It sees a small side road and thinks “I will take the user down here because there’s no traffic” But it doesn’t consider that the side road is empty because you’ll have to turn across four lanes of traffic in rush hour. So you get stuck for twenty minutes.
If your answer is you tell it, then the obvious solution to improve the app is to provide a way of specifying a road exclusion list, and that is extremely feasible.
It's an app with an audience of just me. That's the point. You're not supposed to want it. You have your own problems.
Just with the bit I quoted above, that seemed like a big misread of the market and the implications of everyone writing their own apps.
In this future, are people paying the API pricing of traffic providers? In this future, who's supplying the traffic data if no one is using their mapping apps?
I think this is coming across as glib or crabby but there's something more significant I'm trying to communicate. This subthread is in one of the classic software developer problem solving modes: pose a question or a problem, respond with "what are you really trying to do", argue that the problem was misconceived to begin with.
Eric Raymond wrote a whole giant piece about this.
But the world in which nerds could congratulate themselves about knowing what the real questions were and separating them from the dumb questions being asked by noobs who aren't holding things right is gone. Why do I care whether a software developer thinks I'm holding the tool right? Why do I care that someone familiar with Apple's fixed-function prefab software ecosystem believes there's a better way to handle my commute than what I'm trying to do?
OK? You use those tools. I'm just going to have my computer do the thing the way I want it to work. It's my commute, and my computer, this is the very specific tool I want, and all it took to get it on my screen and working reliably was for me to ask an agent, which didn't lecture me about the proper way to ask the question or what question I should have asked instead, but instead just fucking did the thing I asked for.
It's wild to me that software nerds believe they're going to win this argument.
You might as well just say "I think you're overestimating the general public's interest in using computers", because that's what it's going to mean to use a computer in a couple years, and way sooner than we think --- asking it to do arbitrary, random things, whatever we want in the moment, and then having that happen.
We don't even need to get better than Opus 5.5 to reach that moment. We just need Opus 5.5 to get significantly cheaper and faster. You can bet against that if you want, but I'm glad to be on the other side of that bet.
I don't mean to be snippy, but I think this is a really important feature of the discussion about personal apps, and it's worth being clear about it.
The ideation of features, their requirements, getting code for features written, testing the features, seeing how they fit in with the rest of the landscape, and maintaining those features. Same as before. Do those go away in your future? Even with the aid of AI agents, do you really think billions of people will want to go through that process every time they want a device to do something? Do you really think the younger generations who are being told AI will replace them will also embrace AI?
Similar to how even your hypothetical devices of the future still very much have an operating system (a kernel, libraries for software to interface with hardware, a standard suite of apps and tools, an environment for the user to kick things off)
> You might as well just say "I think you're overestimating the general public's interest in using computers"
I might, because I think the general public doesn't much like to "use the computer". It's what they need to use for work, or school, or how to listen to music or watch what they want to watch.
We're only just starting the general public's introduction to agentic AI with Siri and some Android devices. I'm betting there will eventually be some horror stories.