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.
The model will get full access to your data, but in the name of security, you will only be permitted to have data that is cloud-hosted; local storage will effectively just be cache.
The era of the general computer will end, and the products you purchased from these companies will be nonconsensually altered and limited.
I'm so glad I switched to Linux more than a decade ago. At least on the PC there will still be an open source ecosystem for a long time to come, it may have less features but I'm willing to accept that.
Knowing that they can change what you bought overnight with a single nonconsensual update, think very, very carefully about who you purchase all of your future technology from. Google's upcoming nonconsensual degradation of Android should be a lesson for everybody.
As a proud neo-luddite, I'm watching the AI hype with grim amusement and I'll tell you hwhat, it doesn't look like a good time. Even putting to one side the planetary scale economic crash that is incoming, all the hypers seem to be on some sort of treadmill that is out of their control and it simply doesn't look like fun.
The concerning aspect is how others' content being scanned into systems don't have any knowledge or consent. Having private PII/files/code/emails/etc being read and/or accidentally shared by the agent online.
Honestly, it's alright.
Just think of what we could do with computers up until this point. We keep all those abilities.
And more, even, because the industry still keeps churning out new local LLMs. So you even gain more capabilities than right now. Just not at the rate of the bleeding edge.
Which is just like the Linux desktop, essentially. It's fine, really. There is no need to consume the bleeding edge. You will be fine.
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.
I couldn't imagine thinking "I'm gonna do this 0.1x as fast as I could, wasting my life away with pointless extra work, to spite my employer"
Of course in reality in the short term what happens is companies lay off people to increase margins. Times will be tough for workers, and equity keeps gravitating towards those who already had it.
Those are productivity increases that got our standard of living to where it is. Fewer people doing the same amount of work has, historically speaking, freed people from their current job, allowing them to work on something else.
It's that analogy of the horse, they used to be farm animals. Now, fewer of them are 'employed' but they're much nicer jobs. I'm not sure if the same is true for us this time around though as new jobs being created have increasingly been highly skilled which means the majority can't apply.
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!
If you can figure out the next step and say "Claude, go find me buyers and sell shit for me without using any pre-existing software," have at it. It can't be social media, I guess, since social media is software and Claude is supposed to get rid of software.
At a certain point, why do we even need computers? Can't we just call Claude's hotline and ask "Claude, please find a way to dump $40 million in cash into my living room. Don't put it in my bank account because banks use software."
OP gave a good example how their workflow was changed, you could argue there are tools that could've done that, but they managed to achieve their goals without them, have something that fits their workflow perfectly, is fine tuned in case of changes, and with a few other tools (Word, Excel, Figma) they can do all sorts of things which would've required a small team or far more (expensive) tools to execute.
To me that is a great example of non-developers using tools to enhance their workflows and with initiatives like from this topic, I can only see that increasing.
What would make it not be a monolith? To me it seems like there'll be a big advantage (e.g. in distribution, user understanding) for most people to be using the same product / similar interface. And then the agent and the developer of that interface figure out all the integrations under that, invisible to the user.
I 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.
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.
Even all the websites, desktop/mobile apps will become obsolete.
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.
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.
Comical. Truly comical.
> 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.
If you productize that it will be an experience a lot of people like.
And on the UI piece, I think most people will just interact through text and voice interfaces. Wherever they already spend time like sms, what's app, etc.
Most people are indifferent to computers. A computer to them is similar to the water pipeline or the electrical grid. It’s what makes some other stuff they want possible. And the interface they want to interact with should be as simple as possible and quite direct.
That is pretty much the 101 of UX. No deep interactions (a long list of steps), no DSL (even if visual), and no updates to the interfaces. That’s why people like their phone more than their desktops. Because the constraints have made the UX simpler, while current OS are trying to complicate things.
So Cowork/Codex would probably go where Siri is right now. Because they are not a simpler and consistent interface. They’ve only hidden all the controls behind one single point of entry. But the complexity still exists.
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?
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).
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... )
It's unlikely we've hit the limits on improving agent UX, but there are some fundamental limits on LLMs that seem unlikely to be fixed by better UX.