For the last 6 months, I've been telling my company that I don't think our app will matter much soon. I think most of our customers will want to interact with our service via their AI agent.
This is coming from my own experience as a software developer. I do not want to leave Claude Code. I'm hooking up everything into Claude Code and have it do what I want for me. I do not want to log into my cloud provider. I do not want to log into my Github. I don't want to log into any 3rd party services. I just want to stay in Claude Code.
I think developers tend to be ahead of the general public by 1-2 years in AI use. I imagine a future where most people simply want to stay within their ChatGPT/Claude/Muse/Grok/Gemini agent to do just about everything.
If my prediction is correct, I think Apple is going to be in trouble because it weakens the iPhone ecosystem severely and they are so far behind in AI everything that it's hard for me to see them ever catching up. Not to mention they do not have access to compute since they've not invested in compute.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would hate a future where I have to talk or type everything to an agent. It's difficult enough to communicate with people. Language is imprecise. For that reason, among many others, I think you'll always need traditional UI/UX, potentially some new concepts to adapt to new technology like AR, and supplemented by an AI Agent that can assist and augment rather than replace.
Apple's use of Siri in Vision Pro is a good start, but there would need to be tighter integration w/ the UI. That's probably on the roadmap... assuming they continue to develop it.
I think an AI can just generate a UI that you like. You can go back to that UI anytime. You can change it instantly. Your AI Agent still can interact with it.
Have people forgotten why software exists? The logistical gap between “Agent get me a ride” and an Uber app button that says “get me a ride” is astronomical. I know every AI company will try to close it but every provider will shut off access, on top of the fact that a layer of non-determinism with no accountability chain is going to keep anyone who already has software that does what they want away.
This raises two issues already, now you've already installed an app AND you've given an AI agent free rein of your entire phone? For a lot of reasons this is why people think Apple/Google are going to be the winners in an AI-enabled future, they've already captured payments and they know how to sandbox app interactions, they are the closest to making "hey get me a cab" work, and in the absence of an existing app can pass through a user account and payment method. Anthropic / OpenAI are not (in my opinion) anywhere near closing that gap.
> I think developers tend to be ahead of the general public by 1-2 years in AI use.
I'm pushing the perennial 'developers (and engineers) think differently' trope here, but I think you're wildly optimistic.
The inability of the average person to write a detailed enough spec for implementation, compared to how trivial it is for an experienced developer, is mind boggling.
Imho, this is going to extend to agentic interactions with app-as-service-for-agent.
You don't magically increase customer experience by multiplying (garbage average user prompt) * (whatever agent they use) * (MCP, etc).
I didn't mean that non-developers will be writing apps.
I meant that non-developers will also find that staying within their AI agent to do what they want is better than downloading, logging in, learning different app UIs.
In our company, we recently gave Claude subscriptions to all office workers. They all hooked it up to their favorite tools already and they've been raving about it. It was a revelation for them.
My employer has been integrating agentic AI into every tool and updating the UI/UX to make the agent the primary interface. This applies everywhere, including people management tasks. It sucks.
In the past, you could look at a web page, see some structure, understand process, etc. and intuitively see and understand what you're suppose to do. When you remove all of that in favor of a text box, you spend a lot of time asking questions and prompting to get information or accomplish tasks that would otherwise have taken a minute or two and when you're done, you still don't understand how the underlying system, process, or policy is and how it works.
You'd be surprised at what people can do. My chief revenue officer never knew what SQL is but once he had access to Claude, he built some amazing dashboards that he always wanted.
LLMs are getting exceptionally good at interpreting vague asks.
Do I trust a non-developer to build a production software system? No.
Do I think they can control Excel spreadsheets, PPTs, and other productivity tools through MCP? Absolutely.
The question that needs to be asked is when everyone can create their own dashboard, are they all looking at the same information and in the same way so that they can be aligned?
One of the biggest issues I've seen in this kind of environment is that there are 50 dashboards, created by different people, and the data presented on them hasn't been validated to ensure that the data is correct and pulling from the same location. It's not clear that the data can be trusted and it's not clear what the authoritative source of truth is.
All I can say is that my experience suggests they are that naive because in a fast paced environment, there are often people pulling data without the context to validate it and the push to move faster and faster means proper validation isn't happening. Often it's only discovered after someone who does understand begins looking, asking questions and the errors become known and by then, it's too late.
I've seen it firsthand, multiple time and while anecdotes aren't data, conversations I've had with peers at other companies suggest they have similar experiences.
I'd second that. My experiences, across multiple companies, are that data validity risks are drastically increased by someone not diligent & knowledgeable about implementation details.
Furthermore, that persona is also often incapable of self-checking and recognizing errors in their presented data, because they don't know how it was generated in the first place.
Doesn't apply to most consumption based/scroll based apps like Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, Hinge, etc. Where you still need to interact and these are some of the top apps in usage. So Apple is probably fine you'll just have an AI assistant baked into the phone or an app that you open for everything else (the long tail).
I think an AI-agent based dating service is a good idea actually. I might start one. :)
Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, you're right. So hopefully OpenAI can convince those companies to convert their apps over. Wouldn't be too hard given how easy it is to duplicate an app nowadays.
> This is coming from my own experience as a software developer. I do not want to leave Claude Code. I'm hooking up everything into Claude Code and have it do what I want for me. I do not want to log into my cloud provider. I do not want to log into my Github. I don't want to log into any 3rd party services. I just want to stay in Claude Code.
How much longer do you give until Claude Code replaces you entirely? Product or CEO dictate their wishes and Claude returns a freshly compiled binary and offers to deploy it to production with a simple "yes". A SWE salary seems like an lot of money for middlemen to pull lever on Claude Code.
I invest most of my money at the top layer right now. TSMC a big one. I don't know if Nvidia will win, TPUs, Jalepenos, Cerebras or whatever is coming up. I just know they all have to go through TSMC. I have a bit in Intel as well just for geopoltical reasons.
I'll definitely be buying Anthropic.
Funny enough, I do have substantial amount of Apple stocks I accumulated pre-ChatGPT but I've been selling here and there as it reaches all time highs due it being an "AI hedge".
I think Wallstreet is getting it wrong and I think the narrative around Apple will change fast in the next few months.
That's a historical artifcat, not an innate property. (Math was first invented in the Bronze Age for accounting and architecture.)
There's a theoretical parallel universe with a mathematics where numbers aren't first on the ladder but down there around number five. (Ironically computers are an example of that. Figuring out how to do numbers when all you have is finite sequences from an alphabet is advanced CS.)
Firstly are you so very sure he claimed that is an innate property? That numbers are a gateway to quantitative reasoning seems a perfectly reasonable claim either way.
Secondly there are lots of mathematical objects that significantly predate the bronze age (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone but there are others) and because these objects are so old we have no idea why math was first invented.
Thirdly I have no idea the relevance of the theoretical “late numbers “ parallel universe but this thread is about a book in this one.
> That Numbers are a gateway to quantitative reasoning seems a perfectly reasonable claim either way
This isn't true though. It's not supported by anything except Bronze Age tradition.
I.e., when teaching kids advanced math at an early age it's often better to skip numbers altogether and start with set theory or logic. Many kids find that a much easier gateway.
Set theory and logic stay below numbers, but they do not belong to quantitative reasoning.
By definition, quantities, either discrete or continuous, as already classified by Aristotle, are the properties that can be expressed by numeric values, as a result of counting for discrete quantities, or as a result of measuring for continuous quantities.
Properties that are not quantities, but which can be compared, to determine which is greater or less, or if they are equal, are qualities (also by definition; there are also properties that can neither be expressed by a number nor compared, so they are neither quantities nor qualities, e.g. the properties of belonging to a certain subset or of having a certain name).
The simplest numbers, i.e. cardinal numbers a.k.a. natural numbers, are equivalence classes of sets, so indeed the theory of numbers is built upon that of sets (a.k.a. multitudes in older language), but this does not contradict in any way the title from the book, because quantitative reasoning refers to only a part of mathematics, not to all of it.
In medieval education, the subjects of learning were partitioned into 3 trivial sciences, which were those that do not need quantitative reasoning, which were grammar, logic and rhetoric, plus 4 mathematical sciences, which were those that require quantitative reasoning, which were arithmetic, geometry, music (i.e. harmony) and astronomy.
Therefore the original meaning of the word "mathematics" referred to the sciences that need quantitative reasoning, while logic and set theory were outside "mathematics" (at that time the primitive form of set theory was included in "logic", i.e. the concepts of set operations and of logic quantifiers).
Much later, towards the end of 19th century, due to their importance for describing mathematics in a rigorous way, mathematical logic and set theory became included in "mathematics".
Humans have learned how to handle big numbers only very recently, not much before the invention of writing and the Bronze Age (the "Bronze" age happened only several thousands years later after the first use of agriculture and after the first use of metals like lead, copper and gold).
On the other hand, small numbers are perceived directly by the senses and recognized, not only by humans, but also by many animals.
I belive this is what was attemped in France (they taught set teory in an abstract way in elementary school), but with poor results and abandoned this approach after some time.
It's only RAM, mass storage and GPUs. Desktop CPUs, mainboards, PSUs, and cases have become cheaper because PC building demand has declined. Peripheral prices have remained largely unchanged.
But a large reason for the price increase has been because companies have been hoarding them in warehouses as they wait for DC buildout. If you sell then you remove that pressure and prices decrease.
People saying this actually know how to run local models.
People claiming otherwise are Claude customers who know nothing beyond its point-and-click interface.
Consider that fact.
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