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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

I use agents to do so much stuff on my computer, MCPs are easy to roll so you can give them whatever powers you want. Being able to just direct agents to do stuff on my computer via voice is amazing. The direct driving still sucks so they're not a general UI yet, and the models need to be a bit more consistent/smarter in general, but it'll be there very soon.

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What do you do with agents?

I use them as an intelligence layer over disk cleanup tools, to manage deployments/cloud configs, I have big repo organization workflows, they can manage my KDE system settings, I use them as editors on documents all over my filesystem (to add comments for revision, not to rewrite, that's not consistent enough), I use them to do deep research on topics and save reports, to look at my google analytics and seo data and suggest changes to my pages. Frankly if I had my druthers I wouldn't use a mouse, the agent would use visual tracking (eye/hand) along with words and body language to just quickly figure out what I want.

You’re saying you’ve found a useful assistant for menial tasks. That’s not consistent with the strong claims you were making upthread.

My claim is that the "useful assistant for menial tasks" is the Wright brothers flyer to what we'll have in a few years. If you have voice chat with an agent on your phone that can just do everything you'd need an app for, what's the point of an app? And it's gonna happen, because if your app doesn't let people's agents handle their business and your competitors' does, people are gonna switch if they can. The computer interfaces of the future are going to be made for agents first.

> My claim is that the "useful assistant for menial tasks" is the Wright brothers flyer to what we'll have in a few years.

I agree with that.

But what you originally wrote was, "The AI bundling problem is over. The user interface problem is over." It would probably make more sense to say "...will be over."

People tend to be sensitive to those kinds of claims because there's a lot of hype around all this at the moment. So when people seem to imply that what we have right now is much more capable than it actually is, there tends to be pushback.

> they can manage my KDE system settings

Why do you even have KDE installed if AI has replaced GUIs?

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