In the past month I’ve completed a home dashboard idea I’ve had for years, I’ve built a house management system, a travel planning tool, a guitar chord annotator… it’s been very liberating. I’m not doing the coding, which was fun, but I am doing all of the system design and iteration, which I also really enjoy.
The other day I refused to fire it up for him and he had a full meltdown. I told my wife I had never seen product market fit like that before.
It is a little harder with something like a game to maintain motivation and go for perfection when you know your audience is an audience of one but it’s also a relief to just worry about the things he cares about (trains and firetrucks).
I also miss there being something intellectually challenging to a side project but that probably means I just need to learn a real game engine after this.
Like one of the most obvious things that a computer can do is run a task periodically at a time to go maybe fetch information and process it. And yet, the average computer user using any commercial operating system does not understand how to set up a recurring task. Operating systems don't really advertise it or talk about it as a feature. I think this is a good example of the disempowerment of end users by software companies.
LLMs have the potential to change this by allowing people to simply ask their LLM to invoke the right incantation to schedule the task or produce the program. That seems like a great change. I'd like to see more power in the hands of the end users rather than less.
For people that don't want to put in the effort, of course, this will change nothing. But for those that are willing to explore a little bit, I think it can be a big improvement over the software ecosystem that's emerged in the era of the app store.
The "run a task periodically" isn't the difficult part, it's processing the data that is.
And to be honest I don't think llms will empower that many people, the vast majority don't want to put the effort required (and it's definitely more effort than writing a one-shot prompt)
I wasn't really talking about fetching email.
The bar for setting up automations is already lowered by having AI agents write integrations, but we need a platform where it can all come together. Apps, automation, data and integrations with an AI agent that can process it all, and present it personally customized to the user. That's the future I'm already living in - my setup has all integrations available to any automation, app, or the AI agent. And setting up new tools on top of it is mostly a non-technical task, except when I have to code the platform it's all living in ;)
In the agentic era, there is no need for maintenance - each artifact is immutable and just-in-time. In case you need a new version, spin up a new artifact.
I’m only half-joking.
Or with voice. Or even face movement control, like via the camera.