alt Hacker News> The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done.
Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.
We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.
And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.
Replies
yeah for me even with other people, the amount of times you think "it would be easier for me to just show you" is maybe 30% of interactions with agents currently.
perplexity keeps trying to get me to use "computer" and for the life of me I can't think of anything I'd actually do with it.
I beg to differ that "the technology is here". Everyone I see who uses voice commands have to speak in a very contrived manner so that the computer can understand them properly. Computer vision systems still run into all sorts of weird edge cases.
We've progressed an impressive lot since, say, the nineties when computers (and the internet) started to spread to the general consumer market but the last 10% or so of the way is what would really be the game changer. And if we believe Pareto, of course that is gonna be 90% of the work. We've barely scratched the surface.
> it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well
As I use AI more and more to write code I find myself just implementing something myself more and more for this reason. By the time I have actually explained what I want in precise detail it's often faster to have just made the change myself.
Without enough detail SOTA models can often still get something working, but it's usually not the desired approach and causes problems later.
I think your last paragraph is the real issue that will forever crush improvements over clicking on stuff. Once you get to "buy me socks" you're just entering some different advertising domain. We already see it with very simple things like getting Siri to play a song. Two songs with the same name, the more popular one will win, apply that simple logic to everything and put a pay to play model in it and there's your "agentic" OS of the future.