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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It's fucking weird and I think we're not talking about it enough.

I got through a trial using a document manager I vibe coded in two days. No crashes, no runaway memory usage with several gigs of PDFs. All my depo transcripts, expert reports, etc, indexed, with a terminal window integrated so i can ask Grok to “pull up the testimony on the first day when that guy said that thing.” The app has an API so the AI can directly control what documents i’m looking at and jump me to the right places. All I had to do was tell Claude to “expose all the document viewing functionality through applescript,” then tell Grok to “read the applescript dictionary and write yourself a skill.”

It’s like ye olde times when we had overqualified efficient paralegals who could do stuff like that.

Is the end-app anything worth open sourcing?

With some review and polish, maybe. The code seems fine. Still playing with the UI concepts. The ability to iterate is crazy.

Please just publish it.

If you used it successfully, it’s more than enough to share.

Do not be afraid. Please.

I hope that’s sarcasm or that I’m misunderstanding what you mean. Have you looked at the front-page of HN? At the new submissions? Social media? Newspapers? YouTube videos? It’s bonkers to me anyone could claim with any degree of seriousness that we’re not talking about this enough. We’re talking about it too much.

I don't know what to tell you. I bounce off 80% of the AI stories on the front page too, and I have the same frustration. But the change that's happening now to our field is profound. It sucks that the conversation we're having on HN is a debate between AI maximalists and the "clanker" people, rather than e.g. reconsidering Raskin's Humane Interface in light of what we can see computers will be like in 10 years.

You are at a better position to start these debates about HCI and other things, and you should do it.

Most people are financially tied to their fields. I believe you are at a different stage of your career, so you are in a position to think about it without worrying about putting food on the table. I believe that automation of work being something so scary is a very sad thing, but it is how our current system works.

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