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PaulRobinsontoday at 7:12 AM1 replyview on HN

This is definitely an iterative improvement on what we have today. However, I think from a fundamental approach, you've just highlighted the pain of working with AI that I hadn't quite been able to verbalise until seeing this.

Go and have a look at the history of Microsoft OLE and OpenDoc and you'll see some of these ideas have been around for a while. When these ideas were first being shared in the industry (and yes, I am that old), here's the story that was being told:

In the future, you wouldn't buy "a word processor" or "an image editor", you'd buy components that could do specific tasks, and you'd bring them to your document/work as and when you needed. I'd have DTP components for layout, word processing components for spell checking, image components for resizing and colour balancing, and I'd be heads down in my fancy newsletter or report, and I'd be bringing functionality to the work I needed to do, without having to context switch and import/export things by hand.

The demo you've shown on the homepage is almost the opposite of this: I'm not bringing things into my work (fanning in), I'm starting agents to go and do lots of different bits of work (fanning out), that eventually I'm going to need to think about how to structure and fan in again.

I think coding interfaces kind of force us into a fan-in: here's my code base, now I want to improve test coverage, now I want to refactor, now I want to add this SDK, now I want to change this logic to use the SDK based on configuration params, now I want to improve my integration tests, and so on. I'm flowing through my work in a single asset (the code base), and able to bring agents and other tools to it.

Now, I'd like that, but for everything else. The UI I'd like allows me to build around the assets I am building.

Planning a trip? OK, I need to bring various agents along to help me plan an itinerary (in my calendar), based on location, budget, and preferences. It's not good enough to list the top 10 must-see places in Venice, I need them to fit into my calendar including travel time, and my budget - I want agents to help me plan that out. Ideally I want agents to help me and my partner both contribute to that based on our wants.

Need to do a report for the big boss? OK, I need to start with an empty report doc, and bring various sources of data, and take it through transformations to build the narrative/deck I need to write. Here's some excel data, here's an agent that can do some competitive analysis, here's another that is pulling quotes from real customers on social media, and so on...

Want to learn a new skill? We're going to need to have a framework for assessing where I am in terms of that skill (the "single asset" we're working on is "what I know"), and then agents to figure out the best way for me to fill gaps and reinforce what I already know.

Your demo is nicer than a chat box, but I think you need to think about the job that needs to be done, and how to bring agents to that job (perhaps even suggest those jobs - that could be another agent), not build a UI to just allow me to fire off dozens of agents that then have output sat in multiple windows across my screen.


Replies

miguelacevedotoday at 8:54 AM

The key design tension is whether the main space should be the asset you are working on or the work being delegated.

For a lot of tasks, I don’t think you will need to stay inside the document or app the whole time. But I can also imagine starting from an asset you already have open ie a PDF, spreadsheet, etc and bringing agents and tools into that context, rather than creating a separate task and attaching the asset again.

With that in mind, I agree that fanning out into disconnected task outputs is not enough. Sometimes the asset itself should become the center of the workspace, with the delegated work happening around it.

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