Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus.
The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.
Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.
We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.
And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.
As I use AI more and more to write code I find myself just implementing something myself more and more for this reason. By the time I have actually explained what I want in precise detail it's often faster to have just made the change myself.
Without enough detail SOTA models can often still get something working, but it's usually not the desired approach and causes problems later.
We've progressed an impressive lot since, say, the nineties when computers (and the internet) started to spread to the general consumer market but the last 10% or so of the way is what would really be the game changer. And if we believe Pareto, of course that is gonna be 90% of the work. We've barely scratched the surface.
perplexity keeps trying to get me to use "computer" and for the life of me I can't think of anything I'd actually do with it.
typing "open hackernews" into copilot instead of clicking the browser and typing hackernews?
99% of OS interactions already boil down to 2 clicks and a search phrase.
- "Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options"
- "Look at my household budget and find ways to be more frugal."
There are thousands of things I can think of when it comes to how an agentic OS would work better than the current Screen Keyboard paradigm. I mean all these things I could now do with Claude or Codex and some of these things I already do with these tools.
huh? ... this reads to me like you don't need an "agentic" OS to do the things you'd want to use an "agentic" OS for..?
like... it seems you just don't want a keyboard to do the same things you've already been doing? ... is that the crux of it?
> Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options
What part of this does an agentic OS help with? My OS doesn't know my travel preferences, family size, work schedule, etc.
These are more appropriate tasks for a smart assistant.
What specifically does an agentic OS UX look like beyond giving claude access to local files and a browser?
Providing the structure of a unified framework: APIs, safeguards, routing to the appropriate model or pipeline, and controlled access to devices and data. The capability is already there. What’s missing is a sane permission system that operates at the level of intent. Having used OpenClaw, that’s IMO the missing piece. It’s a fun experience, but in its current state I would not trust it to autonomously run any meaningful part of my life.
UX-wise, chat is kind of a crutch. It’s slow and inherently limiting. I imagine something closer to a natural, ongoing conversation paired with an execution layer: some sort of approval or review dashboard where planned actions are ready for approval or returned for refinment before they happen. Probably with a conservative moderator agent in the loop that flags things based on preferences and hard-coded policies.
Calling it an OS isn’t accurate, I agree. But that's how people will perceive it. Most people already think of the application layer on Android as "the OS," not the kernel or drivers. This will be the first-class interface on your device, so that’s what it gets called. It doesn’t mean browsers or dedicated applications go away.
Three years ago I would not have thought the IDE would stop being the application I spend most of my time in. Now it’s mostly a passive code viewer and Git browser.
Compare that to everyday workflows. Researching anything still feels incredibly antiquated. Buying a phone, planning a vacation, comparing options means opening dozens of tabs, copy-pasting specs or prices into spreadsheets, reading through fine print, dealing with low-quality or honestly untrustworthy reviews, checking distances manually on maps. It’s boring and tedious work.
Meanwhile, in a professional life, these systems already behave like a team of secretaries: always available, reasonably competent, and scalable. Not perfect, but easily good enough to offload a huge amount of cognitive overhead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4
i feel like someone high up in microsoft probably has this pinned in a epic or something somewhere
I think you and I have very different meanings of "intelligent", "understands" and "gets it done"
Communicating and predicting desires, preferences, thoughts, feelings from one mind to another is difficult.
Fundamentally the easiest way of getting what you want is to be able to do it yourself.
Introduce an agent, and now you get the same utility issues of trying to guess what gifts to buy someone for their birthday. Sure every now and then you get the marketers "surprise and delight", but the main experience is relatively middling, often frustrating and confusing, and if you have any skill or knowledge in The area or ability to do it yourself, ultimately frustrating.
There's everything wrong when "agentic" means that the regular bread-and-butter functionality of the OS becomes unusable.
Can you provide an example of agentic functionality in Windows making regular bread-and-butter functionality become unusable?
When that completely didn't work, we thought that augmented reality was the future of the computer, which also didn't work out.
You need a screen to be able to verify what you're doing (try shopping on Amazon without a screen), which means you also need a UI around it, which then means voice (and by extension agents which also function by conversation) is slower and dumber than the UI, every time.
Meanwhile I have yet to see any brand excited to be integrated with ChatGPT and Claude. Unlike a consumer; being a purely "reasoning-based" agent, they're most likely to ignore everything aesthetic and pick the bottom of the barrel cheapest option for any category. How do you convince an AI to show your specific product to a customer? You don't.
See how that sounds a bit silly? It's because it presents a false dichotomy. That our choice is between either the current state of interfaces or an agentic system which strips away your autonomy and does it for you.