4 ms·

> 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

> 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
        Yeah, good luck trusting the output!
        baq 6mo ago
        check back in a couple of years!
        William_BB 6mo ago
        Ah right! Reminds me of AGI by 2025 :D
      - TeMPOraL 6mo 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.)
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- jeffgreco 6mo ago
  > LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"? Yes? === edit: Just tested it with that exact prompt on Claude. It asked me who I was traveling with, what type of trip and budget (with multiple choice buttons) and gave me a detailed itinerary with links to buy the flights ( https://www.kayak.com/flights/ORD-LIS/2026-06-13/OPO-ORD/2026-06-27/2adults?sort=bestflight_a https://www.kayak.com/flights/ORD-LIS/2026-06-13/OPO-ORD/202... )
  - troupo 6mo ago
    I'd love to try and replicate, but I'm not letting any of these tools anywhere near a real browser and capabilites :)
  - mazurnification 6mo ago
    Perfect - and this use case will be enshitificated first. LLM provider will charge small fee for proper recommendation placing. Got to recoup investment.
- roel_v 6mo ago
  "LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"?" Of course they are. I gave one a similar prompt a few weeks ago, albeit quite a bit more verbose (actually I just dictated it, train of thought, with couple of 'eh actually, forget what I just said about x, do y instead") and although I wasn't brave enough to give it my credit card and finalize the bookings, it would have paid for the bookings I had it set up for me, had I done that. I gave it some RL constraints, like "we're meeting friends in place xyz at such and such date, make sure we're there then" and it did everything from watching we wouldn't be spending too many hours driving per day to check that hotels are kid friendly to things to do and see and what public holidays there are so that we know when supermarkets close early and a bunch of details I wouldn't have thought of. It checked my (and my wife's) calendar, checked what I had going on work wise, etc. That is a fully solved 'problem' man. LLMs will run the whole thing for you. Just provide it with the login details to booking websites and you're off to the races. I did have it upgrade the car, even if that pushed the cost outside the budget I gave it. Next time it'll know LOL.
  - suddenlybananas 6mo ago
    >although I wasn't brave enough to give it my credit card and finalize the bookings So it's not trustworthy enough for you, someone clearly interested in the hype of LLMs.
    - roel_v 6mo ago
      It's a matter of getting used to things. We're only a few weeks further, I maybe would have given it now. It'd need some way to keep it private I guess, maybe I could have used a one off CC number. Those are just technicalities at this point. It got me to the point where I just had to enter my details and click a few confirm buttons. Those are solved problems. I'm not sure why the denialists here are saying those things are 'impossible'. I mean I've seen them happen, what do you want me to say? Claiming this is 'just hype' is ostrich behavior. I've been playing with an abliterated Gemma 4 yesterday on my local machine. Yes it would take longer and require a bunch of harness fiddling, but even if OpenAI and Anthropic would collapse tomorrow, I'm confident I could still do the exact same thing the day after with with what I have right now on my hard disk. I'm not sure what you want me to tell you mate. Yes there's rough edges to work out or just in general workflows to improve but the ideas are way beyond 'proof of concept'. There's people like myself using these things for purposes that 6 months ago were science fiction. I don't care if you believe me or not, I'm just some dude on the internet, but level of delusion on how 'inferior' these models (with proper harnessing) are is mind boggling for someone like me who sees it happen literally 20 centimeters to the side on my screen from where I see people claim that those things are impossible.

troupo 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
      Yeah, good luck trusting the output!
      - baq 6mo ago
        check back in a couple of years!
        William_BB 6mo ago
        Ah right! Reminds me of AGI by 2025 :D
    - TeMPOraL 6mo 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.)
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
jeffgreco 6mo ago
> LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"? Yes? === edit: Just tested it with that exact prompt on Claude. It asked me who I was traveling with, what type of trip and budget (with multiple choice buttons) and gave me a detailed itinerary with links to buy the flights ( https://www.kayak.com/flights/ORD-LIS/2026-06-13/OPO-ORD/2026-06-27/2adults?sort=bestflight_a https://www.kayak.com/flights/ORD-LIS/2026-06-13/OPO-ORD/202... )
- troupo 6mo ago
  I'd love to try and replicate, but I'm not letting any of these tools anywhere near a real browser and capabilites :)
- mazurnification 6mo ago
  Perfect - and this use case will be enshitificated first. LLM provider will charge small fee for proper recommendation placing. Got to recoup investment.
roel_v 6mo ago
"LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"?" Of course they are. I gave one a similar prompt a few weeks ago, albeit quite a bit more verbose (actually I just dictated it, train of thought, with couple of 'eh actually, forget what I just said about x, do y instead") and although I wasn't brave enough to give it my credit card and finalize the bookings, it would have paid for the bookings I had it set up for me, had I done that. I gave it some RL constraints, like "we're meeting friends in place xyz at such and such date, make sure we're there then" and it did everything from watching we wouldn't be spending too many hours driving per day to check that hotels are kid friendly to things to do and see and what public holidays there are so that we know when supermarkets close early and a bunch of details I wouldn't have thought of. It checked my (and my wife's) calendar, checked what I had going on work wise, etc. That is a fully solved 'problem' man. LLMs will run the whole thing for you. Just provide it with the login details to booking websites and you're off to the races. I did have it upgrade the car, even if that pushed the cost outside the budget I gave it. Next time it'll know LOL.
- suddenlybananas 6mo ago
  >although I wasn't brave enough to give it my credit card and finalize the bookings So it's not trustworthy enough for you, someone clearly interested in the hype of LLMs.
  - roel_v 6mo ago
    It's a matter of getting used to things. We're only a few weeks further, I maybe would have given it now. It'd need some way to keep it private I guess, maybe I could have used a one off CC number. Those are just technicalities at this point. It got me to the point where I just had to enter my details and click a few confirm buttons. Those are solved problems. I'm not sure why the denialists here are saying those things are 'impossible'. I mean I've seen them happen, what do you want me to say? Claiming this is 'just hype' is ostrich behavior. I've been playing with an abliterated Gemma 4 yesterday on my local machine. Yes it would take longer and require a bunch of harness fiddling, but even if OpenAI and Anthropic would collapse tomorrow, I'm confident I could still do the exact same thing the day after with with what I have right now on my hard disk. I'm not sure what you want me to tell you mate. Yes there's rough edges to work out or just in general workflows to improve but the ideas are way beyond 'proof of concept'. There's people like myself using these things for purposes that 6 months ago were science fiction. I don't care if you believe me or not, I'm just some dude on the internet, but level of delusion on how 'inferior' these models (with proper harnessing) are is mind boggling for someone like me who sees it happen literally 20 centimeters to the side on my screen from where I see people claim that those things are impossible.