| I agree. The UI component is currently a surprisingly big hurdle. Last night I set up my 11 year old son with Claude 4, with MCP enabled for filesystem modification, reasoning that the LLMs are finally at the level of capability where they can reliably just do things. And I was right - Claude put together a browser JS game according to his description in seconds, and iterated on it several times to incorporate his suggestions. But then it hit the limit of how big of a file it can comfortably write out in one go, started making incomplete edits, and basically fell into a snarl of endlessly trying and failing to write files due to file length limitations. I had to step in and tell Claude to split the code up into several files, something my son wouldn’t have known to do. If I hadn’t been there to tell Claude how to work around its own UI and tool limitations, it would have likely blown through the rest of its context window and totally failed at the task. I imagine this is a common experience for people. Most people wouldn’t know how to set up Claude with MCP in the first place. A surprising number of people who seem relatively aware of LLM technology aren’t aware of MCP, especially if their workflow is centered on IDE integration. To be fair, these are probably the people who need MCP the least, but MCP (and, in general, agentic tool use) is definitely closer to how normal people will get value out of LLMs. It may seem stupid and trivial, but telling Claude to directly edit or debug a file that exists on your hard drive is actually a multiples-faster and smoother experience than doing the laborious copy-paste exercise many people are still engaging with. This is just as true for code as it is for writing documents. The LLM companies seem to be quite aware of this, hence products like Claude Code, the Claude computer use suite, all the Gemini android screen/camera share integration, and GPT Codex. It’s a rocky process but at some point soon we will cross the threshold where it just works. But right now, it doesn’t just work, and so it’s not really that much faster or more efficient than doing a task yourself, especially if you aren’t intimately familiar with all the quirks and limitations of LLMs. |