Just yesterday my non-technical spouse had to solve a moderately complex scheduling problem at work. She gave the various criteria and constraints to Claude and had a full solution within a few minutes, saving hours of work. It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python to implement a scheduling optimization algorithm. She only vaguely knows what Python is, but that didn't matter. She got what she needed.

For now she was only able to do that because I set up a modified version of my agentic coding setup on her computer and told her to give it a shot for more complex tasks. It won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big opportunity for whoever can translate the experience we're having with agentic coding to a non-technical audience.

This is effectively how I treat my AI agents. A lot of the reason this doesn't work well for people today is due to context/memory/harness management that makes it too complex for someone to set up if they don't want a full time second job or just like to tinker.

If you productize that it will be an experience a lot of people like.

And on the UI piece, I think most people will just interact through text and voice interfaces. Wherever they already spend time like sms, what's app, etc.

> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature.

Most people are indifferent to computers. A computer to them is similar to the water pipeline or the electrical grid. It’s what makes some other stuff they want possible. And the interface they want to interact with should be as simple as possible and quite direct.

That is pretty much the 101 of UX. No deep interactions (a long list of steps), no DSL (even if visual), and no updates to the interfaces. That’s why people like their phone more than their desktops. Because the constraints have made the UX simpler, while current OS are trying to complicate things.

So Cowork/Codex would probably go where Siri is right now. Because they are not a simpler and consistent interface. They’ve only hidden all the controls behind one single point of entry. But the complexity still exists.

> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature.

What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this.

> Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble.

In the past week I've taught a few non-technical friends, who are well outside the tech bubble, don't live in the SF Bay Area, etc, how to use Cowork. I did this for fun and for curiosity. One takeaway is that people at startups working on these products would benefit from spending more time sitting with and onboarding users - they're very powerful and helpful once people get up and running, but people struggle to get up and running.

> People don't want "personalized interfaces that change every second based on the whims of an unknowable black box". They have plenty of that already.

I obviously agree with this, I think where our view differs is I expect that models will be able to get good at making custom interfaces, and then help the user personalize it to their tasks. I agree that users don't want something that changes all the time. But they do want something that fits them and fits their task. Artifacts on Claude and Canvas on ChatGPT are early versions of this.