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> There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up.

I've finally started getting into AI with a coding harness but I've take the opposite approach. usually I have the structure of my code in my mind already and talk to the prompt like I'm pairing with it. while its generating the code, I'm telling it the structure of the code and individual functions. its sped me up quite a lot while I still operate at the level of the code itself. the final output ends up looking like code I'd write minus syntax errors.

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.

It's reminds me what happened with Frontpage, ultimately people are going to learn the same lesson, there's no replacement for the source code.

Yes, the code is still important. For example, I had tasked Codex to implement function calling in a programming language, and it decided the way to do this was to spin up a brand new sub interpreter on each function call, load a standard library into it, execute the code, destroy the interpreter, and then continue -- despite an already partial and much more efficient solution was already there but in comments. The AI solution "worked", passed all the tests the AI wrote for it, but it was still very very wrong. I had to look at the code to understand it did this. To get it right, you have to either I guess indicate how to implement it, which requires a degree of expertise beyond prompting.

Hot take: we (not I, but I reluctantly) will keep calling it code long after there's no code to be seen.

Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.

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 want it yes. I already feel like Im the one doing the dumb work for the AI of manually clicking windows and typing in a command here or there it cant do.

Ive also been getting increasingly annoyed with how tedious it is to do the same repetitive actions for simple tasks.

It repaired an astonishing messed up permission issue on my mac

There are people running OpenClaw, so yeah, crazy as it sounds, some do that.

I'm reluctant to run any model without at least a docker.

I don’t think people want that, but they are willing to accept that in order to get stuff done.

Their company literally runs on hype. This is all part of the strat.

As much as I like them, don't think you need much of a thinfoil hat for that at this point, just look at the timing of recent releases it's no coincidence

Raced to the comments to say this. Must absolutely be correct - who can dominate the media cycle.

Perhaps, but that strategy can backfire if you're planting a subpar comparison in the minds of customers.

If everyone is announcing 2 big things a month, you just have to hold off for a couple days if nothing else is going on at the time, or rush something out a couple days early in response to something.

They did acquire TBPN, this barely needs tin foil.

Credit to them for being media savvy.

Does that even matter nowadays?

These announcements happen so often

Its not magic. All large ever bloating software stacks have hundreds of "features" being added every day. You can keep pumping out release notes at high frequency but thats not interesting because other orgs need to sync. And sync takes its own sweet time.

Fuck, i've been using it wrong.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise systems/tools. A runtime environment must be developed to do that but where that of the agent ends and that of the enterprise systems begins is a totally open question.

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

Totally agree, AI interfaces will become the norm.

Even all the websites, desktop/mobile apps will become obsolete.

I think the coding market will be much larger. Knowledge work is kind of like the leaf nodes of the economy where software is the branches. That's to say, making software easier and cheaper to write will cause more and more complexity and work to move into the Software domain from the "real world" which is much messier and complicated.

> 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.

You know what happens to a predator who makes its prey go extinct?

AI is doing the same

really struggling to understand where this is coming from, agents haven't really improved much over using the existing models. anything an agent can do, is mostly the model itself. maybe the technology itself isn't mature yet.

> 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.

It’s marginally better than Microsoft naming things.

This is a pretty important issue given that the new update adds "computer use" capabilities. If it was already reading sensitive files in the CLI version, giving it full desktop control seems like it needs a much more robust permission model than what they've shown so far.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r186gl/my_agent_...

tldr Claude pwned user then berated users poor security. (Bonus: the automod, who is also Claude, rubbed salt on the wound!)

I think the only sensible way to run this stuff is on a separate machine which does not have sensitive things on it.

ran into this literally yesterday. so im gonna assume yes.

It was already leaked several days ago and they've been teasing it for weeks. They had already said that it was coming this week specifically.

Slides, publications and tech reports, very handy for figures !

North Korean employees should do the trick. For an even cheaper solution, you could try pirating some programs on KaZaA.

how? was this not a thing with claude cowork?

Goose is an option, but it is just OK. https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose

Codex-cli / OpenClaw. If you need a browser use Playwright-mcp.

I can't see why I'd want an agent to click around Gnome or Ubuntu desktop but maybe that's just me?

Any particular evidence for this other than the conjecture that it might be related?

To me it seems like just a natural evolution of Codex and a direct response to Claude Cowork, rather than something fully claw-like.

The macOS app version of Codex I have doesn't show reasoning summaries, just simply 'Thinking'.

Reasoning deltas add additional traffic, especially if running many subagents etc. So on large scale, those deltas maybe are just dropped somewhere.

Saying that, sometimes the GPT reasoning summary is funny to read, in particular when it's working through a large task.

Also, the summaries can reveal real issues with logic in prompts and tool descriptions+configuration, so it allowing debugging.

i.e. "User asked me to do X, system instructions say do Y, tool says Z which is different to what everyone else wants. I am rather confused here! Lets just assume..."

It has previously allowed me to adjust prompts, etc.

It's useful when using prism, and for exploratory research & code.

I do want to see as it allows me to course correct.

FWIW, I've found Codex with GPT-5.4 to be better than Opus-4.6; I would say it's at least worth checking out for your use case.

I'm switching because of the higher usage limits, 2x speed mode that isn't billed as extra usage, and much more stable and polished Mac app.

at least for our scope of work (data, interfacing with data, building things to extract data quickly and dump to warehouse, resuming) claude is performing night and day better than codex. we're still continuing tinkering with codex here to see if we're happy with it but it's taking a lot more human-in-the-loop to keep it from going down the wrong path and we're finding that we're constantly prompt-nudging it to the end result. for the most part after ~3 days we're not super happy with it. kinda feels like claude did last year idk. it's worth checking out and seeing if it's succeeding at the stuff you want it to do.

Wait for new GPT release this/next week and then decide based on benchmarks. That is what I will do.

One main thing is to de-couple the repos from specific agents e.g. use .mcp.json instead of "claude plugins", use AGENTS.md (and symlink to CLAUDE.md) and so on.

I love this because I have absolutely 0 loyalty to any of these companies and once Anthropic nerfs I just switch to OpenAI, then I can switch to Google and so on. Whichever works best.

Honestly, just try it. I used both and there's no reason to not try depending on which model is superior at a given point. I've found 5.4 to be better atm (subject to change any time) even though Claude Code had a slicker UI for awhile.

Competition forever, ideally

What's the benefit of using both?

I don't see how it's possible to support Linux with Wayland, unless you limit the automation only to the browsers.

This is why both companies are in an SF bubble.

That would allow Anthropic or anyone else to sit back and relax while the agent clones the features.