. Instead that all happens under the hood.