I've finally started getting into AI with a coding harness but I've take the opposite approach. usually I have the structure of my code in my mind already and talk to the prompt like I'm pairing with it. while its generating the code, I'm telling it the structure of the code and individual functions. its sped me up quite a lot while I still operate at the level of the code itself. the final output ends up looking like code I'd write minus syntax errors.

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

A billion people do not know this and probably benefit initially a lot more.

When i did some powerpoint presentation, i browsed around and draged images from the browser to the desktop, than i draged them into powerpoint. My collegue looked at me and was bewildered how fast I did all of that.

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!

People on HN are seriously delusional.

AI removed the need to know the syntax. Your grandma does not know JS but can one shot a React app. Great!

Software engineering is not and has never been about the syntax or one shotting apps. Software engineering is about managing complexity at a level that a layman could not. Your ideal word requires an AI that's capable of reasoning at 100k-1 million lines of code and not make ANY mistakes. All edge cases covered or clarified. If (when) that truly happens, software engineering will not be the first profession to go.

In fact, in the very message you're replying to, I hinted at the opposite (and have since in another post stated explicitly that I very much think the profession will still need to exist).

My ideal world already exists, and will keep getting better: many friends of mine already have custom-built programs that fit their use case, and they don't need anything else. This also didn't "eat" any market of a software house -- this is "DIY" software, not production-grade. That's why I explicitly stated this is a new way of human-computer-interaction, which it definitely is (and IMO those who don't see this are the ones clearly deluded).

All of my friends who would die before they use AI 2 years ago now call themselves AI/agentic engineers because the money is there. Many of them don't understand a thing about AI or agents, but CC/Codex/Cursor can cover up for a lot.

Consequently, if Claude Code/"coding agents" is a hot topic (which it is), people who know nothing about any of this will start raising money and writing articles about it, even (especially) if it has nothing to do with code, because these people know nothing about code, so they won't realize what they're saying makes no sense. And it doesn't matter, because money.

Next thing you know your grandma will be "writing code" because that's what the marketing copy says. That's all it takes for the zeitgeist to shift for the term "code". It will soon mean something new to people who had no idea what code was before, and infuriating to people who do know (but aren't trying to sell you something).

I know that's long-winded but hopefully you get where I'm coming from :D.

Here's an example from just yesterday. An acquaintance of mine who has no idea how to code (literally no idea) spent about 3 weeks working hard with AI (I've been told they used a tool called emergent, though I've never heard of it and therefore don't personally vouch for it over alternatives) to build an app to help them manage their business. They created a custom-built system that has immensely streamlined their business (they run a company to help repair tires!) by automating a bunch of tasks, such as:

- Ticket creation

- Ticket reporting

- Push notifications on ticket changes (using a PWA)

- Automated pre-screening of issues from photographs using an LLM for baseline input

- Semi-automated budgeting (they get the first "draft" from the AI and it's been working)

- Deep analytics

I didn't personally see this system, so I'm for sure missing a lot of detail. Who saw it was a friend I trust and who called me to relay how amazed they were with it. They saw that it was clearly working as intended. The acquaintance was thinking of turning this into a business on its own and my friend advised them that they likely won't be able to do so, because this is very custom-built software, really tailored to their use case. But for that use case, it's really helped them.

In total: ~3 weeks + around 800€ spent to build this tool. Zero coding experience.

I don't actually know how much the "gains" are, but I don't doubt they will definitely be worth it. And I'm seeing this trend more and more everywhere I look. People are already starting to use their computer by coding without knowing, it's so obvious this is the direction we're going.

This is all compatible with the idea of software engineering existing as a way of building "software with better engineering principles and quality guarantees", as well as still knowing how to code (though I believe this will be less and less relevant).

My experience using LLMs in contexts where I care about the quality of the code, as well as personal projects where I barely look at the code (i.e. "vibe coding") is also very clearly showing me that the direction for new software is slowly but surely becoming this one where we don't care so much about the actual code, as long as the requirements are clear, there's a plethora of tests, and LLMs are around to work with it efficiently (i.e. if the following holds -- big if: "as the codebase grows, developing a feature with an LLM is still faster than building it by hand") . It is scary in many ways, but agents will definitely become the medium through which we build software, and, my hot-take here (as others have said too) is that, eventually, the actual code will matter very little -- as long as it works, is workable, and meets requirements.

For legacy software, I'm sure it's a different story, but time ticks forward, permanently, all the time. We'll see.

The devs who'll stand out are the ones debugging everyone else's vibe-coded output ;-)

Since when? HN is truly a bubble sometimes

You'll cause mild panic in a sizable share of people under 30 if you call them without a warning text.

If someone manages to make a robust GUI version of this for normies, people will lap it up. People don't want to juggle applications, we want computers to do what we want/need them to do.

I'm still paranoid about keeping things securely sandboxed.

Knowledge work is work most people don't really want to deal with. Ordinary people don't put much value into ideas regardless of their level of refinement

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.

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.

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?

People want to do stuff, and they want to get it done fast and in a pretty straightforward manner. They don’t want to follow complicated steps (especially with conditional) and they don’t want to relearn how to do it (because the vendor changes the interface).

So the only thing they want is a very simple interface (best if it’s a single button or a knob), and then for the expected result to happen. Whatever exists in the middle doesn’t matter as long as the job is done.

So an interface to the above may be a form with the start and end date, a location, and a plan button. Then all the activities are show where the user selects the one he wants and clicks a final Buy button. Then a confirmation message is displayed.

Anything other than that or that obscure what is happening (ads, network error, agents malfunctioning,…) is an hindrance and falls under the general “this product does not work”.

Ive also been getting increasingly annoyed with how tedious it is to do the same repetitive actions for simple tasks.

I'm reluctant to run any model without at least a docker.

I swear OpenAI has 2-3 unannounced releases ready to go at any time just so they can steal some thunder from their competitors when they announce something

</tin foil hat>

>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)

Edit: as in, I hear them use it, not as in, I was told that

This seems to be the new narrative around here but it's not jiving with what I'm experiencing. Obviously Anthropic's uptime stats are terrible but when it's up, it's excellent (and I personally haven't had any issues with uptime this week, although my earlier-in-the-week usage was lighter than usual).

I'm loving 4.7. I was loving 4.6 too. I use Codex to get code reviews done on Claude-generated code but have no interest in using it as my daily driver.

Credit to them for being media savvy.

These announcements happen so often

i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers

A few thoughts and questions:

1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a company, they often rip and replace some of the software vendors with their personal favorites. Well, most software was designed for human users. Now, peoples' agents will use software for them. Agents have different needs for software than humans do. Some they'll need more of, much they'll no longer need at all. What will this result in? It feels like a much swifter and more significant version of Google taking excerpts/summaries from webpages and putting it at the top of search results and taking away visits and ad revenue from sites.

2. I've tried dozens of products in this space. For most, onboarding is confusing, then the user gets dropped into a blank space, usage limits are uncompetitive compared to the subsidized tokens offered by OpenAI/Anthropic, etc. It's a tough space to compete in, but also clearly going to be a massive market. I'm expecting big investment from Microsoft, Google etc in this segment.

3. How will startups in this space compete against labs who can train models to fit their products?

4. Eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model? Presumably. Harnesses get eaten by model-generated harnesses?

A few more thoughts collected here: https://chrisbarber.co/professional-agents/

Products I've tried: ai browsers like dia, comet, claude for chrome, atlas, and dex; claw products like openclaw, kimi claw, klaus, viktor, duet, atris; automation things like tasklet and lindy; code agents like devin, claude code, cursor, codex; desktop automation tools like vercept, nox, liminary, logical, and raycast; and email products like shortwave, cora and jace. And of course, Claude Cowork, Codex cli and app, and Claude Code cli and app.

Edit: Notes on trying the new Codex update

1. The permissions workflow is very slick

2. Background browser testing is nice and the shadow cursor is an interesting UI element. It did do some things in the foreground for me / take control of focus, a few times, though.

3. It would be nice if the apps had quick ways to demo their new features. My workflow was to ask an LLM to read the update page and ask it what new things I could test, and then to take those things and ask Codex to demo them to me, but it doesn't quite understand it's own new features well enough to invoke them (without quite a bit of steering)

4. I cannot get it to show me the in app browser

5. Generating image mockups of websites and then building them is nice

For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue. That hurts growth. I don't disagree with your general points, though.

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.

I think most people are going to say they dont want it. I mean, why would anyone want a tool that can screw up their bank account? What benefit does it gain them?

Theres lots of cases of great highly useful LLM tools, but the moment they scale up you get slammed by the risks that stick out all along the long tail of outcomes.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs and managers are going to want it for their employees (and force it on them) for the above reason.

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.

the attack surface is so wide idk where to start.

I’m semi-normie (MechEng with a bit of Matlab now working as a ceo).

I spend most of my day in Claude code but outputs are word docs, presentations, excel sheets, research etc.

I recently got it to plan a social media campaign and produce a ppt with key messaging and content calendar for the next year, then draft posts in Figma for the first 5 weeks of the campaign and then used a social media aggregator api to download images and schedule in posts.

In two hours I had a decent social media campaign planned and scheduled, something that would have taken 3-4 weeks if I had done it myself by hand.

I’ve vibe coded an interface to run multiple agents at once that have full access via apis and MCPs.

With a daily cron job it goes through my emails and meeting notes, finds tasks, plans execution, executes and then send me a message with a summary of what it has done.

Most knowledge work output is delivered as code (e.g. xml in word docs) so it shouldn’t be that that surprising that it can do all this!

I agree this is going to be big. I threw a prototype of a domain-specific agent into the proverbial hornets' nest recently and it has altered the narrative about what might be possible.

The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX. You don't need to spend much time developing user interfaces and testing them against customers. Everyone understands the affordances around something that looks like iMessage or WhatsApp. UI/UX development is often the most expensive part of software engineering. Figuring out how to intercept, normalize and expose the domain data is where all of the magic happens. This part is usually trivial by comparison. If most of the business lives in SQL databases, your job is basically done for you. A tool to list the databases and another tool to execute queries against them. That's basically it.

I think there is an emerging B2B/SaaS market here. There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.

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.

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.

Even all the websites, desktop/mobile apps will become obsolete.

An example here is in engineering. Building a simulator for some process makes computing it much safer and consistent vs. having people redo the calculations themselves, even with AI assistance.

I disagree. There is a major gap between awesome tech and market uptake.

At this point, the question is whether LLMs are going to be more useful than excel. AI enthusiasts are 100% sure that it’s already more useful than excel, but on the ground, non-technical views do not reflect that view.

All the interviews and real life interactions I have seen, indicate that a narrow band of non-technical experts gain durable benefits from AI.

GenAI is incredible for project starts. A 0 coding experience relative went from mockup to MVP webapp in 3 days, for something he just had an idea about.

GenAI is NOT great for what comes after a non-technical MVP. That webapp had enough issues that, if used at scale, would guarantee litigation.

Mileage varies entirely on whether the person building the tool has sufficient domain expertise to navigate the forest they find themselves in.

Experts constantly decide trade offs which novices don’t even realize matter. Something as innocuous as the placement of switches when you enter the room, can be made inconvenient.

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

AI is doing the same

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.

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.

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?

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/202... )

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)

You can't seriously believe laymen will try to implement their own tax calculators.

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.

Yeah, yeah, we've heard "our models will be doing everything" for close to three years now.

> a harness for getting this done probably exists today, gastown perhaps

That got a chuckle and a facepalm out of me. I would at least consider you half-serious if you said "openclaw", at least those people pretend to be attempting to automate their lives through LLMs (with zero tangible results, and with zero results available to non-tech people).

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.

I think the latter is technically "Codex For Desktop", which is what this article is referring to.

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

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2847

tldr Claude pwned user then berated users poor security. (Bonus: the automod, who is also Claude, rubbed salt on the wound!)

I think the only sensible way to run this stuff is on a separate machine which does not have sensitive things on it.

I wonder if there’s something off the shelf that does this?

but there is no link, why would you not make this a link.

boggles my mind that companies make such little use of hypertext

Bunch of startups need to pivot today after this announcement including mine

Does anyone know of a good option that works on Wayland Linux?

I can't see why I'd want an agent to click around Gnome or Ubuntu desktop but maybe that's just me?

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.

To me it seems like just a natural evolution of Codex and a direct response to Claude Cowork, rather than something fully claw-like.

Reasoning deltas add additional traffic, especially if running many subagents etc. So on large scale, those deltas maybe are just dropped somewhere.

Saying that, sometimes the GPT reasoning summary is funny to read, in particular when it's working through a large task.

Also, the summaries can reveal real issues with logic in prompts and tool descriptions+configuration, so it allowing debugging.

i.e. "User asked me to do X, system instructions say do Y, tool says Z which is different to what everyone else wants. I am rather confused here! Lets just assume..."

It has previously allowed me to adjust prompts, etc.

It is instructive that they decided to go with weekly active users as a metric, rather than daily active users.

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

One main thing is to de-couple the repos from specific agents e.g. use .mcp.json instead of "claude plugins", use AGENTS.md (and symlink to CLAUDE.md) and so on.

I love this because I have absolutely 0 loyalty to any of these companies and once Anthropic nerfs I just switch to OpenAI, then I can switch to Google and so on. Whichever works best.

Sure we can read the characters in the screen. But accessibility information is structured usually. TUI apps are going to be far less interesting & capable without accessibility built-in.

I don't like it, and I'm sure you don't either, but it's not a Mac. Or a Linux. And it's what most actual desktop users are stuck with, still.

Its clear that it will go in this type of direction but Anthropic announced managed agents just a week ago and this again with all the biuld in connections and tools will help so many non computer people to do a lot more faster and better.

I'm waiting for the open source ai ecosystem to catch up :/