I swear OpenAI has 2-3 unannounced releases ready to go at any time just so they can steal some thunder from their competitors when they announce something
As much as I like them, don't think you need much of a thinfoil hat for that at this point, just look at the timing of recent releases it's no coincidence
Yeah but has that really happened? Anthropic doesn't have the compute so everyone can switch to Claude for a couple months, get nerfed, switch back. Gemini has horrible UX.
Its not magic. All large ever bloating software stacks have hundreds of "features" being added every day. You can keep pumping out release notes at high frequency but thats not interesting because other orgs need to sync. And sync takes its own sweet time.
There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up. I get that productivity can be improved with a lot of this for non developers, just not sure using 'code' as the term is the right one or not.
Yes, the code is still important. For example, I had tasked Codex to implement function calling in a programming language, and it decided the way to do this was to spin up a brand new sub interpreter on each function call, load a standard library into it, execute the code, destroy the interpreter, and then continue -- despite an already partial and much more efficient solution was already there but in comments. The AI solution "worked", passed all the tests the AI wrote for it, but it was still very very wrong. I had to look at the code to understand it did this. To get it right, you have to either I guess indicate how to implement it, which requires a degree of expertise beyond prompting.
Everyday people can now do much more than they could, because they can build programs.
The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code.
Today, when we think of someone "using the computer" we gravitate towards people using apps, installing them, writing documents, playing games. But very rarely have we thought of it as "coding" or "making the computer do new things" -- that's been reserved, again, for coders.
Yet, I think that a future is fast approaching where using the computer will also include simply coding by having an agent code something for you. While there will certainly still be apps/programs that everyone uses, everyone will also have their own set of custom-built programs, often even without knowing it, because agents will build them, almost unprompted.
To use a computer will include _building_ programs on the computer, without ever knowing how to code or even knowing that the code is there.
There will of course still be room for coders, those who understand what's happening below. And of course that software engineers should know how to code (less and less as time goes on, though, probably), but no doubt to me that human-computer interaction will now include this level of sophistication.
It's not the code I write, it's what I've noticed from people in 25 years of writing code in the corner.
All of my friends who would die before they use AI 2 years ago now call themselves AI/agentic engineers because the money is there. Many of them don't understand a thing about AI or agents.
Consequently, if Claude Code/"coding agents" is a hot topic (which it is), people who know nothing about any of this will start raising money and writing articles about it, even (especially) if it has nothing to do with code, because these people know nothing about code, so they won't realize what they're saying makes no sense. And it doesn't matter, because money.
Next thing you know your grandma will be "writing code" because that's what the marketing copy says. That's all it takes for the zeitgeist to shift for the term "code". It will soon mean something new to people who had no idea what code was before, and infuriating to people who do know (but aren't trying to sell you something).
I know that's long-winded but hopefully you get where I'm coming from :D.
Programmers mostly don't. Ordinary people see figuring out how to use the computer as a hindrance rather than empowering, they want Star Trek. They want "computer, plan my next vacation to XYZ for me" to lay out a full itinerary and offer to buy the tickets and make the reservations.
Knowledge work is work most people don't really want to deal with. Ordinary people don't put much value into ideas regardless of their level of refinement
I have been a programmer for 30 years and have loved every minute of it. I love figuring out how to get my computers to do what I want.
I also want Star Trek, though. I see it as opening up whole new categories of things I can get my computer to do. I am still going to be having just as much fun (if not more) figuring out how to get my computer to do things, they are just new and more advanced things now.
People want to do stuff, and they want to get it done fast and in a pretty straightforward manner. They don’t want to follow complicated steps (especially with conditional) and they don’t want to relearn how to do it (because the vendor changes the interface).
So the only thing they want is a very simple interface (best if it’s a single button or a knob), and then for the expected result to happen. Whatever exists in the middle doesn’t matter as long as the job is done.
So an interface to the above may be a form with the start and end date, a location, and a plan button. Then all the activities are show where the user selects the one he wants and clicks a final Buy button. Then a confirmation message is displayed.
Anything other than that or that obscure what is happening (ads, network error, agents malfunctioning,…) is an hindrance and falls under the general “this product does not work”.
My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers
A few thoughts and questions:
1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a company, they often rip and replace some of the software vendors with their personal favorites. Well, most software was designed for human users. Now, peoples' agents will use software for them. Agents have different needs for software than humans do. Some they'll need more of, much they'll no longer need at all. What will this result in? It feels like a much swifter and more significant version of Google taking excerpts/summaries from webpages and putting it at the top of search results and taking away visits and ad revenue from sites.
2. I've tried dozens of products in this space. For most, onboarding is confusing, then the user gets dropped into a blank space, usage limits are uncompetitive compared to the subsidized tokens offered by OpenAI/Anthropic, etc. It's a tough space to compete in, but also clearly going to be a massive market. I'm expecting big investment from Microsoft, Google etc in this segment.
3. How will startups in this space compete against labs who can train models to fit their products?
4. Eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model? Presumably. Harnesses get eaten by model-generated harnesses?
Products I've tried: ai browsers like dia, comet, claude for chrome, atlas, and dex; claw products like openclaw, kimi claw, klaus, viktor, duet, atris; automation things like tasklet and lindy; code agents like devin, claude code, cursor, codex; desktop automation tools like vercept, nox, liminary, logical, and raycast; and email products like shortwave, cora and jace. And of course, Claude Cowork, Codex cli and app, and Claude Code cli and app.
Edit: Notes on trying the new Codex update
1. The permissions workflow is very slick
2. Background browser testing is nice and the shadow cursor is an interesting UI element. It did do some things in the foreground for me / take control of focus, a few times, though.
3. It would be nice if the apps had quick ways to demo their new features. My workflow was to ask an LLM to read the update page and ask it what new things I could test, and then to take those things and ask Codex to demo them to me, but it doesn't quite understand it's own new features well enough to invoke them (without quite a bit of steering)
4. I cannot get it to show me the in app browser
5. Generating image mockups of websites and then building them is nice
I agree with the sentiment but I think for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access. But, by granting agents full access, you immediately turn the computer into an extremely adversarial device insofar as txt files become credible threat vectors.
For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue. That hurts growth. I don't disagree with your general points, though.
> for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access
At this point it's a foregone conclusion this is what users will choose. It'll be like (lack of) privacy on the internet caused by the ad industrial complex, but much worse and much more invasive.
The threats are real, but it's just a product opportunity to these companies. OpenAI and friends will sell the poison (insecure computing) and the antidote (Mythos et all) and eat from both ends.
Anyone trying to stay safe will be on the gradient to a Stallmanesque monastic computing existence.
I don't want this, I just think it's going down that route.
There was a recent Stanford study which showed that AI enthusiasts and experts and the normies had very different sentiment when it came to AI.
I think most people are going to say they dont want it. I mean, why would anyone want a tool that can screw up their bank account? What benefit does it gain them?
Theres lots of cases of great highly useful LLM tools, but the moment they scale up you get slammed by the risks that stick out all along the long tail of outcomes.
I agree, in general we are going to find that ultimately most employee end users don't want it. Assuming it actually makes you more productive. I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase? You're just giving away that value to your employer.
On the other hand, entrepreneurs and managers are going to want it for their employees (and force it on them) for the above reason.
I dont see companies doing that. it can be business ending. only AI bros buying mac mini in 2026 to setup slop generated Claws would do that but a company doing that will for sure expose customer data.
> For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue.
Strongly agreed.
I saw a few people running these things with looser permissions than I do. e.g. one non-technical friend using claude cli, no sandbox, so I set them up with a sandbox etc.
And the people who were using Cowork already were mostly blind approving all requests without reading what it was asking.
The more powerful, the more dangerous, and vice versa.
How many of these threat vectors are just theoretical? Don’t use skills from random sources (just like don’t execute files from unknown sources). Don’t paste from untrusted sites (don’t click links on untrusted sites). Maybe there are fake documentation sites that the agent will search and have a prompt injected - but I haven’t heard of a single case where that happened. For now, the benefits outweigh the risk so much that I am willing to take it - and I think I have an almost complete knowledge of all the attack vectors.
i think you lack creativity. you could create a site that targets a very narrow niche, say an upper income school district. build some credibility, get highly ranked on google due to niche. post lunch menus with hidden embedded text.
> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
I agree this is going to be big. I threw a prototype of a domain-specific agent into the proverbial hornets' nest recently and it has altered the narrative about what might be possible.
The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX. You don't need to spend much time developing user interfaces and testing them against customers. Everyone understands the affordances around something that looks like iMessage or WhatsApp. UI/UX development is often the most expensive part of software engineering. Figuring out how to intercept, normalize and expose the domain data is where all of the magic happens. This part is usually trivial by comparison. If most of the business lives in SQL databases, your job is basically done for you. A tool to list the databases and another tool to execute queries against them. That's basically it.
I think there is an emerging B2B/SaaS market here. There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.
> There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.
Sort of agreed, though I wonder if ai-deployed software eats most use cases, and human consultants for integration/deployment are more for the more niche or hard to reach ones.
> The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX.
I strongly doubt that. That’s like saying conversation is the ultimate way to convey information. But almost every human process has been changed to forms and structured reports. But we have decided that simple tools does not sell as well and we are trying to make workflow as complex as possible. LLM are more the ultimate tools to make things inefficient.
Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise systems/tools. A runtime environment must be developed to do that but where that of the agent ends and that of the enterprise systems begins is a totally open question.
> Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise systems/tools.
What would make it not be a monolith? To me it seems like there'll be a big advantage (e.g. in distribution, user understanding) for most people to be using the same product / similar interface. And then the agent and the developer of that interface figure out all the integrations under that, invisible to the user.
I think the coding market will be much larger. Knowledge work is kind of like the leaf nodes of the economy where software is the branches. That's to say, making software easier and cheaper to write will cause more and more complexity and work to move into the Software domain from the "real world" which is much messier and complicated.
Yes, and the same thing will happen in non-coding knowledge work too. Making knowledge work cheaper will cause complexity to increase, more knowledge work.
Yes, I have a theory - that higher efficiency becomes structural necessity. We just can't revert to earlier inefficient ways. Like mitochondria merging with the primitive cell - now they can't be apart.
I don't think so, the whole point of writing software is it is a great sink for complexity. Encoding a process or mechanism in a program makes it work (as defined) for ever perfectly.
An example here is in engineering. Building a simulator for some process makes computing it much safer and consistent vs. having people redo the calculations themselves, even with AI assistance.
The history of both knowledge work and software engineering seems to be increasing in both volume and complexity, feels reasonable to me to bet on both of those trendlines increasing?
> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
I disagree. There is a major gap between awesome tech and market uptake.
At this point, the question is whether LLMs are going to be more useful than excel. AI enthusiasts are 100% sure that it’s already more useful than excel, but on the ground, non-technical views do not reflect that view.
All the interviews and real life interactions I have seen, indicate that a narrow band of non-technical experts gain durable benefits from AI.
GenAI is incredible for project starts. A 0 coding experience relative went from mockup to MVP webapp in 3 days, for something he just had an idea about.
GenAI is NOT great for what comes after a non-technical MVP. That webapp had enough issues that, if used at scale, would guarantee litigation.
Mileage varies entirely on whether the person building the tool has sufficient domain expertise to navigate the forest they find themselves in.
Experts constantly decide trade offs which novices don’t even realize matter. Something as innocuous as the placement of switches when you enter the room, can be made inconvenient.
really struggling to understand where this is coming from, agents haven't really improved much over using the existing models. anything an agent can do, is mostly the model itself. maybe the technology itself isn't mature yet.
> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
They won't.
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.
> And eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model?
No. Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble. 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.
> 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.
> What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this.
LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"?
Or at "do my taxes"?
> how to use Cowork.
Yes, and I taught my mom how to use Apple Books, and have to re-teach her every time Apple breaks the interface.
Ask your non-tech friends what they do with and how they feel about Cowork in a few weeks.
> 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.
How many users you see personalizing anything to their task? Why would they want every app to be personalized? There's insane value in consistency across apps and interfaces. How will apps personalize their UIs to every user? By collecting even more copious amounts of user data?
codex did my taxes this year (well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough)
what I believe is that laymen will put all their tax docs into codex and tell it to 'do their taxes' and the tool will decide to implement the calculator, do the taxes and present only the final numbers. the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented.
> 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.
This is a pretty important issue given that the new update adds "computer use" capabilities. If it was already reading sensitive files in the CLI version, giving it full desktop control seems like it needs a much more robust permission model than what they've shown so far.
Codex is my favorite UX for anything as it edits the files and I can use the proper tooling to adjust and test stuff, so in my experience it was already able to do everything. However lately the limits seem to have got extremely tight, I keep spending out the daily limits way too quickly. The weekly limits are also often spent out early so I switch to Claude or Gemini or something.
I'm sorry to be slightly off topic but since it's ChatGPT, anyone else find it annoying to read what the bot is thinking while it thinks? For some reason I don't want to see how the sausage is being made.
The macOS app version of Codex I have doesn't show reasoning summaries, just simply 'Thinking'.
Reasoning deltas add additional traffic, especially if running many subagents etc. So on large scale, those deltas maybe are just dropped somewhere.
Saying that, sometimes the GPT reasoning summary is funny to read, in particular when it's working through a large task.
Also, the summaries can reveal real issues with logic in prompts and tool descriptions+configuration, so it allowing debugging.
i.e. "User asked me to do X, system instructions say do Y, tool says Z which is different to what everyone else wants. I am rather confused here! Lets just assume..."
It has previously allowed me to adjust prompts, etc.
First use case I'm putting to work is testing web apps as a user. Although it seems like this could be a token burner. Saving and mostly replaying might be nice to have.
I'm sure it's been said before, but more and more our development work is encroaching on personal compute space.
A reminder to me to air gap those to spaces with separate hardware [:cringe:]
Side note: I really wish there was an expectation that TUI apps implemented accessibility APIs.
Sure we can read the characters in the screen. But accessibility information is structured usually. TUI apps are going to be far less interesting & capable without accessibility built-in.
My monthly subscription for Claude is up in a week, is there any compelling reason to switch to Codex (for coding/bug fixing of low/medium difficulty apps)? Or is it pretty much a wash at this point?
at least for our scope of work (data, interfacing with data, building things to extract data quickly and dump to warehouse, resuming) claude is performing night and day better than codex. we're still continuing tinkering with codex here to see if we're happy with it but it's taking a lot more human-in-the-loop to keep it from going down the wrong path and we're finding that we're constantly prompt-nudging it to the end result. for the most part after ~3 days we're not super happy with it. kinda feels like claude did last year idk. it's worth checking out and seeing if it's succeeding at the stuff you want it to do.
Wait for new GPT release this/next week and then decide based on benchmarks. That is what I will do.
One main thing is to de-couple the repos from specific agents e.g. use .mcp.json instead of "claude plugins", use AGENTS.md (and symlink to CLAUDE.md) and so on.
I love this because I have absolutely 0 loyalty to any of these companies and once Anthropic nerfs I just switch to OpenAI, then I can switch to Google and so on. Whichever works best.
Honestly, just try it. I used both and there's no reason to not try depending on which model is superior at a given point. I've found 5.4 to be better atm (subject to change any time) even though Claude Code had a slicker UI for awhile.
I can't help but see some things as a solution in search of a problem every time I see these examples illustrating toy projects. Cloud Tic Tac Toe? Seriously?
I wish Codex App was open source. I like it, but there are always a bunch of little paper cuts that, if you were using codex cli, you could have easily diagnosed and filed an issue. Now, the issues in the codex repo is slowly becoming claude codish – ie a drawer for people's feelings with nothing concrete to point to.
<tin foil hat>
I swear OpenAI has 2-3 unannounced releases ready to go at any time just so they can steal some thunder from their competitors when they announce something
</tin foil hat>
As much as I like them, don't think you need much of a thinfoil hat for that at this point, just look at the timing of recent releases it's no coincidence
Perhaps, but that strategy can backfire if you're planting a subpar comparison in the minds of customers.
Yeah but has that really happened? Anthropic doesn't have the compute so everyone can switch to Claude for a couple months, get nerfed, switch back. Gemini has horrible UX.
They did acquire TBPN, this barely needs tin foil.
Credit to them for being media savvy.
Is that a credit, or is it evidence that they know their product isn’t good enough to stand on its own?
Its not magic. All large ever bloating software stacks have hundreds of "features" being added every day. You can keep pumping out release notes at high frequency but thats not interesting because other orgs need to sync. And sync takes its own sweet time.
There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up. I get that productivity can be improved with a lot of this for non developers, just not sure using 'code' as the term is the right one or not.
Yes, the code is still important. For example, I had tasked Codex to implement function calling in a programming language, and it decided the way to do this was to spin up a brand new sub interpreter on each function call, load a standard library into it, execute the code, destroy the interpreter, and then continue -- despite an already partial and much more efficient solution was already there but in comments. The AI solution "worked", passed all the tests the AI wrote for it, but it was still very very wrong. I had to look at the code to understand it did this. To get it right, you have to either I guess indicate how to implement it, which requires a degree of expertise beyond prompting.
Hot take: we (not I, but I reluctantly) will keep calling it code long after there's no code to be seen.
Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.
Very much agree.
Everyday people can now do much more than they could, because they can build programs.
The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code.
Today, when we think of someone "using the computer" we gravitate towards people using apps, installing them, writing documents, playing games. But very rarely have we thought of it as "coding" or "making the computer do new things" -- that's been reserved, again, for coders.
Yet, I think that a future is fast approaching where using the computer will also include simply coding by having an agent code something for you. While there will certainly still be apps/programs that everyone uses, everyone will also have their own set of custom-built programs, often even without knowing it, because agents will build them, almost unprompted.
To use a computer will include _building_ programs on the computer, without ever knowing how to code or even knowing that the code is there.
There will of course still be room for coders, those who understand what's happening below. And of course that software engineers should know how to code (less and less as time goes on, though, probably), but no doubt to me that human-computer interaction will now include this level of sophistication.
We are living in the future and I LOVE IT!
Yeah, that's indeed a hot take. I am curious what kind of code you write for a living to have an opinion like this.
It's not the code I write, it's what I've noticed from people in 25 years of writing code in the corner.
All of my friends who would die before they use AI 2 years ago now call themselves AI/agentic engineers because the money is there. Many of them don't understand a thing about AI or agents.
Consequently, if Claude Code/"coding agents" is a hot topic (which it is), people who know nothing about any of this will start raising money and writing articles about it, even (especially) if it has nothing to do with code, because these people know nothing about code, so they won't realize what they're saying makes no sense. And it doesn't matter, because money.
Next thing you know your grandma will be "writing code" because that's what the marketing copy says. That's all it takes for the zeitgeist to shift for the term "code". It will soon mean something new to people who had no idea what code was before, and infuriating to people who do know (but aren't trying to sell you something).
I know that's long-winded but hopefully you get where I'm coming from :D.
> Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.
Since when? HN is truly a bubble sometimes
Confusingly, Codex their agentic programming thing and codex their GUI which only works on Mac and Windows have the same name.
I think the latter is technically "Codex For Desktop", which is what this article is referring to.
It’s marginally better than Microsoft naming things.
Do people really want codex to have control over their computer and apps?
I'm still paranoid about keeping things securely sandboxed.
Programmers mostly don't. Ordinary people see figuring out how to use the computer as a hindrance rather than empowering, they want Star Trek. They want "computer, plan my next vacation to XYZ for me" to lay out a full itinerary and offer to buy the tickets and make the reservations.
Knowledge work is work most people don't really want to deal with. Ordinary people don't put much value into ideas regardless of their level of refinement
I have been a programmer for 30 years and have loved every minute of it. I love figuring out how to get my computers to do what I want.
I also want Star Trek, though. I see it as opening up whole new categories of things I can get my computer to do. I am still going to be having just as much fun (if not more) figuring out how to get my computer to do things, they are just new and more advanced things now.
I'm on the same page, personally, but what I was trying to emphasize with my previous comment is that the non-tech people only want Star Trek
> Ordinary people don't put much value into ideas regardless of their level of refinement
This seems true to me, though I'm not sure how it connects here?
assuming that developers aren't Ordinary people...
Not the parent.
People want to do stuff, and they want to get it done fast and in a pretty straightforward manner. They don’t want to follow complicated steps (especially with conditional) and they don’t want to relearn how to do it (because the vendor changes the interface).
So the only thing they want is a very simple interface (best if it’s a single button or a knob), and then for the expected result to happen. Whatever exists in the middle doesn’t matter as long as the job is done.
So an interface to the above may be a form with the start and end date, a location, and a plan button. Then all the activities are show where the user selects the one he wants and clicks a final Buy button. Then a confirmation message is displayed.
Anything other than that or that obscure what is happening (ads, network error, agents malfunctioning,…) is an hindrance and falls under the general “this product does not work”.
It repaired an astonishing messed up permission issue on my mac
There are people running OpenClaw, so yeah, crazy as it sounds, some do that.
I'm reluctant to run any model without at least a docker.
I don’t think people want that, but they are willing to accept that in order to get stuff done.
My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers
A few thoughts and questions:
1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a company, they often rip and replace some of the software vendors with their personal favorites. Well, most software was designed for human users. Now, peoples' agents will use software for them. Agents have different needs for software than humans do. Some they'll need more of, much they'll no longer need at all. What will this result in? It feels like a much swifter and more significant version of Google taking excerpts/summaries from webpages and putting it at the top of search results and taking away visits and ad revenue from sites.
2. I've tried dozens of products in this space. For most, onboarding is confusing, then the user gets dropped into a blank space, usage limits are uncompetitive compared to the subsidized tokens offered by OpenAI/Anthropic, etc. It's a tough space to compete in, but also clearly going to be a massive market. I'm expecting big investment from Microsoft, Google etc in this segment.
3. How will startups in this space compete against labs who can train models to fit their products?
4. Eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model? Presumably. Harnesses get eaten by model-generated harnesses?
A few more thoughts collected here: https://chrisbarber.co/professional-agents/
Products I've tried: ai browsers like dia, comet, claude for chrome, atlas, and dex; claw products like openclaw, kimi claw, klaus, viktor, duet, atris; automation things like tasklet and lindy; code agents like devin, claude code, cursor, codex; desktop automation tools like vercept, nox, liminary, logical, and raycast; and email products like shortwave, cora and jace. And of course, Claude Cowork, Codex cli and app, and Claude Code cli and app.
Edit: Notes on trying the new Codex update
1. The permissions workflow is very slick
2. Background browser testing is nice and the shadow cursor is an interesting UI element. It did do some things in the foreground for me / take control of focus, a few times, though.
3. It would be nice if the apps had quick ways to demo their new features. My workflow was to ask an LLM to read the update page and ask it what new things I could test, and then to take those things and ask Codex to demo them to me, but it doesn't quite understand it's own new features well enough to invoke them (without quite a bit of steering)
4. I cannot get it to show me the in app browser
5. Generating image mockups of websites and then building them is nice
I agree with the sentiment but I think for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access. But, by granting agents full access, you immediately turn the computer into an extremely adversarial device insofar as txt files become credible threat vectors.
For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue. That hurts growth. I don't disagree with your general points, though.
> for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access
At this point it's a foregone conclusion this is what users will choose. It'll be like (lack of) privacy on the internet caused by the ad industrial complex, but much worse and much more invasive.
The threats are real, but it's just a product opportunity to these companies. OpenAI and friends will sell the poison (insecure computing) and the antidote (Mythos et all) and eat from both ends.
Anyone trying to stay safe will be on the gradient to a Stallmanesque monastic computing existence.
I don't want this, I just think it's going down that route.
There was a recent Stanford study which showed that AI enthusiasts and experts and the normies had very different sentiment when it came to AI.
I think most people are going to say they dont want it. I mean, why would anyone want a tool that can screw up their bank account? What benefit does it gain them?
Theres lots of cases of great highly useful LLM tools, but the moment they scale up you get slammed by the risks that stick out all along the long tail of outcomes.
I agree, in general we are going to find that ultimately most employee end users don't want it. Assuming it actually makes you more productive. I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase? You're just giving away that value to your employer.
On the other hand, entrepreneurs and managers are going to want it for their employees (and force it on them) for the above reason.
I dont see companies doing that. it can be business ending. only AI bros buying mac mini in 2026 to setup slop generated Claws would do that but a company doing that will for sure expose customer data.
> For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue.
Strongly agreed.
I saw a few people running these things with looser permissions than I do. e.g. one non-technical friend using claude cli, no sandbox, so I set them up with a sandbox etc.
And the people who were using Cowork already were mostly blind approving all requests without reading what it was asking.
The more powerful, the more dangerous, and vice versa.
How many of these threat vectors are just theoretical? Don’t use skills from random sources (just like don’t execute files from unknown sources). Don’t paste from untrusted sites (don’t click links on untrusted sites). Maybe there are fake documentation sites that the agent will search and have a prompt injected - but I haven’t heard of a single case where that happened. For now, the benefits outweigh the risk so much that I am willing to take it - and I think I have an almost complete knowledge of all the attack vectors.
i think you lack creativity. you could create a site that targets a very narrow niche, say an upper income school district. build some credibility, get highly ranked on google due to niche. post lunch menus with hidden embedded text.
the attack surface is so wide idk where to start.
> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
I agree this is going to be big. I threw a prototype of a domain-specific agent into the proverbial hornets' nest recently and it has altered the narrative about what might be possible.
The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX. You don't need to spend much time developing user interfaces and testing them against customers. Everyone understands the affordances around something that looks like iMessage or WhatsApp. UI/UX development is often the most expensive part of software engineering. Figuring out how to intercept, normalize and expose the domain data is where all of the magic happens. This part is usually trivial by comparison. If most of the business lives in SQL databases, your job is basically done for you. A tool to list the databases and another tool to execute queries against them. That's basically it.
I think there is an emerging B2B/SaaS market here. There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.
> There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.
Sort of agreed, though I wonder if ai-deployed software eats most use cases, and human consultants for integration/deployment are more for the more niche or hard to reach ones.
> The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX.
I strongly doubt that. That’s like saying conversation is the ultimate way to convey information. But almost every human process has been changed to forms and structured reports. But we have decided that simple tools does not sell as well and we are trying to make workflow as complex as possible. LLM are more the ultimate tools to make things inefficient.
Most knowledge workers aren't willing to put in the effort so they're getting their work done efficiently.
Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise systems/tools. A runtime environment must be developed to do that but where that of the agent ends and that of the enterprise systems begins is a totally open question.
> Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise systems/tools.
What would make it not be a monolith? To me it seems like there'll be a big advantage (e.g. in distribution, user understanding) for most people to be using the same product / similar interface. And then the agent and the developer of that interface figure out all the integrations under that, invisible to the user.
I think the coding market will be much larger. Knowledge work is kind of like the leaf nodes of the economy where software is the branches. That's to say, making software easier and cheaper to write will cause more and more complexity and work to move into the Software domain from the "real world" which is much messier and complicated.
Yes, and the same thing will happen in non-coding knowledge work too. Making knowledge work cheaper will cause complexity to increase, more knowledge work.
Yes, I have a theory - that higher efficiency becomes structural necessity. We just can't revert to earlier inefficient ways. Like mitochondria merging with the primitive cell - now they can't be apart.
I don't think so, the whole point of writing software is it is a great sink for complexity. Encoding a process or mechanism in a program makes it work (as defined) for ever perfectly.
An example here is in engineering. Building a simulator for some process makes computing it much safer and consistent vs. having people redo the calculations themselves, even with AI assistance.
The history of both knowledge work and software engineering seems to be increasing in both volume and complexity, feels reasonable to me to bet on both of those trendlines increasing?
> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
I disagree. There is a major gap between awesome tech and market uptake.
At this point, the question is whether LLMs are going to be more useful than excel. AI enthusiasts are 100% sure that it’s already more useful than excel, but on the ground, non-technical views do not reflect that view.
All the interviews and real life interactions I have seen, indicate that a narrow band of non-technical experts gain durable benefits from AI.
GenAI is incredible for project starts. A 0 coding experience relative went from mockup to MVP webapp in 3 days, for something he just had an idea about.
GenAI is NOT great for what comes after a non-technical MVP. That webapp had enough issues that, if used at scale, would guarantee litigation.
Mileage varies entirely on whether the person building the tool has sufficient domain expertise to navigate the forest they find themselves in.
Experts constantly decide trade offs which novices don’t even realize matter. Something as innocuous as the placement of switches when you enter the room, can be made inconvenient.
> market uptake.
I think the market uptake of Claude Cowork is already massive.
You know what happens to a predator who makes is prey go extinct?
AI is doing the same
really struggling to understand where this is coming from, agents haven't really improved much over using the existing models. anything an agent can do, is mostly the model itself. maybe the technology itself isn't mature yet.
My view is different. Agent products have access to tools and to write and run code. This makes them much more useful than raw models.
> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
They won't.
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.
> And eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model?
No. Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble. 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.
> 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.
> What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this.
LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"?
Or at "do my taxes"?
> how to use Cowork.
Yes, and I taught my mom how to use Apple Books, and have to re-teach her every time Apple breaks the interface.
Ask your non-tech friends what they do with and how they feel about Cowork in a few weeks.
> 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.
How many users you see personalizing anything to their task? Why would they want every app to be personalized? There's insane value in consistency across apps and interfaces. How will apps personalize their UIs to every user? By collecting even more copious amounts of user data?
> Or at "do my taxes"?
codex did my taxes this year (well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough)
If your prompt was more complex than "do my taxes", then this is irrelevant.
> well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough
You can't seriously believe laymen will try to implement their own tax calculators.
of course not.
what I believe is that laymen will put all their tax docs into codex and tell it to 'do their taxes' and the tool will decide to implement the calculator, do the taxes and present only the final numbers. the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented.
> 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.
They felt the pressure of posting something after Claude 4.7
It was already leaked several days ago and they've been teasing it for weeks. They had already said that it was coming this week specifically.
Obviously they pressed the "publish" button since Opus was released. Do not deny it.
ant is known to release stuff before oai. oai is consistent on 10am launches
Does that version of Codex still read sensitive data on your file system without even asking? Just curious.
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2847
This is a pretty important issue given that the new update adds "computer use" capabilities. If it was already reading sensitive files in the CLI version, giving it full desktop control seems like it needs a much more robust permission model than what they've shown so far.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r186gl/my_agent_...
tldr Claude pwned user then berated users poor security. (Bonus: the automod, who is also Claude, rubbed salt on the wound!)
I think the only sensible way to run this stuff is on a separate machine which does not have sensitive things on it.
'it's your fault you asked for the most efficient paperclip factory, Dave'
ran into this literally yesterday. so im gonna assume yes.
Codex is my favorite UX for anything as it edits the files and I can use the proper tooling to adjust and test stuff, so in my experience it was already able to do everything. However lately the limits seem to have got extremely tight, I keep spending out the daily limits way too quickly. The weekly limits are also often spent out early so I switch to Claude or Gemini or something.
Sherlocking ramps up into IPO
Bunch of startups need to pivot today after this announcement including mine
Is there anyone that feels that LLMs are wrong for computer use? It's like robotic, if find LLMs alone are really slow for this task
> Computer use is initially available on macOS,
Does anyone know of a good option that works on Wayland Linux?
Goose is an option, but it is just OK. https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose
Codex-cli / OpenClaw. If you need a browser use Playwright-mcp.
I can't see why I'd want an agent to click around Gnome or Ubuntu desktop but maybe that's just me?
I'm sorry to be slightly off topic but since it's ChatGPT, anyone else find it annoying to read what the bot is thinking while it thinks? For some reason I don't want to see how the sausage is being made.
The macOS app version of Codex I have doesn't show reasoning summaries, just simply 'Thinking'.
Reasoning deltas add additional traffic, especially if running many subagents etc. So on large scale, those deltas maybe are just dropped somewhere.
Saying that, sometimes the GPT reasoning summary is funny to read, in particular when it's working through a large task.
Also, the summaries can reveal real issues with logic in prompts and tool descriptions+configuration, so it allowing debugging.
i.e. "User asked me to do X, system instructions say do Y, tool says Z which is different to what everyone else wants. I am rather confused here! Lets just assume..."
It has previously allowed me to adjust prompts, etc.
I do want to see as it allows me to course correct.
First use case I'm putting to work is testing web apps as a user. Although it seems like this could be a token burner. Saving and mostly replaying might be nice to have.
it it doesn't complain about everything being malware maybe i will come back to openai from my adventures with anthropic
OpenClaw acquisition at work.
Any particular evidence for this other than the conjecture that it might be related?
To me it seems like just a natural evolution of Codex and a direct response to Claude Cowork, rather than something fully claw-like.
>> for the more than 3 million developers who use it every week
It is instructive that they decided to go with weekly active users as a metric, rather than daily active users.
Am I the only one who sees screen recordings of AI agents as archaic as filming airplane instruments to take measurements?
Tool for everything does nothing really good.
I'm sure it's been said before, but more and more our development work is encroaching on personal compute space. A reminder to me to air gap those to spaces with separate hardware [:cringe:]
Side note: I really wish there was an expectation that TUI apps implemented accessibility APIs.
Sure we can read the characters in the screen. But accessibility information is structured usually. TUI apps are going to be far less interesting & capable without accessibility built-in.
Using Claude and Codex side by side now . Would love to just use one eventually
Competition forever, ideally
What's the benefit of using both?
quota resets/backup when the other is unavailable.
My monthly subscription for Claude is up in a week, is there any compelling reason to switch to Codex (for coding/bug fixing of low/medium difficulty apps)? Or is it pretty much a wash at this point?
FWIW, I've found Codex with GPT-5.4 to be better than Opus-4.6; I would say it's at least worth checking out for your use case.
I'm switching because of the higher usage limits, 2x speed mode that isn't billed as extra usage, and much more stable and polished Mac app.
at least for our scope of work (data, interfacing with data, building things to extract data quickly and dump to warehouse, resuming) claude is performing night and day better than codex. we're still continuing tinkering with codex here to see if we're happy with it but it's taking a lot more human-in-the-loop to keep it from going down the wrong path and we're finding that we're constantly prompt-nudging it to the end result. for the most part after ~3 days we're not super happy with it. kinda feels like claude did last year idk. it's worth checking out and seeing if it's succeeding at the stuff you want it to do.
Wait for new GPT release this/next week and then decide based on benchmarks. That is what I will do.
One main thing is to de-couple the repos from specific agents e.g. use .mcp.json instead of "claude plugins", use AGENTS.md (and symlink to CLAUDE.md) and so on.
I love this because I have absolutely 0 loyalty to any of these companies and once Anthropic nerfs I just switch to OpenAI, then I can switch to Google and so on. Whichever works best.
Honestly, just try it. I used both and there's no reason to not try depending on which model is superior at a given point. I've found 5.4 to be better atm (subject to change any time) even though Claude Code had a slicker UI for awhile.
I can't help but see some things as a solution in search of a problem every time I see these examples illustrating toy projects. Cloud Tic Tac Toe? Seriously?
Is it OpenAI Cowork?
What does "major update to codex" mean? New model? Or just new desktop app? The announcement is vague.
Only on macOS though? This doesn't seem to work on Linux. Neither does Claude Cowork, not officially.
I don't see how it's possible to support Linux with Wayland, unless you limit the automation only to the browsers.
This is why both companies are in an SF bubble.
Linux desktop users. Talk about a bubble!
There's this thing called Windows.
I don't like it, and I'm sure you don't either, but it's not a Mac. Or a Linux. And it's what most actual desktop users are stuck with, still.
I wish Codex App was open source. I like it, but there are always a bunch of little paper cuts that, if you were using codex cli, you could have easily diagnosed and filed an issue. Now, the issues in the codex repo is slowly becoming claude codish – ie a drawer for people's feelings with nothing concrete to point to.
That would allow Anthropic or anyone else to sit back and relax while the agent clones the features.