The barrier to entry is lower now because of AI. Even though I code, I ask the AI to write a lot of little helper apps for my wife who homeschools our kids, and I don't code review many of them. I only do enough user testing to ensure they function as requested.

Armed with this knowledge, I have tried in vain to get various family and friends who are not technically minded to do anything like this. In some cases, they just tell me that they can't think of anything the AI can help with.

Many things that seem simple to them are more complex, and they can't tell the difference between simple apps that the AI can knock out in a few minutes and larger projects that require internet hosting and/or vastly more AI credits than they would ever be willing to pay for.

By far the biggest problem is that many of them are not very good at describing what they want. For simple apps, you can go back and forth with the AI to ask for changes, but the more complex the solution, the more its becomes like a traditional engineering design project where carefully though out design of features and their interactions are critical for success. The new "code" may be more like human language, but the user facing details must still be specified.

Claude especially, where you might say “how can I do task xyz more quickly” and Claude responds with a little JS app. This creates an expectation that it’s possible to do anything if you ask Claude right.

I have seen this first hand where my partner - a deeply non technical person - came to ask what an API token is and how she can get one for Canva. Claude was busy automating her Canva -> Pinterest workflow.

She now has a half dozen of these things and hunts through her Claude chats to reuse them.

In my opinion, an OS that hosts a local agent can produce things for you on the fly in response to a particular task in addition to the baseline set of features.

Too often have I ran into "you can't do that" in operating systems, especially Macos where you either have to buy a paid app to implement what they should have already, or what you want is niche enough that you have to build it yourself.

Plus and agent can operate across your hardware including the cloud. I could ask something like "graphics cards are expensive and always out of stock so when some pop up can you notify me and show me the price etc" and then receive a rich alert on whatever device I happen to be using at the time it happens, once agents are aware of where we are and what we're doing (yes, it will be pretty dystopian with current governments and the drooling animals who vote for tribalism).

Or being able to be like "I want my photo gallery to show animated thumbnails when I've taken a series of photos of the same subject. Oh, little bit slower like one every second thanks" boom done.

And much UI will becomes defunct in the first place, UI only exists because of many annoying discrete steps we have to do to get something done. If I can just ask an agent to do the thing I want then I don't care about that.

It's like how I only need to make a PowerPoint now and then and every time I open it I've completely forgotten where all of the stupid fucking buttons are in the stupid fucking ribbon bullshit they made.