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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

The cognitive dissonance is astounding in AI circles. The vast majority of people have a personal computer in their pocket and they use it the vast majority of the time to scroll Instagram, play games, and occasionally interact with their bank and other social services. People who have laptops and desktop computers have them for specialized tasks they already do. None of the vast majority of users who buy their phone when the screen cracks and the battery stops working care about the agentic AI world because their phone already does everything they want to do.

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I think the rise of Claw's, Grok Bot and Muse is a good counterpoint to this. Yes they are still niche specialized interfaces right now, but they are basically allowing non-technical people to do things that have been easily possible with scripts and cronjobs for a long time. Its basically the Ford and faster houses analogy.

Howl was faster houses, Ford was faster horses.

When I look around me, the only time people get their phone out of their pockets is either for youtube, some social media, or calling/chatting with people. It's very rare to even see them set reminders or use the calculator. It's look like you're in some tech bubble. People outside of that don't scripts or do repetitive and formalized stuff. The people that do create apps and services to sell.

My wife is as non-technical as it gets, but she still spends hours with ChatGPT everyday. Calorie counting, parenting tips, gardening help, fact checks, looking up celebrities, road trip planning, meal planning, health related questions, all with ChatGPT. I really don't think she's the only one. It wasn't the most downloaded iPhone app of 2025 for nothing.

Sounds like it's replaced Google Search for her, not much else.

This is a bizarre sentence seeing as Google is a portal for most people. So replacing Google with ChatGPT is replacing all those destination sites as well.

The use cases described above aren't really multiple applications though. They're just using a search method to get the right fact or factoid. I consider that the scope of a single "app".

Most of those websites have been complements for Google Search rather than standalone services whether they like it or not, and if chat bots replace Google Search, they'll replace the entire ecosystem.

Oh, and she also uses image generation to test redecoration ideas by asking "gipitiak" to add/remove/recolor things on room photos. That's something you can't do with Google search in any way, shape or form.

Not that this matters, because Google search alone disproves the claim that people only use phones for videos and social media.

I didn't intend to argue either way, but I feel that adding "and search" to the argument made above doesn't really weaken it. The full claim is that regular users weren't really interested in using power-user apps, so they won't be interested with a chat-bot UI either.

I do personally think that we'll see regular users interested in new, different workflows than the automation ones we associate with power users, and the image generation use case you mention is a good example. Chat-bots do seem to be owning those rather than entirely new apps.

Google search is neither Youtube nor social media nor calling/chatting with people.

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