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I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user.

I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them. Managing codebases, etc. is still a hassle though. 90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use. I think we'll see something similar with coding agents.

LPisGood 5mo ago
I was just thinking about that earlier this week. Claude can write code pretty well, but there are just a few tasks that I need to do to orchestrate everything. If it could do those tasks well even some of the time it would be about 10x more useful.
dbuxton 5mo ago
We’re (harriethq.com) trying to do this by reframing it as a “provisioning” challenge - how do you get your connectors installed on non-technical desktops, how do you give some easy pre-bake recipes that wake them from their dogmatic slumber Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.
ignoramous 5mo ago
> whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user You mean UX? Isn't Claude Cowork supposed to be 'Claude but for normies'? As for Claude Code / OpenAI Codex for non-programmers, believe Replit, Loveable, & others are trying & succeeding. WhatsApp comes to mind in how its sole focus on replacing SMS (rather than Skype/AOL/MSN Messenger/YChat/GChat) meant it had no (user-facing) password/username, no elaborate signup, no login, no chat/friend requests, no sync etc. & became the biggest social network right under the nose of well resourced competitors with worldwide distribution, like Google & Facebook.
- pmontra 5mo ago
  Business wise, neither Google nor Facebook were impacted IMHO. Google sells the tools that WhatsApp need to run and Facebook bought WhatsApp and kept its FB users in house. Probably phone operators were not impacted too: SMSes bundled with flat plans are still flat plans and Europe style unlimited calls + 100 SMS per month plans are still there and those SMSes are still mostly unused. So we could have a killer app and yet nothing changes in the flow of money around it. UX wise, WhatsApp is a big improvement over SMS. Vocal messages, I'm not a fan of them. A waste of my time.
  - graemep 5mo ago
    Google was impacted: their chat product is pretty much dead. Mobile network operators lost the profits (at prices that were pretty much pure margin) they had on pay as you go messages, and messages not included in flat plans (e.g. overseas SMS's). They also lost a huge amount on highly profitable overseas calls. Those of us with family in other countries save a lot of money by using Whatsapp and similar instead of phone calls.
    - com 5mo ago
      WhatsApp and other over the top messaging and calling apps destroyed “the rivers of gold” that the telcos had in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Net neutrality was triggered by their attempts to block VOIP and messenger apps. I knew one telco who made €3Bn clear profit a year from 2 Dell servers and a team of five to keep SMS messages flowing. Their billing infrastructure was bigger, much bigger than the SMS servers.
olliem36 5mo ago
I agree and that's what i'm working on (for businesses) - an all-one-one consolidated AI application that's setup and ready for non-technical users. It's called Zenning AI - we're a small team in London, testing it with a few companies at the moment!
edf13 5mo ago
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lanyard-textile 5mo ago
I am building a product in that space :) It's targeted for creatives atm. For the few in private testing, it's been amazing what they're able to do with the little tooling I've given them. It is a legitimate change in their daily drive.
- operatingthetan 5mo ago
  >I am building a product in that space :) I don't know anyone not building a product in that space
  - endofreach 5mo ago
    So, what are you building in that space?
  - lanyard-textile 5mo ago
    I think everyone is making bespoke versions of what they think people want. It all feels gimmicky and dev oriented. I have a vision for what will be the next household ChatGPT: 1. An actually frictionless way of keeping the human in the loop. My product is primarily targeting that: Your tools should feel like an extension of you, not replacing you. 2. Juggling work. I feel like what I'm making here is the secret sauce, so keeping a hush on it :) 3. Keeping all your work in one place. Drawing, sketching, developing, emailing, planning, writing; there is no reason to depend on other apps if you have one place that does it all, and it's the best offering among them. Edit with some follow up thoughts -- I think what I'm trying to make is best summarized as claude code for non-developers (that's what I put in my YC application), but I think what I'm trying to make doesn't quite even have a developer equivalent. There's not an environment you can go into right now and say "after this builds every single time, deploy to this machine" and it actually seamlessly does that. The tech is there but making it a whole Factorio-esque operation is still very manual -- and that's what I'm solving.
    - lukan 5mo ago
      "I feel like what I'm making here is the secret sauce" Good for your feelings, but I feel the same for my work .. The main problem is still, agents are not reliable and what normal (and dev) people really want, is to have them reliable. Or well, tools to manage unreliable agents in a more clear way.
deleted 5mo ago
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ageitgey 5mo ago
> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is that these people just ask Claude to do whatever it is they need done. Codebase needs managing? They just ask Claude to do it. No idea how to deploy an app? They just ask Claude to do it. Any app built on top of this stack to 'make it easier' is competing with 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'.
- nicce 5mo ago
  > Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) The drug is scary when everyone is depending on it. I wonder what is future like.
  - antihero 5mo ago
    Our company started monitoring our Claude usage so I've started coding personal stuff manually again and it's...really fun!
  - BoredPositron 5mo ago
    same was said about electricity.
  - safety1st 5mo ago
    Seems far less scary to me than, say, building an electrical grid in a cold climate, where if it fails for a few days people start to die. Oh wait...
    - coldtea 5mo ago
      It's the same, on steroids.
    - M95D 5mo ago
devsda 5mo ago
> Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them. This is probably fine as long as the code is acting on local resources. The moment you have vibe coded software interacting with shared state or database the risk increases exponentially and all it takes to have a bad day is a poorly worded prompt from one of those users. Some oversight by humans or automated guardrails will probably reduce those instances.
- eecc 5mo ago
  > Claude, fix the bug. Make no mistakes. /s
  - otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
    You forgot to add "you are an expert software engineer with PhD level architecture insights".
    - devsda 5mo ago
      haha..After all "prompt engineering" is the mystic art of magecraft that uses forbidden incantations to summon the souls of special experts and make them possess our computers to do our bidding.
      - sersi 5mo ago
        Sometimes watered down though. When I summon the soul of Linus, he is nowhere near as scathing or biting as the original :)
robbomacrae 5mo ago
I'm trying to do this with orcabot.com A figma like dashboard for turning ClaudeCode, Gemini Cli, Codex into an OpenClaw but with security measures to break the lethal trifecta while running on a VM. But it's not quite there in terms of usability. I agree that is the hardest part of the equation. It's something I'm constantly experimenting with and haven't found the solution to it yet. Open to feedback!
vasco 5mo ago
Whoever does it everyone else will just prompt the same UX.
Hamuko 5mo ago
I wouldn't want to build a business that was so dependent on a massive third-party that can either cut off my access or copy my design at any time of their choosing.
- PAndreew 5mo ago
  I was thinking about this and there are several aspects that can still make this viable. 1) AI labs are incentivised to increase token consumption because literally that's their product. The only thing they sell AFIAK are tokens (and maybe a teensy bit of user data). So if you build a product that is actively reducing token consumption (which they simply cannot do without hurting themselves even if their marketing fluff says otherwise) you'll save large amounts of money for your customers and they'll choose you. 2) Big providers want to funnel every prompt into their servers. If you're in a regulated market or simply don't want to share every detail with an American or Chinese megacorp you are in trouble. BUT open weight models are now quite capable for "small business stuff" and they can be self hosted. If you can bundle this into your service, in other words actually care about their privacy, they will choose you. Even more so if you're in Europe.
  - mannanj 5mo ago
    they have that incentive until they do not. After you have given them enough data of all your best ideas, products, etc and they use the non-training data you opted to share with them, to create a competing product, then it was no ones fault but your own for being gullible and naive into thinking they wouldn't use your data to compete with you.
dnnddidiej 5mo ago
Lovable?
yordan_kavalov 5mo ago
Yes, totally agree. Spent a few years in operations consulting and our clients' people were doing such amounts of mind-numbing repetitive work you wouldn't believe. Funny thing is, they are so used to it, they don't realize how wasteful it is. Yet, they are "afraid" of AI and new technologies in general, because it is something new and unfamiliar. However, when you show them something simple, e.g. how to write an Excel formula, they feel extremely motivated and empowered. So yes, if anyone can make AI feel less "scary" and approachable so that ordinary non-tech-savvy people can click around and see how they can automate some basic stuff, it will make them feel they have superpowers.
disillusioned 5mo ago
We're building something along these lines, but since our roots are a consulting business, we're still building around the idea that there needs to be an expert integrator doing the front-loading work of discovery/decomposition/scoring of tasks/implementing them as those agents. These tools are terrifying to anyone not quite technical, and it turns out, people are bad at decomposing their own work, let alone describing it in a box with a blinking cursor. We're obviously going to be holding ourselves back in terms of scale and in terms of not being a "true" SaaS with this approach, but my thesis is that we get much higher quality results and higher compliance/activation and can charge more for the bespoke model backed by our own platform.
mettamage 5mo ago
> I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. I haven't tried it, or know a lot about it, but isn't this the whole claw thing?
- raincole 5mo ago
  Depending on what an average user looks like in your mind. For me openclaw is the opposite of a tool designed for an average user. ChatGPT/Claude's web ui is much more like something for average user, tbh.
tgv 5mo ago
True story, heard yesterday from a consultant who was working with some VP type (not a large company, but still high management): VP uploads a spreadsheet to Claude and tells it to remove column F. The power of Excel is not what it was. Nor is the power of ordinary thought.
fooker 5mo ago
Microsoft is trying this with copilot, but they are calling everything copilot so YMMV.
brainless 5mo ago
I really believe that the Spreadsheets UX is great for mainstream users and that is what drives me for my coding agent that uses the sheets UX: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo https://github.com/brainless/nocodo Super early stage but I am really happy to read your comment.
insin 5mo ago
I don't think it needs to specifically be a coding agent for the average user, creating apps for whatever they want to do, just something that can use code and has appropriate access for what they're already asking it to do (instead of the model bullshitting to them that it can do it, annoying them), and some way to make it repeatable when needed, like skills. I'm currently doing something like this in the internal model-independent LLM chat app I work on at a F100, specifically targeted at our everyday users. <input type="file" webkitdirectory> lets the user give the model read and write access to a local folder (and OPFS lets us reuse the same fs tools we give the model for files manually attached to the chat, or for files tools want to create if they haven't granted folder access). Every time we used to release a new version it was "still can't handle the 6MB Excel file I drop into it" when that was being extracted to CSV and added to context - now it can poke about in the big Excel file directly with SheetJS to pull the sheets/headers and inspect the shape of the data, and use locally sandboxed code execution to write code against either extracted data or the spreadsheet itself via SheetJS for pivot tables and such (all locally - none of which need go into the context). The base models are good enough at tool calling (I really mean Claude, though, the GPTs just go on a tear calling tools with no context for the user) they're already decent at automating stuff for the user without a dedicated harness (our default system prompt is still "You are a helpful AI assistant", lol). Add tools for Graph API stuff, and now it can pull the nightly batch file from a support inbox, unzip the spreadsheet within, diff it against yesterday's and generate an import file for new users and draft an email to welcome them, something that used to be a daily support task (which I'd already automated most of - but now you don't need a dev for this kind of thing). Or go find the big 450,000+ row spreadsheet that's being automated somewhere on SharePoint, pull it down in 150,000 row chunks (Graph Excel REST API limit) and write code to go figure out whatever the user is asking. Having implemented and used it, I like this setup so much it kinda ruined Claude.ai and ChatGPT.com for me, so I've hooked up similar access for them using a browser extension to add the folder picker input, with the extension talking to a local server to tell it which folder to give access to, and Claude/ChatGPT talking to the same server over MCP via a CloudFlare Tunnel to work with the selected folder.
whiplash451 5mo ago
> a UI that makes claude code accessible Isn’t that literally Claude’s web UI?
- bstsb 5mo ago
  while there are some tools available for the web UI, like building small React apps or making diagrams, it doesn't have the same loop as Claude Code in terms of iteratively building or fixing
rib3ye 5mo ago
Non-engineer average user here: this is what cursor is for!
- dakolli 5mo ago
  The average person isn't going to be using a shitty vscode fork.
  - davidgomes 5mo ago
    https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-3 https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-3 You should check out Cursor 3 :)
skydhash 5mo ago
> 90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use. I think we'll see something similar with coding agents. If you look closely, people we already creating databases and doing computation. But on paper. Spreadsheet software move the medium to the digital and with that brings a lot of convenience. Same with email, instant chat, and shopping on the web. The killer app is not about bringing something new, but making an old problem easy to solve. The issue with LLMs is that it makes errors. Uncontrollably. And even if you can spot the obvious ones, there’s always some you won’t be able to catch unless you’re a subject expert. I’ve never seen a random people willing to monitor a piece of tech.
ninjagoo 5mo ago
> killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user That would be a capable 'personal assistant', or 'executive assistant', of 'chief of staff'. Why? because the point is, just like in real life, to abstract away the complexity, irrespective of domain. "Average user" implies someone not skilled or savvy in the domain you're thinking of. For a medical doctor, the 'average user' is not-a-doctor. For a technologist, the average user is not-a-technologist. For an insurance specialist, an average user is not-an-insurance-specialist. Etc. etc. The personal assistant, exec assistant or chief of staff are themselves not necessarily experts in any domain, but they do rely on specialists to get stuff done. So the UI for this killer app is basically voice input, keyboard input, camera input (mirros of human output) in the user's language with natural language interaction, and the output is voice and monitor/screen, and possibly a robotic arm/hand/body (mirrors of human input). Anything more complex than that would require tailoring it to a domain/domains. If you doubt this analysis, think of all those folks for whom the IE/Chrome icon was/is "The Internet". Sure, you can go one level deeper with having them put in URLs, or operate email through the aol/gmail bookmark or desktop icon, maybe open documents/files from 'My Documents', but are they going to go any deeper than that, for the 'average user'?
deleted 5mo ago
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giarc 5mo ago
>90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use. I really thought Airtable would take off because it was even more of a "database that a normal person could actually use".
lightbulbish 5mo ago
This feels like sort of what openclaw is ^^ helping out in real estate/prop management right now and have been thinking same things
pastorhudson 5mo ago
Claude has an excel addon that is really good it can control everything in excel.
peder 5mo ago
> a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. It'll just be power users. We're moving toward a world of significantly fewer analysts and more into "Super SMEs" that can actually learn tools like Claude and manage enormous complexity with them. Just giving average users these tools will produce garbage. This example from Claude is so contrived and any business analyst can see how a process that requires uploading additional data will fail. You can't expect users that don't even know their own data to be able to make this thing work. There will be no "average" user in the future. It'll be multi-disciplinary SMEs that are extremely creative and knowledgeable about their businesses.
- z2 5mo ago
  Sadly I feel the Excel analogy holds still, where maybe 80% of its users can't write a SUMIF() formula or make a pivot table to save their lives, yet they will happily use Excel every day as digital grid paper. Meanwhile Microsoft made a lot of money selling Excel licenses.
  - originalvichy 5mo ago
    It’s my favorite analogy against the cliche LLM will revolutionize all white collar work. Excel is probably the most powerful business application most people have used, but as you said, people only scratch the surface. No LLM magic will make people more fluent with software. Sadly it’s a combination of not knowing what you don’t know, and time pressure from the employer. My analogy usually ends by saying that if the government mandated 200 hours of Excel courses, it would probably be a faster and cheaper productivity leap than adding an LLM into everything.
- joshspankit 5mo ago
  Yes but I think you’re underestimating “average users”. If we talk about the median, then probably you’re right, but if we talk about “the group of people clustered around the average” I think there’s a lot of untapped potential, especially in people who assumed data and programming were unknowable/impossible and have therefore been held back by “good” tools like excel
tlogan 5mo ago
Maybe. The reason I think it might not be true is that some people are simply not wired to be developers: to think analytically. Learning how to type commands and use a terminal is not something people cannot already learn right now. And that was the way before. I think the real killer app is making marketing and other non development (non analytical) work better. In case of marketing, we have tried many AI tools for marketing, and so far they mostly make campaigns more generic, less exciting, and often worse. They help a little but you need to careful that they do not to make it worse.
order-matters 5mo ago
i dont think it is possible. it is not a tool they need but a training session on how to make a basic developer environment and a basic workflow on how to go from sitting at the computer to contributing work to the project back to exiting the project and using the computer as normal. excel isnt used because it's a database, it is because you can do things in it in relatively unstructured ways and reference things youve already done with a click. the future of databasing is bringing more spreadsheet UI to the database, not bringing more users away from spreadsheets. with AI i agree there could be some sort of UI that could pop off that leverages it well, but im not sure its going to be t bring users closer to coding. I think it is going to look more like a project management tool than anything else. i mean shit, it might even just be an excel add-on because excel is still where the data is
peheje 5mo ago
Maybe the end state of computing is not humans learning how to speak to computers, but computers learning how to speak to humans. Think the movie Her 2013. OS1 it's called.
Aeroi 5mo ago
i'm working on something tangenially with cloud coding agents to bring the workflow to mobile. the breakthrough for me was realizing that the IDE isn't needed anymore and cloud repos + sandboxes open up the ability to continue working from anywhere. mouse.dev
mNovak 5mo ago
Lately I've been thinking that UI really needs to include the equivalent of a screenshare meeting. Ideally you could click through an example of a software flow Claude's never seen before, with a few quick notes, and have it reliably work. These narrow integrations with specific software suites seems like a dead end.
MaxLeiter 5mo ago
This is one reason I think openai releasing a phone makes sense If they can build an integrated AI assistant (what Siri should be) that can spin up and call agents it will be big (or it will flop but my money is on big if it’s the easiest way to use agents in your daily life)
kruxigt 5mo ago
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FlyThruTheSun 5mo ago
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redanddead 5mo ago
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jackzhuo 5mo ago
Absolutely! Excel is the ultimate business system because it’s a database that anyone can actually use. Excel is the best because it gives people the power to manage data without needing to be an expert.
codesentinel 5mo ago
[flagged]

LPisGood 5mo ago

I was just thinking about that earlier this week. Claude can write code pretty well, but there are just a few tasks that I need to do to orchestrate everything. If it could do those tasks well even some of the time it would be about 10x more useful.

dbuxton 5mo ago

We’re (harriethq.com) trying to do this by reframing it as a “provisioning” challenge - how do you get your connectors installed on non-technical desktops, how do you give some easy pre-bake recipes that wake them from their dogmatic slumber Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.

ignoramous 5mo ago

> whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user You mean UX? Isn't Claude Cowork supposed to be 'Claude but for normies'? As for Claude Code / OpenAI Codex for non-programmers, believe Replit, Loveable, & others are trying & succeeding. WhatsApp comes to mind in how its sole focus on replacing SMS (rather than Skype/AOL/MSN Messenger/YChat/GChat) meant it had no (user-facing) password/username, no elaborate signup, no login, no chat/friend requests, no sync etc. & became the biggest social network right under the nose of well resourced competitors with worldwide distribution, like Google & Facebook.

pmontra 5mo ago
Business wise, neither Google nor Facebook were impacted IMHO. Google sells the tools that WhatsApp need to run and Facebook bought WhatsApp and kept its FB users in house. Probably phone operators were not impacted too: SMSes bundled with flat plans are still flat plans and Europe style unlimited calls + 100 SMS per month plans are still there and those SMSes are still mostly unused. So we could have a killer app and yet nothing changes in the flow of money around it. UX wise, WhatsApp is a big improvement over SMS. Vocal messages, I'm not a fan of them. A waste of my time.
- graemep 5mo ago
  Google was impacted: their chat product is pretty much dead. Mobile network operators lost the profits (at prices that were pretty much pure margin) they had on pay as you go messages, and messages not included in flat plans (e.g. overseas SMS's). They also lost a huge amount on highly profitable overseas calls. Those of us with family in other countries save a lot of money by using Whatsapp and similar instead of phone calls.
  - com 5mo ago
    WhatsApp and other over the top messaging and calling apps destroyed “the rivers of gold” that the telcos had in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Net neutrality was triggered by their attempts to block VOIP and messenger apps. I knew one telco who made €3Bn clear profit a year from 2 Dell servers and a team of five to keep SMS messages flowing. Their billing infrastructure was bigger, much bigger than the SMS servers.

olliem36 5mo ago

I agree and that's what i'm working on (for businesses) - an all-one-one consolidated AI application that's setup and ready for non-technical users. It's called Zenning AI - we're a small team in London, testing it with a few companies at the moment!

edf13 5mo ago

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lanyard-textile 5mo ago

I am building a product in that space :) It's targeted for creatives atm. For the few in private testing, it's been amazing what they're able to do with the little tooling I've given them. It is a legitimate change in their daily drive.

operatingthetan 5mo ago
>I am building a product in that space :) I don't know anyone not building a product in that space
- endofreach 5mo ago
  So, what are you building in that space?
- lanyard-textile 5mo ago
  I think everyone is making bespoke versions of what they think people want. It all feels gimmicky and dev oriented. I have a vision for what will be the next household ChatGPT: 1. An actually frictionless way of keeping the human in the loop. My product is primarily targeting that: Your tools should feel like an extension of you, not replacing you. 2. Juggling work. I feel like what I'm making here is the secret sauce, so keeping a hush on it :) 3. Keeping all your work in one place. Drawing, sketching, developing, emailing, planning, writing; there is no reason to depend on other apps if you have one place that does it all, and it's the best offering among them. Edit with some follow up thoughts -- I think what I'm trying to make is best summarized as claude code for non-developers (that's what I put in my YC application), but I think what I'm trying to make doesn't quite even have a developer equivalent. There's not an environment you can go into right now and say "after this builds every single time, deploy to this machine" and it actually seamlessly does that. The tech is there but making it a whole Factorio-esque operation is still very manual -- and that's what I'm solving.
  - lukan 5mo ago
    "I feel like what I'm making here is the secret sauce" Good for your feelings, but I feel the same for my work .. The main problem is still, agents are not reliable and what normal (and dev) people really want, is to have them reliable. Or well, tools to manage unreliable agents in a more clear way.

deleted 5mo ago

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ageitgey 5mo ago

> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is that these people just ask Claude to do whatever it is they need done. Codebase needs managing? They just ask Claude to do it. No idea how to deploy an app? They just ask Claude to do it. Any app built on top of this stack to 'make it easier' is competing with 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'.

nicce 5mo ago
> Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :) The drug is scary when everyone is depending on it. I wonder what is future like.
- antihero 5mo ago
  Our company started monitoring our Claude usage so I've started coding personal stuff manually again and it's...really fun!
- BoredPositron 5mo ago
  same was said about electricity.
- safety1st 5mo ago
  Seems far less scary to me than, say, building an electrical grid in a cold climate, where if it fails for a few days people start to die. Oh wait...
  - coldtea 5mo ago
    It's the same, on steroids.
  - M95D 5mo ago

devsda 5mo ago

> Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them. This is probably fine as long as the code is acting on local resources. The moment you have vibe coded software interacting with shared state or database the risk increases exponentially and all it takes to have a bad day is a poorly worded prompt from one of those users. Some oversight by humans or automated guardrails will probably reduce those instances.

eecc 5mo ago
> Claude, fix the bug. Make no mistakes. /s
- otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
  You forgot to add "you are an expert software engineer with PhD level architecture insights".
  - devsda 5mo ago
    haha..After all "prompt engineering" is the mystic art of magecraft that uses forbidden incantations to summon the souls of special experts and make them possess our computers to do our bidding.
    - sersi 5mo ago
      Sometimes watered down though. When I summon the soul of Linus, he is nowhere near as scathing or biting as the original :)

robbomacrae 5mo ago

I'm trying to do this with orcabot.com A figma like dashboard for turning ClaudeCode, Gemini Cli, Codex into an OpenClaw but with security measures to break the lethal trifecta while running on a VM. But it's not quite there in terms of usability. I agree that is the hardest part of the equation. It's something I'm constantly experimenting with and haven't found the solution to it yet. Open to feedback!

vasco 5mo ago

Whoever does it everyone else will just prompt the same UX.

Hamuko 5mo ago

I wouldn't want to build a business that was so dependent on a massive third-party that can either cut off my access or copy my design at any time of their choosing.

PAndreew 5mo ago
I was thinking about this and there are several aspects that can still make this viable. 1) AI labs are incentivised to increase token consumption because literally that's their product. The only thing they sell AFIAK are tokens (and maybe a teensy bit of user data). So if you build a product that is actively reducing token consumption (which they simply cannot do without hurting themselves even if their marketing fluff says otherwise) you'll save large amounts of money for your customers and they'll choose you. 2) Big providers want to funnel every prompt into their servers. If you're in a regulated market or simply don't want to share every detail with an American or Chinese megacorp you are in trouble. BUT open weight models are now quite capable for "small business stuff" and they can be self hosted. If you can bundle this into your service, in other words actually care about their privacy, they will choose you. Even more so if you're in Europe.
- mannanj 5mo ago
  they have that incentive until they do not. After you have given them enough data of all your best ideas, products, etc and they use the non-training data you opted to share with them, to create a competing product, then it was no ones fault but your own for being gullible and naive into thinking they wouldn't use your data to compete with you.

dnnddidiej 5mo ago

Lovable?

yordan_kavalov 5mo ago

Yes, totally agree. Spent a few years in operations consulting and our clients' people were doing such amounts of mind-numbing repetitive work you wouldn't believe. Funny thing is, they are so used to it, they don't realize how wasteful it is. Yet, they are "afraid" of AI and new technologies in general, because it is something new and unfamiliar. However, when you show them something simple, e.g. how to write an Excel formula, they feel extremely motivated and empowered. So yes, if anyone can make AI feel less "scary" and approachable so that ordinary non-tech-savvy people can click around and see how they can automate some basic stuff, it will make them feel they have superpowers.

disillusioned 5mo ago

We're building something along these lines, but since our roots are a consulting business, we're still building around the idea that there needs to be an expert integrator doing the front-loading work of discovery/decomposition/scoring of tasks/implementing them as those agents. These tools are terrifying to anyone not quite technical, and it turns out, people are bad at decomposing their own work, let alone describing it in a box with a blinking cursor. We're obviously going to be holding ourselves back in terms of scale and in terms of not being a "true" SaaS with this approach, but my thesis is that we get much higher quality results and higher compliance/activation and can charge more for the bespoke model backed by our own platform.

mettamage 5mo ago

> I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. I haven't tried it, or know a lot about it, but isn't this the whole claw thing?

raincole 5mo ago
Depending on what an average user looks like in your mind. For me openclaw is the opposite of a tool designed for an average user. ChatGPT/Claude's web ui is much more like something for average user, tbh.

tgv 5mo ago

True story, heard yesterday from a consultant who was working with some VP type (not a large company, but still high management): VP uploads a spreadsheet to Claude and tells it to remove column F. The power of Excel is not what it was. Nor is the power of ordinary thought.

fooker 5mo ago

Microsoft is trying this with copilot, but they are calling everything copilot so YMMV.

brainless 5mo ago

I really believe that the Spreadsheets UX is great for mainstream users and that is what drives me for my coding agent that uses the sheets UX: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo https://github.com/brainless/nocodo Super early stage but I am really happy to read your comment.

insin 5mo ago

I don't think it needs to specifically be a coding agent for the average user, creating apps for whatever they want to do, just something that can use code and has appropriate access for what they're already asking it to do (instead of the model bullshitting to them that it can do it, annoying them), and some way to make it repeatable when needed, like skills. I'm currently doing something like this in the internal model-independent LLM chat app I work on at a F100, specifically targeted at our everyday users. <input type="file" webkitdirectory> lets the user give the model read and write access to a local folder (and OPFS lets us reuse the same fs tools we give the model for files manually attached to the chat, or for files tools want to create if they haven't granted folder access). Every time we used to release a new version it was "still can't handle the 6MB Excel file I drop into it" when that was being extracted to CSV and added to context - now it can poke about in the big Excel file directly with SheetJS to pull the sheets/headers and inspect the shape of the data, and use locally sandboxed code execution to write code against either extracted data or the spreadsheet itself via SheetJS for pivot tables and such (all locally - none of which need go into the context). The base models are good enough at tool calling (I really mean Claude, though, the GPTs just go on a tear calling tools with no context for the user) they're already decent at automating stuff for the user without a dedicated harness (our default system prompt is still "You are a helpful AI assistant", lol). Add tools for Graph API stuff, and now it can pull the nightly batch file from a support inbox, unzip the spreadsheet within, diff it against yesterday's and generate an import file for new users and draft an email to welcome them, something that used to be a daily support task (which I'd already automated most of - but now you don't need a dev for this kind of thing). Or go find the big 450,000+ row spreadsheet that's being automated somewhere on SharePoint, pull it down in 150,000 row chunks (Graph Excel REST API limit) and write code to go figure out whatever the user is asking. Having implemented and used it, I like this setup so much it kinda ruined Claude.ai and ChatGPT.com for me, so I've hooked up similar access for them using a browser extension to add the folder picker input, with the extension talking to a local server to tell it which folder to give access to, and Claude/ChatGPT talking to the same server over MCP via a CloudFlare Tunnel to work with the selected folder.

whiplash451 5mo ago

> a UI that makes claude code accessible Isn’t that literally Claude’s web UI?

bstsb 5mo ago
while there are some tools available for the web UI, like building small React apps or making diagrams, it doesn't have the same loop as Claude Code in terms of iteratively building or fixing

rib3ye 5mo ago

Non-engineer average user here: this is what cursor is for!

dakolli 5mo ago
The average person isn't going to be using a shitty vscode fork.
- davidgomes 5mo ago
  https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-3 https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-3 You should check out Cursor 3 :)

skydhash 5mo ago

> 90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use. I think we'll see something similar with coding agents. If you look closely, people we already creating databases and doing computation. But on paper. Spreadsheet software move the medium to the digital and with that brings a lot of convenience. Same with email, instant chat, and shopping on the web. The killer app is not about bringing something new, but making an old problem easy to solve. The issue with LLMs is that it makes errors. Uncontrollably. And even if you can spot the obvious ones, there’s always some you won’t be able to catch unless you’re a subject expert. I’ve never seen a random people willing to monitor a piece of tech.

ninjagoo 5mo ago

> killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user That would be a capable 'personal assistant', or 'executive assistant', of 'chief of staff'. Why? because the point is, just like in real life, to abstract away the complexity, irrespective of domain. "Average user" implies someone not skilled or savvy in the domain you're thinking of. For a medical doctor, the 'average user' is not-a-doctor. For a technologist, the average user is not-a-technologist. For an insurance specialist, an average user is not-an-insurance-specialist. Etc. etc. The personal assistant, exec assistant or chief of staff are themselves not necessarily experts in any domain, but they do rely on specialists to get stuff done. So the UI for this killer app is basically voice input, keyboard input, camera input (mirros of human output) in the user's language with natural language interaction, and the output is voice and monitor/screen, and possibly a robotic arm/hand/body (mirrors of human input). Anything more complex than that would require tailoring it to a domain/domains. If you doubt this analysis, think of all those folks for whom the IE/Chrome icon was/is "The Internet". Sure, you can go one level deeper with having them put in URLs, or operate email through the aol/gmail bookmark or desktop icon, maybe open documents/files from 'My Documents', but are they going to go any deeper than that, for the 'average user'?

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giarc 5mo ago

>90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use. I really thought Airtable would take off because it was even more of a "database that a normal person could actually use".

lightbulbish 5mo ago

This feels like sort of what openclaw is ^^ helping out in real estate/prop management right now and have been thinking same things

pastorhudson 5mo ago

Claude has an excel addon that is really good it can control everything in excel.

peder 5mo ago

> a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user. It'll just be power users. We're moving toward a world of significantly fewer analysts and more into "Super SMEs" that can actually learn tools like Claude and manage enormous complexity with them. Just giving average users these tools will produce garbage. This example from Claude is so contrived and any business analyst can see how a process that requires uploading additional data will fail. You can't expect users that don't even know their own data to be able to make this thing work. There will be no "average" user in the future. It'll be multi-disciplinary SMEs that are extremely creative and knowledgeable about their businesses.

z2 5mo ago
Sadly I feel the Excel analogy holds still, where maybe 80% of its users can't write a SUMIF() formula or make a pivot table to save their lives, yet they will happily use Excel every day as digital grid paper. Meanwhile Microsoft made a lot of money selling Excel licenses.
- originalvichy 5mo ago
  It’s my favorite analogy against the cliche LLM will revolutionize all white collar work. Excel is probably the most powerful business application most people have used, but as you said, people only scratch the surface. No LLM magic will make people more fluent with software. Sadly it’s a combination of not knowing what you don’t know, and time pressure from the employer. My analogy usually ends by saying that if the government mandated 200 hours of Excel courses, it would probably be a faster and cheaper productivity leap than adding an LLM into everything.
joshspankit 5mo ago
Yes but I think you’re underestimating “average users”. If we talk about the median, then probably you’re right, but if we talk about “the group of people clustered around the average” I think there’s a lot of untapped potential, especially in people who assumed data and programming were unknowable/impossible and have therefore been held back by “good” tools like excel

tlogan 5mo ago

Maybe. The reason I think it might not be true is that some people are simply not wired to be developers: to think analytically. Learning how to type commands and use a terminal is not something people cannot already learn right now. And that was the way before. I think the real killer app is making marketing and other non development (non analytical) work better. In case of marketing, we have tried many AI tools for marketing, and so far they mostly make campaigns more generic, less exciting, and often worse. They help a little but you need to careful that they do not to make it worse.

order-matters 5mo ago

i dont think it is possible. it is not a tool they need but a training session on how to make a basic developer environment and a basic workflow on how to go from sitting at the computer to contributing work to the project back to exiting the project and using the computer as normal. excel isnt used because it's a database, it is because you can do things in it in relatively unstructured ways and reference things youve already done with a click. the future of databasing is bringing more spreadsheet UI to the database, not bringing more users away from spreadsheets. with AI i agree there could be some sort of UI that could pop off that leverages it well, but im not sure its going to be t bring users closer to coding. I think it is going to look more like a project management tool than anything else. i mean shit, it might even just be an excel add-on because excel is still where the data is

peheje 5mo ago

Maybe the end state of computing is not humans learning how to speak to computers, but computers learning how to speak to humans. Think the movie Her 2013. OS1 it's called.

Aeroi 5mo ago

i'm working on something tangenially with cloud coding agents to bring the workflow to mobile. the breakthrough for me was realizing that the IDE isn't needed anymore and cloud repos + sandboxes open up the ability to continue working from anywhere. mouse.dev

mNovak 5mo ago

Lately I've been thinking that UI really needs to include the equivalent of a screenshare meeting. Ideally you could click through an example of a software flow Claude's never seen before, with a few quick notes, and have it reliably work. These narrow integrations with specific software suites seems like a dead end.

MaxLeiter 5mo ago

This is one reason I think openai releasing a phone makes sense If they can build an integrated AI assistant (what Siri should be) that can spin up and call agents it will be big (or it will flop but my money is on big if it’s the easiest way to use agents in your daily life)

kruxigt 5mo ago

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FlyThruTheSun 5mo ago

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redanddead 5mo ago

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jackzhuo 5mo ago

Absolutely! Excel is the ultimate business system because it’s a database that anyone can actually use. Excel is the best because it gives people the power to manage data without needing to be an expert.

codesentinel 5mo ago

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