I think what's interesting here is that it's a super cheap version of what many busy people already do -- hire a person to help do this. Why? Because the interface is easier and often less disruptive to our life. Instead of hopping from website to website, I'm just responding to a targeted imessage question from my human assistant "I think you should go with this <sitter,restaurant>, that work?" The next time I need to plan a date night, my assistant already knows what I like.
Replying "yes, book it" is way easier than clicking through a ton of UIs on disparate websites.
My opinion is that agents looking to "one-shot" tasks is the wrong UX. It's the async, single simple interface that is way easier to integrate into your life that's attractive IMO.
Yes! I’ve been thinking along similar lines: agents and LLMs are exposing the worst parts of the ergonomics of our current interfaces and tools (eg programming languages, frameworks).
I reckon there’s a lot to be said for fixing or tweaking the underlying UX of things, as opposed to brute forcing things with an expensive LLM.
Well then there's the overall experience using the roads, regardless of roughness. For example, Texas' under interstate turnarounds are super weird and make running a local errand feel like a cross country trip as an example. Areas without zoning laws between commercial / residential feel more stressful to me as a driver personally too.
I think even Docker might be a big ask. I mean, my experience so far has been that a lot of the people that this is targeted towards are still using platforms like Wordpress, Drupal, and Magento (all php...). Heck, git adoption still isn't 100% in this market; I just recently received sftp credentials from an agency that works in this niche.
I'd say CLI access is an even higher bar. Even in most medium-sized companies, the website people would never be able to get shell access in a reasonable amount of time, if at all, as they might be using web or CMS hosting.
Scale this up to a government organization, and the chance of it happening is basically zero, especially in an emergency. And even if they host their own web servers and manage to get access to them, the chances of them being able to run Docker or really anything besides what they were set up for without unreasonable effort are slim at best.
I'm not saying Netlify is a good solution, but it's one that a single creative tech could figure out and set up in a day and would be almost guaranteed to work well.
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Just want to compliment how well written this article is. A lot of technical articles lack the context or basic background (“why”) and this article does a great job.
This is the same for the train and shipping industries. I’ve always thought those vehicles had ample opportunities to capture solar rays and wind since they’re out in the open all the time, but we simply don’t have batteries and engines powerful enough yet.
I mean, basically every train engine you'll see that isn't steam is powered by electric motors. The diesel engine just makes electricity for them, and is not used to directly drive them via transmission like in a car or truck.
Point taken -- AWS is better at ops than the developers who create open source tools.
Then why not pay a fraction of the money you're earning on offering these tools back to the open source community? Using something like GitHub's new funding tools?
Replying "yes, book it" is way easier than clicking through a ton of UIs on disparate websites.
My opinion is that agents looking to "one-shot" tasks is the wrong UX. It's the async, single simple interface that is way easier to integrate into your life that's attractive IMO.