Summarizer

The fact that the Codex app is still unavailable on Linux makes me think the target audience isn't people who understand code.

Right. It's rather for vibecoders than for software engineers.

The power to the people is not us the developers and coders. 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.

I've helped an otherwise very successful and capable guy (architect) set up a shortcut on his desktop to shut down his machine. Navigating to the power down option in the menu was too much of a technical hurdle. The gap in needs between the average HNer and the rest of the world is staggering

Oh boy, the gap between the average it professional and ai pros here is already staggering, let alone the rest of the world. I feel like an alien, no matter where.

This. I’m sure everyone has a similar story of how difficult it was to explain the difference between a program shortcut represented as a visual icon on a desktop versus the actual executable itself to somebody who didn’t grow up in the age of computing. And this was Windows… the purported OS for the masses not the classes.

Initially I thought you meant “software architect” and I was flabbergasted at how that’s possible. Took me a minute to realize there’s other architects out there lol.

I think you just proved the point here about the divide between the average user of this site and the population.

The same way most people hear "legacy" and think it's something good

right clicking start menu and clicking shutdown is too hard? amazing

Yes! Even closing the windows of programs that users no longer need is hard. It's easy to develop a disconnect with the level that average users operate at when understanding computers deeply is part of the job. I've definitely developed it myself to some extent, but I have occasional moments where my perspective is getting grounded again.

It's a while since I've used Windows but I seem to remember it giving a choice of sleep, logout, switch session etc. I could totally see someone wanting a single button for it.

Very much agree. 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!

> 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. 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.

I wonder how good AI is at playing Factorio. That’s the closest thing I’ve ever done to programming without the syntax.

It's not the code I write, it's what I've noticed from people in 25 years of writing code in the corner. 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.

Totally this. People who don't see this seem to think we're in some sort of "bubble" or that we don't "ship proper code" or whatever else they believe in, but this change is happening. Maybe it'll be slower than I feel, but it will definitely happen. Of course I'm in a personal bubble, but I've got very clear signs that this trend is also happening outside of it. 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.

So they invented microsoft access?

I don’t know Microsoft Access and that’s…entirely the point!

Lots of scepticism here, but I think this may really take off. After 25 years of heavy CLI use, lately I've found myself using codex (in terminal) for terminal tasks I've previously done by CLI commands. 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.

Programmers mostly don't. Ordinary people see figuring out how to use the computer as a hindrance rather than empowering, they want Star Trek. They want "computer, plan my next vacation to XYZ for me" to lay out a full itinerary and offer to buy the tickets and make the reservations. 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'm on the same page, personally, but what I was trying to emphasize with my previous comment is that the non-tech people only want Star Trek

Ordinary people absolutely hate AI and AI products. There is a reason why all these LLM providers are absolutely failing at capturing consumers. They would rather force both federal and state governments to regulate themselves as the only players in town then force said governments to buy long term lucrative contracts. 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.

I hear real people use it IRL more and more. I think's just AI exposure Edit: as in, I hear them use it, not as in, I was told that

My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. 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

I agree with the sentiment but I think for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access. But, by granting agents full access, you immediately turn the computer into an extremely adversarial device insofar as txt files become credible threat vectors. 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.

> for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access 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.

There was a recent Stanford study which showed that AI enthusiasts and experts and the normies had very different sentiment when it came to AI. 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.

I agree, in general we are going to find that ultimately most employee end users don't want it. Assuming it actually makes you more productive. I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase? You're just giving away that value to your employer. On the other hand, entrepreneurs and managers are going to want it for their employees (and force it on them) for the above reason.

> For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue. 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.

This is me! 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 am starting to use Codex heavily on non-coding tasks. But I am realizing it works because I work and think like a programmer - everything is a file, every file and directory should have very precise responsibilities, versioning is controlled, etc. I don't know how quick all of this will take to spread to the general population.

Most knowledge workers aren't willing to put in the effort so they're getting their work done efficiently.

> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. 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.

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

> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. 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.

This is effectively how I treat my AI agents. A lot of the reason this doesn't work well for people today is due to context/memory/harness management that makes it too complex for someone to set up if they don't want a full time second job or just like to tinker. 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.

Just yesterday my non-technical spouse had to solve a moderately complex scheduling problem at work. She gave the various criteria and constraints to Claude and had a full solution within a few minutes, saving hours of work. It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python to implement a scheduling optimization algorithm. She only vaguely knows what Python is, but that didn't matter. She got what she needed. 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.

> Just yesterday my non-technical spouse > 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.

There's no such big opportunity, as the number of programmers' spouses is quite limited. Again, and as the GP rightly suggested, some of the HN-ers here need to go and touch some normie grass, so to speak. 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.

> 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. 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.

> 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. 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.

> What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at 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?

> 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.

of course not. 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.

check back in a couple of years!

If your prompt was more complex than "do my taxes", then this is irrelevant.

> but a sufficiently smart model would be able to just do it without any steering; 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).

The first example is tic tac toe. Why would anyone bother? None of those eash things are relevant for people who use AI. They don't care about learning, improving, exploring how things work, creating, being creative to that degree. They want to hit buttons and see the computer do things and get a dopamine rush.

I can't help but see some things as a solution in search of a problem every time I see these examples illustrating toy projects. Cloud Tic Tac Toe? Seriously?

Man this progress is fast. 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 :/