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rcarmotoday at 7:57 AM1 replyview on HN

I don't buy it. It might be very useful for a few use cases, but despite all the desktop automation craze and "Claude for cooking" stuff that is inevitably to follow, our computing model for live business applications has, for maintainability, auditability, security, data access, etc. become cloud-centric to a point where running things locally is... kind of pointless for most "real" apps.

Not that I'm not excited about the possibilities in personal productivity, but I don't think this is the way--if it was, we wouldn't have lost, say, the ability to have proper desktop automation via AppleScript, COM, DDE (remember that?) across mainstream desktop operating systems.


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pjmlptoday at 12:27 PM

COM is pretty much alive, it is the main delivery mechanism for new Windows APIs since Windows vista, and in the context of your remark powers UI Automation framework.

I have a DDE book somewhere, with endless pages of C boilerplate to exchange a couple of values between two applications on Windows 3.x.

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