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.

> if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly?

Going to entirely depend on the nature of the task and where AI pricing goes in the future.

Would you like to spend $0.10 on every task or would you like to spend $1.00 to make an app that does it free for you forever?

I don't think it'll be one or the other.

But also I don't see things like video games ever being replaced by 1 off AI. If for no other reason then the fact that a lot of games are fun because of multiplayer capabilities. That's not something you can do a 1 and done with AI (unless you only want to play games with family and close friends).

I imagine the future of computer interaction could evolve into a split model combining foundational capabilities that just make sense to be pre-built, tested and shared deterministic code - codecs, numerical solvers, geometry kernels, databases and transactional tools, compilers, theorem provers, cryptography, etc. - with a fluid interaction layer that accesses either local or cloud-provided versions of those foundational capabilities and is capable of synthesising any tools it needs where it would be helpful to build it first - either as a one-off or something to cache - for anything that can’t just be done as a task.

Applications are compressed bundles of some assumptions about how something should work and be interacted with. So you wouldn’t need VLC, it’s a shell around a foundational codec layer. Instagram is just a view over data in the Instagram social network, and you could customise it as you see fit. Transmit is a lovely application but you can delegate that to a fluid task layer that can do one-off tasks or make something you can re-use.

Everything in the fat ‘middle layer’ of software that is connecting a user to something foundational through interface assumptions might disappear, unless it’s more useful for it to exist as a permanent tool. Things that a lot of people share or that are more complex, Blender for example.

I also imagine there’d be a lot more focus on making explicit things like canonical records or schema, contracts, provenance, versioning, access policies, some kind of fixed views. Things that your local fluid interface would rely on the structure for when it came to connecting to your bank and doing whatever you want with your finances.

Not all software as we think of it might disappear, but the things that are lightweight layers over something more stable could all be subsumed with tools synthesised on demand.

Perhaps, at least.

An AI assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. An application written by an AI assistant, if it doesn't just call an LLM at runtime, will mostly likely produce the same answer for the same inputs. That is, unless there's something intrinsic to its business logic that makes it nondeterministic.

Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.

> Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete.

I doubt it. Most people would rather stab at their phone to download an app that just does what they want than explain to a chatbot over a period of minutes/hours and several reiterations to get it to spew out what they want, let alone what kind of software they want it to make for them. Most people can barely articulate what they want in the first place.

The market for applications isn't going anywhere and neither is the OS. I can't imagine booting a computer directly into a chat window where I have to explain to a bot what I wish would show up on my screen, where on my screen, and how it should look. What a total nightmare that would be!

Even if what passes for "AI" these days was as smart and capable as the computers on Star Trek (and it very much isn't) you wouldn't want to ask it for everything. Even the Enterprise had an OS that people interacted with. What they also had though was an OS with configurable interfaces that people could customize according to their current task and preferred workflow.

That sort of thing is maybe possible in the future for "AI" empowered operating systems we might live to see, but 90% of the people using computers aren't going to bother with any of that, just like they've never seen the settings/options in most of their applications or their operating system right now. Not because it couldn't make their time working the computer better, but because they just can't be bothered.

The writer of this piece remembers how, as a child, computers promised to let him write his own software and games and it seemed like there were endless possibilities until the reality that programing takes effort killed a little of that enthusiasm (although not enough that he didn't eventually become a programmer), but many people never see a computer as anything more than a means to an end or a device for mainly passive content consumption.

> Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete.

Define "soon".

Banks in the UK have thirty million customers each. They have moved away from web interfaces to apps on well-controlled platforms.

Social media doesn't use the mobile web; it's not good enough.

Neither of these applications for a phone are simply going to surrender to agentic environments on a phone that de-emphasises apps.

They both have a need to fully control that experience, and yet they are polar opposites in terms of seriousness.

We can't even stop voice assistants acting on commands they mishear from TV shows, youtube clips, radio.

“Go enjoy my family photos for me.”

“Go play video games for me”

“Go create music for me”

Idk. Seems like there is still use for apps.

Absolutely agree. At the start of the year when Opus 4.6 came out, I remember my co-worker showing me a bunch of apps he made for himself to make himself more productive.

Fast forward a few months, and most of those apps are abandonware. Not that he's not as productive, he just skipped the middlemen (the apps), and started directly asking the agent to do those things.

This reminds me the car industry touchscreen craze: if you can paint anything and control anything via the touchscreen, then the only thing you need is the touchscreen, right?

> Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly?

Given the current trends in predictive language models, once users are able to articulate their needs with clarity and precision, conventional software development may become obsolete.

It is not clear whether models will be both capable enough and cost effective enough but not as capable to wipe us all out. The outcome is a tiny sliver of possible futures and even then likely short-lived.

Current capabilities are not there. You need software engineers to keep it going. And even then as intoxicating as it might be to be able to bring to life all the side projects you often had no energy/skill to finish, today it is still may be cost / “cognitive load” -effective to buy off the shelf apps that somebody else has to maintain (even if they are not as personal / less customized for your use-case).

Exactly my opinion too.

Apps will become barely visible data providers. Some will provide specialized widgets for those cases where a specialized UI is needed. And data will be designed to inter operate.

I have reached this conclusion from a specific example I'm working on, more details in this blog post if you pardon a link to a website of mine: https://cloudywithachanceoflatency.net/blog_02-how-llm-accel...

Like browsing TikTok or messaging your friends? People want their devices to work like their friends’ devices do. Your prediction seems to be out of touch with how and why people actually use computing devices. Nobody actually uses them to "perform tasks".

Why would you ever want a nice word processor to write a letter to someone when you could just ask AI to write the letter? Why would you ever want photo editing software when you could just tell the AI to make your picture look good? Why would you want audio recording and mixing software when you could just tell the AI to output the next Billboard 100 hit? Why would you want a camera when you could just ask AI to generate photos for you?

This is the part that many people are missing. Decades ago I heard "the ideal UI is a search box," and I agree today even more.

I don't understand why people are still thinking that clicking on stuff will still be a desirable thing in the future.

It’s funny you say this because Apple resisted an App Store for apps. They originally expected web based apps. The market demanded an App Store. Remember web snippets where one could clip a portal to view a small section of a website?

There is a big misconception in your answer in that you seem to believe that an LLM would always produce (machine) code that does what the user intended, in a correct and safe manner. Neither of these assumptions is true. If you knew how LLMs are built and operate, you would know they are not reliable at all. What you might ask from an AI interpreter OS might be unique and thus might be absent from its training set and might not follow a pattern inferred from its training set either.

LLMs are the first machine learning models that blatantly and regularly produce incorrect output and we have been brainwashed into accepting that. An application on the other hand can be exhaustively verified. There is no comparison.

Had this thought this morning after seeing DHH announcing that Basecamp isn't writing code by hand anymore and they're using AI to write Rust for Hey's backend.

To me they're failing to see the even bigger picture that maybe even Hey itself is outdated in the Ai era and not only is its Ruby framework antiquated... the whole Hey service is too.

> The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.

I suppose if you break your glasses, squirt real hard, and drop down about 30 IQ points, then sure.

We're extremely far from anyone, even those with the most interest and capability, giving a practical demo of this future you're suggesting.

What we all see irrefutably happening is some new people are just barely able to do slightly more than they used to. That's the impact we'd expect from a better search engine and a better "I'm feeling lucky" button which, of course, is what this era of AI is.

> the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete

"ChatGPT, please send <username> a message with the following contents: <content>. Oh, what platform? Create the platform to send the message for me. That username doesn't mean anything on this brand new platform? Uhhhh" [insert step where the AI-psychotic decides to give up on communicating with humans and tells ChatGPT to roleplay as the person they intended to message, I guess]

> the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.

Sounds more realistic than what this blog post is proposing. Meta also tried releasing a phone, how did that go?

Muse on the other hand is the polished version of what OpenClaw should have been and Meta appears to have given a lot of thought about it more than this blog post.

I don't think we need yet another phone.

The author is missing fundamentals. Exactly what to expect from someone who thought the built is BASIC was lame.