alt Hacker NewsMan, just when it seemed like we had it all. Computers were cheap, efficient and powerful. Somehow we figured out a way to accomplish tasks we already had solved except now it's 1000x more expensive, requires the combined electricity of the entire world, is reliant on someone else's rented compute, and now I need a robot to tell me what button to press. What a time to be alive.
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For ages people have been saying "it's obvious" or "it's intuitive", without learning anything about design principles. Obvious to who?
People have been saying "we don't need docs", "nobody reads docs", "they'll figure it out". They experience the pain of a new employee onboarding but never treat this as a signal for the user experience. The user can't just walk over to the developer's desk. But luckily we got stack overflow, blogs, and Google. Somewhere someone explains it! The problem became finding it!
But hey, why do things the "hard" way when you can just throw money at the problem? Or better yet, dismiss the problem by calling the user an idiot.
You're right. What a time to be alive. We've created a world where this product is useful. And not even to because dark patterns exist, but simply because we've always wanted to avoid taking a step back and thinking or getting an outside view. Because it isn't obvious if a robot has to teach you what button to press. If it does, you probably should be ashamed (there are, as always, exceptions)
That said, I do think there's still a lot of utility you this. Those exceptions aren't uncommon. This'll help people learn programs like FreeCAD or Blender, or whatever. Where the complexity is naturally high. But also I do think we should recognize the silliness of many problems that this does solve that shouldn't be problems in the first place.
Valid points, but this sounds extremely useful for learning complicated GUI applications like 3d modeling or media editing apps.
i've read enough 'shlemiel the painter' ports across hundreds of systems and thousands of examples that I must quickly and coldly dismiss the precept that computers were ever used efficiently.
Now imagine what people back in the day thought about going from assembly to C. Or C to Java. Or, forgive me for even saying it, Java to Python.
On the other hand, (while you made a completely valid point,) some people who are new to a field, like young aspiring computer scientists who don't know how to do some stuff and need a guiding hand, will find this tremendously useful. Also, technology and compute power has been growing a tremendous amount over the past 5-10 years (now we have 20-100 billion transistors in chips!). <-- enough to sustain this wild use of compute
Indeed, what a time to be able.
If you look at the example animations, it's clear that Apple has brought this entirely upon themselves. Don't yell at some guys who are trying to fix it.
Human in the loop is the superior workflow!
/s
In 40 year software designers couldn't figure out that there should be a search function for every functionality that your computer provides.
When we got a form of such search, it searched all of the internet alongside with the functions of your software on your computer. You had to tell it manually what software you have and when it found something you had to fish out the description of what to click to get the functionality you are seeking and then click through some dumb ui to actually invoke it.
Agents are the first thing that can lead you directly from "I know what I want my computer to do." to "Actually doing it."
Success of agents is founded on the profound and sustained failure of all of the software designers and developers ever.