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Comment by rco8786 | Hacker News Reader

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rco8786

What IS Sky? Their landing page is just about the acquisition and I can't infer much from the OpenAI announcement.

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It watches your screen, sends the screenshot to the company and the ai decides what's the next step or good for you.

I see nothing wrong with this! What could go wrong?

The 2nd paragraph in the article

> Sky is a powerful natural language interface for the Mac. With Sky, AI works alongside you, whether you’re writing, planning, coding, or managing your day. Sky understands what’s on your screen and can take action using your apps.

> We will bring Sky’s deep macOS integration and product craft into ChatGPT, and all members of the team will join OpenAI.

So it's probably a https://www.raycast.com/ competitor

Clippy. It’s Clippy’s the whole way down.

That's what I was gonna say. All of these companies are desperate to make Clippy work.

Right. People want thoughtful computer slaves that love serving you, but we call it Clippy.

Not sure if you saw the demo video but the blue "Trailer" button at the bottom of their page pops it up to watch.

https://sky.app/

Thoroughly unimpressed. Every one of these assistant apps always go to "send message/add something to calendar".

Hopefully the actual features and interoperability prove the ad wrong and there's a game changing UX behind it.

I've yet to see a useful case for these AI browsers that is something other than a dead simple task.

But when I browse the net, I'm not thinking about asking AI about the info on my screen. I can just read it?

And by no means am I anti AI, I use it a bit for coding

It feels like it's always the same 3-4 things.

Travel Bookings Recipes Calendar/Email integration

But maybe if you look from a first principles standpoint, do most human tasks decompose to some form of these same 4-6 tasks? (not talking about brainstorming, which is already well covered, or socializing, which is offline)

AI browsing the web is dumb AF if you think about it. Using an API through a REPL is so much better, we're doing all this work to basically work around jackass site operators who make everything require javascript and don't provide a documented user facing API.

The irony is that as the agentic boom really takes off, all these no-api, no accessibility sites are going to lose to small competitors who just offer a reliable agent interface, so people can use their service without having to use their service. Good riddance to the dinosaurs.

They're also the reason we have to support backwards compat for some shit sites designed in 99.

Like update it already ffs or it's not worth having around, we can archive it instead

Obviously an API is better but realistically we aren't going to convince every web service to offer an API overnight and people want to be able to e.g. make reservations through chatgpt today.

Yep, the only way to convince companies to offer an API is to implement an agent that slowly but surely works around whatever trainwreck of a web experience they put in its way and then give them an option to make it smoother by offering an AI.

See: mobile websites. They sucked so badly that "desktop internet, not mobile internet" was a big selling point of the original iPhone. Then, once mobile had enough market share to "set the terms," we went back to having special mobile versions (or even mobile-first), but this time it didn't suck. Part of that was tech, but most of it was mobile acquiring a critical mass of marketshare, and the winner of the mobile wars won using an all-important temporary workaround stepping stone that solved the chicken-egg problem.

The only useful case I can think of is if you’re on a website with a big unstructured list or collection and you want to filter or reformat the data. For example, say you’re looking at a listing of houses for sale and you want to see only the ones that are painted blue, but the site doesn’t have that kind of structured data. Then AI could help by looking at the images and picking those out. Still, that’s probably not a very common situation, and you could do something similar with a bit of scripting and feeding that data into an AI manually. But for people who don’t know how to code, or are intimidated by it even when AI writes it for them, I guess it could be useful.

Oh and maybe one more thing to just give you the content that you're looking for like on all of these recipe sites with walls of text and images for SEO purposes where you just want the recipe. I guess that could be useful to just ask show me the recipe.

The demo looks like holding a robot's hand while they do something that would normally take me 15 seconds anyway. I have mostly found AI to be useful for search/research, not creating a middle-man between my friends and myself who has the "feature" of knowing what the star ratings on Google Maps imply.

There are more details about how it works here, with videos: https://www.macstories.net/stories/sky-for-mac-preview/

Archive link to the video, in case it disappears : :-) https://web.archive.org/web/20251024095740/https://sky.app/s...

https://www.macstories.net/stories/sky-for-mac-preview/

This is what you need to know.

it's a revolutionary app the let's you create calendar events to have dinner with your friends

It's a demo of how macOS accessibility APIs and app intents can be used to provide context aware AI agent.

In a way Apple itself was unable to do: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/06/03/2155

That’s a weird claim. Sky never shipped anything, and they’ve been building for 2 years. You don’t think Apple has any internal demos that are comparable? How do you know?

You didn't read the link, did you? Sky was written by the people who wrote Shortcuts, and Apple not only failed to retain that talent but also make their App Intents (and previous automation features) usable.

Whats the big deal? If the management at Apple thought they were important and critical to Apples future, they wouldve made it work. The reality is, they dont believe this to be the case.

I did read the link. The people working on Sky were exactly the people tasked with making App Intents usable, so again it doesn’t make sense why you give a bunch of credence to semi-public demoware in one context versus demoware you don’t have access to. Ari worked at Apple for a decade and Shortcuts went nowhere. Then he made a demo that was acquired by a company that’s buying a lot of teams with good demos. What’s the huge miss, nothing has actually shipped.

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