6 ms·

> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing pro

by troupo 7mo ago

> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. They won't. Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature. > And eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model? No. Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble. 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.

cjbarber 7mo ago
> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature. 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.
- troupo 7mo ago
  > What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this. LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"? Or at "do my taxes"? > how to use Cowork. Yes, and I taught my mom how to use Apple Books, and have to re-teach her every time Apple breaks the interface. Ask your non-tech friends what they do with and how they feel about Cowork in a few weeks. > 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. How many users you see personalizing anything to their task? Why would they want every app to be personalized? There's insane value in consistency across apps and interfaces. How will apps personalize their UIs to every user? By collecting even more copious amounts of user data?
  - baq 7mo ago
    > Or at "do my taxes"? codex did my taxes this year (well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough)
    - William_BB 7mo ago
      > well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough You can't seriously believe laymen will try to implement their own tax calculators.
      - baq 7mo ago
        of course not. what I believe is that laymen will put all their tax docs into codex and tell it to 'do their taxes' and the tool will decide to implement the calculator, do the taxes and present only the final numbers. the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented.
        William_BB 7mo ago
        Yeah, good luck trusting the output!
        baq 7mo ago
        check back in a couple of years!
        William_BB 7mo ago
        Ah right! Reminds me of AGI by 2025 :D
        TeMPOraL 7mo ago
        > the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented. That's on company making the agentic harness. Hiding details of what computer does from the user is the original sin of this industry, and subsequent generations of developers and software companies keeps doubling down on it. (Case in point - I just downloaded the Codex app for Windows, and in the options I see it has two UI modes of operating, one of which is meant for "non coding" and apparently this means hiding the details of what the agent is doing. This is precisely where the layman is betrayed by the tool.)
skydhash 7mo ago
> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature. 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.
noelsusman 7mo ago
Just yesterday my non-technical spouse had to solve a moderately complex scheduling problem at work. She gave the various criteria and constraints to Claude and had a full solution within a few minutes, saving hours of work. It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python to implement a scheduling optimization algorithm. She only vaguely knows what Python is, but that didn't matter. She got what she needed. 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.
- paganel 7mo ago
  There's no such big opportunity, as the number of programmers' spouses is quite limited. Again, and as the GP rightly suggested, some of the HN-ers here need to go and touch some normie grass, so to speak. More to the point, nobody wants to be more efficient for the sake of being efficient, we all want to go to work, do our metaphorical 9 to 5 without consuming too much (intellectual and not only) energy, and then back home. In that regard AI is seen as an existential threat to that "lifestyle" and it will be treated as such by regular workers.
  - w2df 7mo ago
    correct. you cant trust this place for realistic takes - I had a post re. financial stuff downvoted when a former Investment Banker chimed in to back me up. Comical. Truly comical.
- troupo 7mo ago
  > Just yesterday my non-technical spouse > It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python And she knows those a hundred lines of python work correctly and give her correct result because in this instance Claude managed to produce a working result. What if it didn't? Would vague knowledge of Python have helped her? > 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. Even though I agree with the sentiment, we've tried non-coding coding how many times now? Once every 5 years? Throwing LLMs into the mix won't help much when in the end you leave the end user hanging, debugging problems and hunting for solutions.
a1j9o94 7mo ago
This is effectively how I treat my AI agents. A lot of the reason this doesn't work well for people today is due to context/memory/harness management that makes it too complex for someone to set up if they don't want a full time second job or just like to tinker. 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.
jhizzard 7mo ago
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by troupo 7mo ago

cjbarber 7mo ago

> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature. 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.

troupo 7mo ago
> What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this. LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"? Or at "do my taxes"? > how to use Cowork. Yes, and I taught my mom how to use Apple Books, and have to re-teach her every time Apple breaks the interface. Ask your non-tech friends what they do with and how they feel about Cowork in a few weeks. > 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. How many users you see personalizing anything to their task? Why would they want every app to be personalized? There's insane value in consistency across apps and interfaces. How will apps personalize their UIs to every user? By collecting even more copious amounts of user data?
- baq 7mo ago
  > Or at "do my taxes"? codex did my taxes this year (well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough)
  - William_BB 7mo ago
    > well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough You can't seriously believe laymen will try to implement their own tax calculators.
    - baq 7mo ago
      of course not. what I believe is that laymen will put all their tax docs into codex and tell it to 'do their taxes' and the tool will decide to implement the calculator, do the taxes and present only the final numbers. the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented.
      - William_BB 7mo ago
        Yeah, good luck trusting the output!
        baq 7mo ago
        check back in a couple of years!
        William_BB 7mo ago
        Ah right! Reminds me of AGI by 2025 :D
      - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
        > the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented. That's on company making the agentic harness. Hiding details of what computer does from the user is the original sin of this industry, and subsequent generations of developers and software companies keeps doubling down on it. (Case in point - I just downloaded the Codex app for Windows, and in the options I see it has two UI modes of operating, one of which is meant for "non coding" and apparently this means hiding the details of what the agent is doing. This is precisely where the layman is betrayed by the tool.)

skydhash 7mo ago

> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature. 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.

noelsusman 7mo ago

Just yesterday my non-technical spouse had to solve a moderately complex scheduling problem at work. She gave the various criteria and constraints to Claude and had a full solution within a few minutes, saving hours of work. It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python to implement a scheduling optimization algorithm. She only vaguely knows what Python is, but that didn't matter. She got what she needed. 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.

paganel 7mo ago
There's no such big opportunity, as the number of programmers' spouses is quite limited. Again, and as the GP rightly suggested, some of the HN-ers here need to go and touch some normie grass, so to speak. More to the point, nobody wants to be more efficient for the sake of being efficient, we all want to go to work, do our metaphorical 9 to 5 without consuming too much (intellectual and not only) energy, and then back home. In that regard AI is seen as an existential threat to that "lifestyle" and it will be treated as such by regular workers.
- w2df 7mo ago
  correct. you cant trust this place for realistic takes - I had a post re. financial stuff downvoted when a former Investment Banker chimed in to back me up. Comical. Truly comical.
troupo 7mo ago
> Just yesterday my non-technical spouse > It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python And she knows those a hundred lines of python work correctly and give her correct result because in this instance Claude managed to produce a working result. What if it didn't? Would vague knowledge of Python have helped her? > 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. Even though I agree with the sentiment, we've tried non-coding coding how many times now? Once every 5 years? Throwing LLMs into the mix won't help much when in the end you leave the end user hanging, debugging problems and hunting for solutions.

a1j9o94 7mo ago

This is effectively how I treat my AI agents. A lot of the reason this doesn't work well for people today is due to context/memory/harness management that makes it too complex for someone to set up if they don't want a full time second job or just like to tinker. 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.

jhizzard 7mo ago

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