> The other big thing was making research actually persist across sessions. Most agents treat a single deliverable (a PDF, a spreadsheet) as the end goal. In investing that's day one.

This is a problem with pretty much everything beyond easy single-shot tasks. Even day-to-day stuff, like e.g. I was researching a new laptop to buy for my wife, and am now enlisting AI to help pick a good car. In both cases I run into a mismatch with what the non-coding AI tools offer, vs. what is needed:

I need a persistent Excel sheet to evolve over multiple session of gathering data, cross-referencing with current needs, and updating as decisions are made, and as our own needs get better understood.

All AI tools want to do single session with a deliverable at the end, that they they cannot read, or if they can read it, they cannot work on it, at best they can write a new version from scratch.

I think this may be a symptom of the mobile apps thinking that infects the industry: the best non-coding AI tools offered to people all behave like regular apps, thinking in sessions, prescribing a single workflow, and desperately preventing any form of user-controlled interoperability.

I miss when software philosophy put files ahead of apps, when applications were tools to work on documents, not a tools that contain documents.