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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

Agents are going to change everything. Once we've got a solid programmatic system driving interface and people get better about exposing non-ui handles for agents to work with programs, agents will make apps obsolete. You're going to have a device that sits by your desk and listens to you, watches your movements and tracks your eyes, and dispatches agents to do everything you ask it to do, using all the information it's taking in along with a learned model of you and your communication patterns, so it can accurately predict what you intend for it to do.

If you need an interface for something (e.g. viewing data, some manual process that needs your input), the agent will essentially "vibe code" whatever interface you need for what you want to do in the moment.

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This isn't likely to happen for roughly the same reason Hypercard didn't become the universal way for novices to create apps.

I probably spend 80% of my time in front of a computer driving agents, challenge accepted :)

Marshall McLuhan called, he said to ask yourself, who's driving who?

"We shape our tools, and therefore, our tools shape us."

Ironically the outro of a YouTube video I just watched. I'm just a few hundred ms of latency away from being a cyborg.

So basically, the "ideal" state of a human is to be 100% active driving agents to vibe code whatever you need, based on every movement, every thought? Can our brains even handle having every thought being intentional and interpreted as such without collapsing (nervous breakdown)?

I guess I've always been more of a "work to live" type.

Consider that a subset of us programmer types pride themselves on never moving their hands off the keyboard. They are already "wired in" so to speak.

The technology for this has been around for the past 10 years but it's still not a reality, what makes AI the kicker here?

e.g. Alexa for voice, REST for talking to APIs, Zapier for inter-app connectdness.

(not trying to be cynical, just pointing out that the technology to make it happen doesn't seem to be the blocker)

Alexa is trash. If you have to basically hold an agent's hand through something or it either fails or does something catastrophic nobody's going to use or trust it.

REST is actually a huge enabler for agents for sure, I think agents are going to drive everyone to have at least an API, if not a MCP, because if I can't use your app via my agent and I have to manually screw around in your UI, and your competitor lets my agent do work so I can just delegate via voice commands, who do you think is getting my business?

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