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by pegasus 70 days ago
> but that gap gets smaller every year (and will ostensibly be closed)

As long as you build software for humans (and all software we build is for humans, ultimately), you'll need humans at the helm to steer the ship towards a human-friendly solution.
1 comments
boshalfoshal 70 days ago
The thing is, do humans _need_ most software? The less surfaces that need to interact with humans, the less you need humans in the loop to design those surfaces.

In a hypothetical world where maybe some AI agents or assistants do the vast majority of random tasks for you, does it matter how pleasing the doordash website looks to you? If anything, it should look "good" to an ai agent so that its easier to navigate. And maybe "looking good" just amounts to exposing some public API to do various things.

UIs are wrappers around APIs. Agents only need to use APIs.

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9rx 70 days ago
> And maybe "looking good" just amounts to exposing some public API to do various things.

Maybe, but you still need humans to make that call. The software is still built for humans no matter how much indirection you add.

There is a conceivable day where that is no longer true, but when you have reached that point it is no longer AI.

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pegasus 70 days ago
> do humans _need_ most software?

Yes, if it's not redundant software. The ultimate utility is to a human. Sure, at some point humans stopped writing assembly language and employed a compiler instead, so the abstraction level and interfaces change, but it's all still there to serve humans.

To use your example, do you think humans will want to interact with AI agents using a chat interface only? For most tasks humans use computers today, that would be very unwieldy. So the UI will migrate from the website to the AI agent interface. It all transforms, becoming more powerful (hopefully!), but won't go away. And just how the advent of compilers led to an increase of programmers in the world, so will AI agents. This is connected with Javon's paradox as well.

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andai 69 days ago
Yeah. The UI will still be there, but it'll be a guy.

A little guy who lives in your phone and who's really good at APIs. (And, by that point, hopefully good at keeping track of things, too!)

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