alt Hacker NewsImagine if different sectors worked like that. To go to a restaurant, each customer brings their own private chef to let loose in the kitchen.
Wouldn't it make more sense for OS makers to "tell Claude" to make a user friendly GUI for their terminal commands?
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That's what KDE (and gnome, to a lesser extent) have been trying to do for a long while.
The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable.
To expand on your analogy, it’s like running a restaurant that only uses automated vending machines to serve food. It works perfectly fine if someone just wants toasted bread. But the moment a customer asks for more than toasted bread, you're toasted.
Imho, the best bet for the future is a bunch of pre loaded llm skills and clis an agent can work with: getting the chef to use pre-approved hardware, sorta, that can cook up anything that is needed.
I agree but its becoming increasingly clear that "chatbot-as-the-CLI" is likely a "worse is better" situation. It's clearly crappier and slower than just hitting a button, but everyone knows what they want and they know how to put it into text. CLIs in the past never could cope because they relied on exacting, esoteric syntax, so mere mortals had to learn a lot about how to translate what they want "Send a copy of this photo to my friend Sally". So a button is abstracted that says "Send" and "Attach" and some file-based metaphor is built up to allow the work to map better to what people know and understand and can intuit.
My mom can't find the button in the GUI though, and odds are it would be buried in menus she'd get lost in. She can type "Send Sally this picture" into a box and hit go. Anyone literate can.
Funnily enough the terminal which was the reason people said linux is too much of a hassle is the very thing that now makes it so you can easily fix your computer with natural language.
Sure the problem is it will still come with problems out of the box but that's mostly on laptop manufacturers. At least now you can easily fix them with an agent.
For me it's much more fun to tell my computer what I want and to get it than to scroll through a settings GUI but to each his own