I was talking to my wife about this a little bit, that the promise of computers has never really been realized in the sense that we don't put power in the hands of the end user.
Like one of the most obvious things that a computer can do is run a task periodically at a time to go maybe fetch information and process it. And yet, the average computer user using any commercial operating system does not understand how to set up a recurring task. Operating systems don't really advertise it or talk about it as a feature. I think this is a good example of the disempowerment of end users by software companies.
LLMs have the potential to change this by allowing people to simply ask their LLM to invoke the right incantation to schedule the task or produce the program. That seems like a great change. I'd like to see more power in the hands of the end users rather than less.
For people that don't want to put in the effort, of course, this will change nothing. But for those that are willing to explore a little bit, I think it can be a big improvement over the software ecosystem that's emerged in the era of the app store.
The average user can and already does that. If they want to regularly fetch their emails and process them, they will install outlook or use the Gmail web app. If they want to regularly fetch and install updates for their games they will install steam.
The "run a task periodically" isn't the difficult part, it's processing the data that is.
And to be honest I don't think llms will empower that many people, the vast majority don't want to put the effort required (and it's definitely more effort than writing a one-shot prompt)
Those are just built in functions in the apps. I think we are more talking about custom automations like ”I want you to download the images on this site everyday and put them in this folder and send me a message on telegram with any new photos” or ”I wanna check this website for searches for X and when a match then message me”. An example I have seen is non-tech people before logging in to a saas app and manually copying numbers to a spreadsheet every single day forever. But with LLM:s they automated it to just work automatically in the background
Exactly. The users of e.g. autohotkey are in a vanishing minority. It's the kind of stuff I'd like to see advertised more in the OS, as though a product manager had on OKR to move that metric. Apps like Apple Music that emphasize consumption (and subscription revenue) get that treatment, but empowering apps that teach automation do not, since there's no (short term) business there.
People are waking up to the reality that AI can actually empower them. Unfortunately a lot are afraid as well, or have a misplaced skepticism. More people should watch the Moonshots podcast and spread the optimistic message. The Elon interview was good in that sense, and probably turned it around for some.
There’s already signs of this shifting, but we need to make it easier to choose the free, open alternatives that are aligned with users (instead of extracting from users, which sometimes overlaps).
The bar for setting up automations is already lowered by having AI agents write integrations, but we need a platform where it can all come together. Apps, automation, data and integrations with an AI agent that can process it all, and present it personally customized to the user. That's the future I'm already living in - my setup has all integrations available to any automation, app, or the AI agent. And setting up new tools on top of it is mostly a non-technical task, except when I have to code the platform it's all living in ;)
Most of the apps I've built take the form of "something I was doing with a long-running note in Notes.app that is now much simpler to deal with because there's a purpose-built program for it". That's what computer programs, like, are?
