Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

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I've seen a few posts of the form "why would you ever want to use anything else than AI from now on?" by now. My counterpoints would be:

Unless you have a local model and the appropriate hardware for it, your agent is Somebody Else's Computer. Do you really want to send all your data and make your entire computing experience dependent on whatever OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever else is planning in this moment?

That's not even starting with inference time and token cost. Despite all the incredible advances in inference, it still takes more time than most non-AI computer functionality. Do you really want to wait a few minutes and pay money for something that you could also do with a few clicks fully locally on your PC?

But the most important thing: User interfaces. Right now, we're basically cramming everything you could possibly want to do at a computer into a chat interface. But there are lots of applications fir which specialized graphical interfaces are much more suitable. Why would you want to get rid of them?

Somewhat connected to that: Repetition. If you have to do the same task again every week or every day, it seems wasteful to ask the AI for it every time: Not just are you wasting a lot of time, energy and tokens, you're also at risk of getting inconsistent results, if the agent from today's session will interpret the requirements slightly differently than the agent from yesterday.

You can circumvent all those things by having the AI write you a custom app, but then using the app without AI to do the task.

Those are all techbical limitations that will be solved with time. In 5 years I would be surprised if we do NOT have an AI as smart as today's frontier models, that runs completely locally, and has a real time voice interface.

I'm not a Treky but I think Star Trek has the right interface here. For basic operations you just use voice and tell it your intent or what you need to know "Computer, what's the fastest route for me to get home?". "Madison is fastest right now, it's 3 minutes faster than Lake, it traffic is building up".

This isn't just whatever Waze gives you, it knows about your constraints and preferences. So you need to program that somehow. Imagine taking it one step further "Computer, what's the fastest route to pickup my daughter and get home?" or even it just responding to the first prompt "Take Roosevelt, and today you need to pickup your daughter from volleyball".

In Star Trek they often do this when they create "simulations". They tell the computer constraints and then it refines it. No writing programs, but effectively that's what you are doing but with the natural language voice interface.

"Computer let's create a simulation to figure out the fastest way for me to get home. I want to take a route along the expressway and know whether to get off at Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake. I need to pickup my daughter when she has volleyball." You don't need to repeat the whole instruction each time, and behind the scenes it is probably turning it into some deterministic code, so next time you trigger that program it's not going to hallucinate some nonsense.

Afair Star Trek AI is more like 'Ok Google', and generally doesn't really seem like very agentic, more like a computer with a voice interface, able to execute simple commands and answer simple questions.

I think Star Trek is interesting in that "AI" was explored so often by so many different writers that you have the entire spectrum of agency or sophistication levels by now - the ship's computer at one end, then the Holodeck characters, Data and eventually the Borg at the other end...

> "Computer let's create a simulation to figure out the fastest way for me to get home. I want to take a route along the expressway and know whether to get off at Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake. I need to pickup my daughter when she has volleyball."

Imagine saying that to a random dude with a map and that should give you a good idea on how many info you're leaving out. You can say that the AI will infere those but that seems to be the common fallacy of AI enjoyers: They're always assuming the AI will magically find out the missing information from their prompt somehow.

I have Organic Maps installed on my phone and within a few minutes (faster than my car warming up) I can set a multi stop route (you can bookmark places). Training a random user to use such apps is also equally fast. The same happens with various pro tools: once trained, a user can be very fast with them.

> I have Organic Maps installed on my phone and within a few minutes (faster than my car warming up) I can set a multi stop route (you can bookmark places).

Wow that's slow. I can do the same in Google Maps in seconds. Can you tell me what I'm missing? I'm definitely missing something.

If your car is relatively new (couple decades) you don't need to warm it up, just drive easy for a couple minutes.

  > just drive easy for a couple minutes.

so your... warming it up?

The important part is that you're not prevented from driving when it's still cold.

What engineering innovation in the recent decades has enabled oil-lubricated internal combustion engines to not require warming up?

Much tighter electronic control of fuel, ignition and even cooling system combined with tighter tolerances and modern oil formulations. Wait for the cat to light off and the revs drop and then put it in gear and take it easy for the next couple of minutes of driving.

The main thing is that it takes a long time to hit operating temperature at idle. Of course it still requires warming up, but every knows the other poster meant sitting at idle, not driving easy for a couple minutes.

Getting rid of the internal combustion engine is the main one, but your point stands.

Planned obsolescence.

Why don't you just use the transporter instead of your car?

And yet, even on Star Trek we can see people typing things into screens or onto pads. The helmsman doesn't fly the ship by talking to the computer.

My point is that text-based interfaces - and voice is just a convenience around text - are not the best interfaces for a lot of tasks.

We live in a "capitalist" society. Moats will be built, regulations will be enacted to ensure the American Corporation controls the market segment. No one has been able to unseat Amazon, no one has been able to unseat Google, no one has been able to unseat Microsoft, no one has been able to seat Twitter, Facebook, etc. The modern market is segments that are controlled by a single entity. There will be no local models.

Loss of control/privacy, poor performance at high cost, bad UX.

Fortunately our industry has been getting people used to these for years.

Are you criticizing vibe coding or assistants here? I really can't tell.

Neither, I'm criticizing the average quality of work produced by the last ~20 years of software "engineering"

We are talking about a hypothetical future where coding AIs are good enough, cheap enough and ubiquitous enough that not just expert programmers, but everybody is capable of vibe coding exactly what they need, to the point they actually reach for coding AIs and not the app store with ready-made apps. That future is still far away, at least 5 years, probably closer to 10-15. In that hypothetical future, most of the problems you're talking about would be solved, or else we wouldn't have that future yet.

Man, you seem like you're thinking linearly... the capability growth does not look to be linear... 3 years tops IMO

Actually I'm thinking sublinearly. Ceiling is coming.

You really believe that?

Sometimes it is wild to me how two people can look at the same information and come to completely different conclusions.

As best as I can tell, the only constraint the really matters right now is availability of compute, or as a buddy of mine put it "GPU GO BRRRRRRRRRRR!"

Empirically, nobody has a problem with their stuff running on someone else's computer, with chat interfaces, or with repetition, or with repetition.

> Unless you have a local model and the appropriate hardware for it, your agent is Somebody Else's Computer

So, any Apple computer?

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