> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user

That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :)

I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is that these people just ask Claude to do whatever it is they need done. Codebase needs managing? They just ask Claude to do it. No idea how to deploy an app? They just ask Claude to do it.

Any app built on top of this stack to 'make it easier' is competing with 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'.

Microsoft is trying this with copilot, but they are calling everything copilot so YMMV.

True story, heard yesterday from a consultant who was working with some VP type (not a large company, but still high management): VP uploads a spreadsheet to Claude and tells it to remove column F.

The power of Excel is not what it was. Nor is the power of ordinary thought.

We're building something along these lines, but since our roots are a consulting business, we're still building around the idea that there needs to be an expert integrator doing the front-loading work of discovery/decomposition/scoring of tasks/implementing them as those agents. These tools are terrifying to anyone not quite technical, and it turns out, people are bad at decomposing their own work, let alone describing it in a box with a blinking cursor.

We're obviously going to be holding ourselves back in terms of scale and in terms of not being a "true" SaaS with this approach, but my thesis is that we get much higher quality results and higher compliance/activation and can charge more for the bespoke model backed by our own platform.

> I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user.

I haven't tried it, or know a lot about it, but isn't this the whole claw thing?

> Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them.

This is probably fine as long as the code is acting on local resources. The moment you have vibe coded software interacting with shared state or database the risk increases exponentially and all it takes to have a bad day is a poorly worded prompt from one of those users.

Some oversight by humans or automated guardrails will probably reduce those instances.

I'm trying to do this with orcabot.com

A figma like dashboard for turning ClaudeCode, Gemini Cli, Codex into an OpenClaw but with security measures to break the lethal trifecta while running on a VM.

But it's not quite there in terms of usability. I agree that is the hardest part of the equation. It's something I'm constantly experimenting with and haven't found the solution to it yet. Open to feedback!

I am building a product in that space :)

It's targeted for creatives atm. For the few in private testing, it's been amazing what they're able to do with the little tooling I've given them. It is a legitimate change in their daily drive.

I wouldn't want to build a business that was so dependent on a massive third-party that can either cut off my access or copy my design at any time of their choosing.

Lovable?

Yes, totally agree. Spent a few years in operations consulting and our clients' people were doing such amounts of mind-numbing repetitive work you wouldn't believe. Funny thing is, they are so used to it, they don't realize how wasteful it is. Yet, they are "afraid" of AI and new technologies in general, because it is something new and unfamiliar. However, when you show them something simple, e.g. how to write an Excel formula, they feel extremely motivated and empowered. So yes, if anyone can make AI feel less "scary" and approachable so that ordinary non-tech-savvy people can click around and see how they can automate some basic stuff, it will make them feel they have superpowers.

> whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user

You mean UX? Isn't Claude Cowork supposed to be 'Claude but for normies'? As for Claude Code / OpenAI Codex for non-programmers, believe Replit, Loveable, & others are trying & succeeding.

WhatsApp comes to mind in how its sole focus on replacing SMS (rather than Skype/AOL/MSN Messenger/YChat/GChat) meant it had no (user-facing) password/username, no elaborate signup, no login, no chat/friend requests, no sync etc. & became the biggest social network right under the nose of well resourced competitors with worldwide distribution, like Google & Facebook.

Whoever does it everyone else will just prompt the same UX.

[dead]

I was just thinking about that earlier this week.

Claude can write code pretty well, but there are just a few tasks that I need to do to orchestrate everything. If it could do those tasks well even some of the time it would be about 10x more useful.

I agree and that's what i'm working on (for businesses) - an all-one-one consolidated AI application that's setup and ready for non-technical users.

It's called Zenning AI - we're a small team in London, testing it with a few companies at the moment!

We’re (harriethq.com) trying to do this by reframing it as a “provisioning” challenge - how do you get your connectors installed on non-technical desktops, how do you give some easy pre-bake recipes that wake them from their dogmatic slumber

Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.