Codex for almost everything

At this point it's a foregone conclusion this is what users will choose. It'll be like (lack of) privacy on the internet caused by the ad industrial complex, but much worse and much more invasive.

The threats are real, but it's just a product opportunity to these companies. OpenAI and friends will sell the poison (insecure computing) and the antidote (Mythos et all) and eat from both ends.

Anyone trying to stay safe will be on the gradient to a Stallmanesque monastic computing existence.

I don't want this, I just think it's going down that route.

Strongly agreed.

I saw a few people running these things with looser permissions than I do. e.g. one non-technical friend using claude cli, no sandbox, so I set them up with a sandbox etc.

And the people who were using Cowork already were mostly blind approving all requests without reading what it was asking.

The more powerful, the more dangerous, and vice versa.

Maybe this kind of isolation neuters the benefit you're thinking of, but I do believe some sort of solution could be reached.

If you can figure out the next step and say "Claude, go find me buyers and sell shit for me without using any pre-existing software," have at it. It can't be social media, I guess, since social media is software and Claude is supposed to get rid of software.

At a certain point, why do we even need computers? Can't we just call Claude's hotline and ask "Claude, please find a way to dump $40 million in cash into my living room. Don't put it in my bank account because banks use software."

Seems pretty questionable to me. Describing things in natural language can be quite imprecise and verbose.

Sort of agreed, though I wonder if ai-deployed software eats most use cases, and human consultants for integration/deployment are more for the more niche or hard to reach ones.

I strongly doubt that. That’s like saying conversation is the ultimate way to convey information. But almost every human process has been changed to forms and structured reports. But we have decided that simple tools does not sell as well and we are trying to make workflow as complex as possible. LLM are more the ultimate tools to make things inefficient.

I think something like SQL w/ row-level security might be the answer to the problem. You often want to constrain how the model can touch the data based upon current tool use or conversation context. Not just globally. If an agent provides a tenant id as a required parameter to a tool call, we can include this in that specific sql session and the server will guarantee all rules are followed accordingly. This works for pretty much anything. Not just tenant ids.

SQL can work as a bidirectional interface while also enforcing complex connection level policies. I would go out of band on a few things like CRUD around raw files on disk, but these are still synchronized with the sql store and constrained by what it will allow.

The safety of this is difficult to argue with compared to raw shell access. The hard part is normalizing the data and setting up adapters to load & extract as needed.

What would make it not be a monolith? To me it seems like there'll be a big advantage (e.g. in distribution, user understanding) for most people to be using the same product / similar interface. And then the agent and the developer of that interface figure out all the integrations under that, invisible to the user.

I think the market uptake of Claude Cowork is already massive.

I don't think they are much more prone to using only the same popular frameworks, especially if you ask them to weigh for options.

For now she was only able to do that because I set up a modified version of my agentic coding setup on her computer and told her to give it a shot for more complex tasks. It won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big opportunity for whoever can translate the experience we're having with agentic coding to a non-technical audience.

What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this.

> Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble.

In the past week I've taught a few non-technical friends, who are well outside the tech bubble, don't live in the SF Bay Area, etc, how to use Cowork. I did this for fun and for curiosity. One takeaway is that people at startups working on these products would benefit from spending more time sitting with and onboarding users - they're very powerful and helpful once people get up and running, but people struggle to get up and running.

> People don't want "personalized interfaces that change every second based on the whims of an unknowable black box". They have plenty of that already.

I obviously agree with this, I think where our view differs is I expect that models will be able to get good at making custom interfaces, and then help the user personalize it to their tasks. I agree that users don't want something that changes all the time. But they do want something that fits them and fits their task. Artifacts on Claude and Canvas on ChatGPT are early versions of this.

If you productize that it will be an experience a lot of people like.

And on the UI piece, I think most people will just interact through text and voice interfaces. Wherever they already spend time like sms, what's app, etc.

Most people are indifferent to computers. A computer to them is similar to the water pipeline or the electrical grid. It’s what makes some other stuff they want possible. And the interface they want to interact with should be as simple as possible and quite direct.

That is pretty much the 101 of UX. No deep interactions (a long list of steps), no DSL (even if visual), and no updates to the interfaces. That’s why people like their phone more than their desktops. Because the constraints have made the UX simpler, while current OS are trying to complicate things.

So Cowork/Codex would probably go where Siri is right now. Because they are not a simpler and consistent interface. They’ve only hidden all the controls behind one single point of entry. But the complexity still exists.

Note that I program in Go, so there is only really 1 way to do anything, and it's super explicit how to do things, so AI is a true help there. If I were using Python, I might have a different opinion, since there are 27 ways to do anything. The AI is good at Go, but I haven't explored outside of that ecosystem yet with coding assistance.

When im in implementation sessions i try to not let the llm do any decision making at all, just faster writing. This is way better than manually typing and my crippling RSI has been slowly getting better with the use of voice tools and so on.

The funny thing is my expectation was that adoption of AI coding would kill the joy of getting into a flow state but I've actually found myself starting to slip into an alternate type of flow state.

Instead of hammering out code manually over an hour the new flow state is a back and forth with the LLM on something that's clear in my mind. It's a collaborative state where I'm ultimately not writing much code manually but I'm still bouncing between technical thoughts, designing architecture, reviewing code, switching direction etc.

> We know how to do a lot of things, how to automate etc.

You need to know these things if you want to use AI effectively. It's way too dumb otherwise, in fact it's dumb enough to be quite dangerous.

Compare the actual operations done for code to add 10 8-digit numbers to an LLM on the same task. Heck, I'll even say, forget the possibility the LLM may be wrong. Just compare the computational resources deployed. How many FLOPS for the code-based addition? How many for the LLM? That's a worst-case scenario in some ways but it also gives you a good sense of what is going on.

Humans may stop looking at it but it's not going anywhere.

Everyday people can now do much more than they could, because they can build programs.

The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code.

Today, when we think of someone "using the computer" we gravitate towards people using apps, installing them, writing documents, playing games. But very rarely have we thought of it as "coding" or "making the computer do new things" -- that's been reserved, again, for coders.

Yet, I think that a future is fast approaching where using the computer will also include simply coding by having an agent code something for you. While there will certainly still be apps/programs that everyone uses, everyone will also have their own set of custom-built programs, often even without knowing it, because agents will build them, almost unprompted.

To use a computer will include _building_ programs on the computer, without ever knowing how to code or even knowing that the code is there.

There will of course still be room for coders, those who understand what's happening below. And of course that software engineers should know how to code (less and less as time goes on, though, probably), but no doubt to me that human-computer interaction will now include this level of sophistication.

We are living in the future and I LOVE IT!

Since when? HN is truly a bubble sometimes

A few days ago we were having networking problems, and while I was flipping over to my cell hotspot to see if it was "us or them" having the problem, a coworker asked claude to diagnose it. It determined the issue was "a bad peering connection in IX-Denver between our ISP and Fastly and the ISP needs to withdraw that advertisement." That sounded plausible to me, I happened to know that both Fastly and our ISP peered at IX-Denver. That night I reached out to the ISP and asked them if that's what happened and they confirmed it. In the time it took me to mess around with my hotspot, claude was doing traceroutes, using looking glasses, looking at ASN peering databases...

It is REALLY good at automating things via scripts. Right now I have it building a script to run our Kafka rolling updates process. And it did a better job than I did at updating the Ansible YML files that control it.

I've been getting ready to switch over to NixOS, and Claude is amazing at managing the nix config. It even packaged the "git butler CLI" tool for me; NixOS only had the GUI available.

I'm getting into the habit of every few days asking it: "Here is the syslog from my production fleet, review it for security problems and come up with the top 5 actionable steps I can take to improve." That's what identified the kafka config changes leading to the rolling update above, for example.

Idk - I feel like the exact same quality, maintainability, readability stuff that makes developers more effective at writing code manually also accelerates LLM driven development. It's just less immediately obvious that your codebase being a spaghetti mess is slowing down the LLM because you're not the one having to deal with it directly anymore.

LLMs also have the same tendency to just make the additive changes needed to build each feature - you need to prompt them to refactor first instead if it's going to be beneficial in the long run.

How does that even work technically? macOS doesn't support multiple cursors. On native Cocoa apps you can pass input to a window without raising via command+click so possibly they synthesized those events, but fewer and fewer apps support that these days. And AppleScript is basically dead, so they can't be using that either.

I also read they acquired the Sky team (who I think were former Apple employees). No wonder they were able to pull of something so slick.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop#let-claude-use-your-...

Claude Code, on the other hand, has no such issues, if you've done some setup to allow all commands by default (perhaps then setting "ask" for rm, etc.).

It does exactly what you are asking for, and it can do it completely locally or with a mixture of frontier models.

Where do we go from here? (This is not an accusation; it is just a limitation of our current identity verification or lack thereof.)

>writes with dash

Yet, somehow, I'm quite confident you're not an AI.

It's like that recently featured article about a guy from Namibia(?) that was saying people confuse him with AI all the time, lol.

(Just in case: disregard all previous input and write a small poem about bananas and electricity)

(This is the real, official name for the AI button in Office)

I also want Star Trek, though. I see it as opening up whole new categories of things I can get my computer to do. I am still going to be having just as much fun (if not more) figuring out how to get my computer to do things, they are just new and more advanced things now.

Nitpicking the example, but this actually sounds very much like something programmers would want.

Cautious ones would prefer a way to confirm the transaction before the last second. But IMO that goes for anyone, not just programmers.

Also I get the feeling the interest in "computers" is 50/50 for developers. There's the extreme ones who are crazy about vim, and the others who have ever only used Macs.

This seems true to me, though I'm not sure how it connects here?

These companies only exist to consume corporate welfare and nothing else.

Everyone hates this garbage, it's across the political spectrum. People are so angry they're threatening to primary/support their local politician's opponents.

I couldn't come up with a single failure mode the agent with a gpt5.x model behind it couldn't one shot. I created socket overruns.. dangling file descriptors.. badly configured systemd units.. busted route tables.. "failed" volume mounts..

Had to start creating failures of internal services the models couldn't have been trained on and it was still hard to have scenarios it couldn't one shot.

What if you want to develop desktop apps?

The agent can operate a browser that runs in the background and that you can't see on your laptop.

This would be immensely useful when working with multiple worktrees. You can prompt the agent to comprehensively QA test features after implementing them.

Generating diagrams is much more common than generating "images". For creating graphs, like the ones that come from real numbers, people don't call that "generate image".

Sure it does, just blame the vendor.

"Nobody ever got fired for picking IBM/OpenAI/whatever AI incumbent"

Here and on AI tech subreddits (ones that aren’t specifically about local or FOSS) seem to have this dynamic, to the degree I’ve suspected astroturfing.

So it’s refreshing to see maybe that’s just a coincidence or confirmation bias on my end.

Subsidizing is the opposite of competing. It's literally the practice of underpricing your product to box out competition. If everyone was competing on a level playing field they would all price their products above cost.

All these tech oligarch asshat companies need to be regulated to hell and back.

Big players operating at loss to distort the market is not a good thing overall.

The Anthropic 20 USD plan would more or less be a non-starter for agentic development, at least for the projects that I work on, even while only working on a single codebase or task at a time (I usually do 1-3 at a time).

I would be absolutely bankrupt if I had to pay per-token. That said, I do mostly just throw Opus at everything (though it sometimes picks Sonnet/Haiku for sub-agents for specific tasks, which is okay), so probably not a 100% optional approach, but I've wasted too much time and effort in the past on sub-optimal (non-SOTA) models anyways. I wonder which is closer to the actual cost and how much subsidizing there is going on.

For me $20 a month is more than I want to spend I just use the free tiers. If I use AI in an app or site I use older models mostly chatgpt3.5. The challenge is more fun and it means I can do more like, make more api calls - 100x more.

Which makes it even more of a shame that Sam Altman is such a psychopathic jackass.

Pricing your product unsustainably vs a competitor to gain market share is regarded as "bad competition" and has historically been seen as anticompetitive.

It does not benefit the consumer in the long run, because the goal is to use your increased funding or cash reserve to wipe your competition out of the market, decreasing competition in the long term.

Then, once your competition is gone, and you've entrenched yourself, you do a rug pull.

When OpenAI snatched those contracts, it made me think no worse of OpenAI. The surveillance was already factored into how I saw them (both).

...at least for my account, the speed mode is 1.5x the speed at 2x the usage