I think there's a distribution of agency in humans, hence why we have insults like "npcs". Its probably not fair to use that word to describe people, but the cliche has some truth in it and I think a lot of tech exploits this.
I personally rarely need to use google maps, and if I do its a glance at it on the beginning of a trip, and I can find my way there through normal navigation. I might look again if I get lost, whereas, I have friends that use it to give directions to go five blocks. I don't think sense of direction is innate either, but its a muscle you build and some people choose to not work on that muscle and they suffer the consequences, albeit minor consequences.
I think we are seeing something similar with LLMs with the development and maintenance of reading, planning, creative and critical thinking skills. While some people might have a higher baseline, I think everyone has the ability to strengthen those muscles and the world implores us to do that in many situations, however, now we can pay Altman $0.0010 cents to offload that workout onto a GPU much like people do with navigation and maps. Tech companies love to exploit the dopamine driven response from taking shortcuts, getting somewhere quickly, its no different here.
I think (/know) the implications of this are much more hazardous than consequences of not exercising your navigational abilities, and at least with navigation there are fallback to assist people (signs, landmarks ect). There are no societal fallbacks for llm assisted thinking once someone becomes dependent on it for all aspects of analysis, planning and creativity. Once it is taken away (or they can't afford a quality of output the previously did), where do those natural abilities stand? The implications are very terrifying in my opinion.
I'm personally trying to stay as far away as possible from these things, I see where this is heading and its not as inconsequential as needing Maps to navigate 5 blocks. I do not want my critical thinking skills correlated 1:1 to the quality and quantity of tokens I can afford or have access too anymore than I do not want my navigational abilities correlated 1:1 to the quality of Maps service available to me.
People will say that this is cope, its the new calculator, whatever.. Have fun, I promise you that not knowing trigonometry but having access to an LLM does not give you the ability to write CAD software. I actually think not using these will give you a huge competitive advantage in the future. Someone who has great navigation skills will likely win a navigational competition in the mountains, or survive longer in certain situations.
While the scope of those skills is narrow, it still proves a point[0]. The scope of your reading, critical thinking, creativity and planning skills is not limited.
[0]: It should be noted that some of the worlds most high agency and successful people actually participate in navigation as a sport called Orienteering, and spend boatloads of money in it.. I wonder why that is?
If the management is the one actually paying for the software from their own pocket (founder), the tables turn. There are millions of SME owners who are forced to pay for B2B software just out of necessity and not having resources to build it in-house.
What are you implying?. He would have had to hire a good developer at least for a full month salary to build something like this.
And if you are thinking enterprise, it would take 2-3 developers, 2 analysts, 2 testers, 1 lead and 1 manager 2-3 months to push something like this. (Otherwise why would lead banks spent billions and billions for IT development every year? What tangible difference you see in their website/services?)
5000 calculators may look excessive, but in this case it magnifies the AI capabilities in the future - both in terms of quality and quantity.
> (Otherwise why would lead banks spent billions and billions for IT development every year? What tangible difference you see in their website/services?)
Well, I don't think all those people are spending their time making simple calculators.
Scary is that the LLM might have been trained on the entire open source code ever produced - which is far beyond human comprehension - and with ever growing capability (bigger context window, more training) my gut feeling is that, it would exceed human capability in programming pretty soon. Considering 2025 was the ground breaking year for agents, can't stop imagine what would happen when it iterates in the next couple of years. I think it would evolve to be like Chess playing engines that consistently beat top Chess players in the world!
I used to think the same until latest agents started adding perfectly fine features to a large existing react app with just basic input (in English) . Most of the jobs require levels of intelligence below that. It's just a matter of time before agents get to that.
I disagree - having worked on backends most of the time, I find modern frontend much more complex (and difficult to test) than pure backend. When I say modern frontend - its mostly React, state management like Redux, Zustand, Router framework like React Router, a CSS framework like Tailwind and component framework like Shadcn. Not to mention different versions of React, different ways of managing state, animation/transitions etc. And on top of that the ever increasing complex quirks in the codebase still needed to be compatible with all the modern browsers and device sizes/orientation out there.
> When I say modern frontend - its mostly React, state management like Redux, Zustand, Router framework like React Router, a CSS framework like Tailwind and component framework like Shadcn
AI is the best at adding standard things into standard boilerplate situations, all those frameworks just makes it easier for AI. They also make it easier for humans once you know them and have seen examples, that is why they exist, once you know those frontend is not hard.
Actual complexity depends is not imposed by the framework, but by the application itself, and the amount of front-end logic tends to be lower. Yes, there is more complexity in the setup of front end code (now there are dependencies and build pipelines), but ultimately they should simplofy things especially for slighly more complex websites.
Testing is one of the things that's generally tedious in front end applications, but not inherently complex. There may be lots of config needed (e.g. for setting up and controlling a headless browser), and long turnarounds because tests are slow and shaky. But they are also boilerplatey.
That's just a farmiliarity thing. I've worked on project doing full web FE, mobile and BE.
It's hard to generalize but modern frontend is very good at isolating you from dealing with complex state machine states and you're dealing with single user/limited concurrency. It's usually easy to find all references/usecases for something.
Most modern backend is building consistent distributed state machines, you need to cover all the edge cases, deal with concurrency, different clients/contracts etc. I would say getting BE right (beyond simple CRUD) is going to be hard for LLM simply because the context is usually wider and hard to compress/isolate.
>Most modern backend is building consistent distributed state machines, you need to cover all the edge cases, deal with concurrency, different clients/contracts etc. I would say getting BE right (beyond simple CRUD) is going to be hard for LLM simply because the context is usually wider and hard to compress/isolate.
Seeing the kind of complexity that agents (not standalone llm) are able to navigate - I can only start to believe - just a matter of time it can do all kinds of programming, including state of the art backend programming - even writing a database on its own - good thing with backend is its easily testable and if there is documentation that a developer can read and comprehend - an llm/agent would be able to do that - not very far from today.
Isn’t frontend more complex? If my task starts with a Figma UI design, how well does a code agent do at generating working code that looks right, and iterate on it (presuming some browser MCP)? Some automated tests seem enough for an genetic loop on backend.
>Isn’t frontend more complex? If my task starts with a Figma UI design, how well does a code agent do at generating working code that looks right, and iterate on it (presuming some browser MCP)? Some automated tests seem enough for an genetic loop on backend.
Haven't tried a Figma design, but i built an internal tool entirely via instructions to agent. The kind of work I could easily quote 3 weeks previously.
Training data is quite readily available as well, and the online education for React is immense in volume. Where enterprise backend software tends to be closed source and unavailable, and there's much less good advice online for how to build with say Java or .NET
That said, I still get surprising results from time to time, it just takes a lot more curation and handholding.
Or perhaps the sort of things it's been trained on? There's not really a huge corpus of material re: beating Pokemon in the manner it has to play Pokemon, especially compared to the mountains of code these models have access to.
Wondering why someone did not solve the problem already? Of all the countries in the world US is brimming with entrepreneurs who want to "solve" a consumer problem, and with modern population I assume there is enough demand on fresh/healthier products - why on earth someone wouldn't try to fix it there?
Most Americans are fine eating stale or preserved bread. (Almost all pre-sliced supermarket bread is the latter.) You just don’t have enough people to spread the cost of baking fresh bread throughout the day outside wealthy communities.
That said, a lot of European bread is also trash. There are simply some bread-loving ones where it isn’t. Similarly, there are places in America with great bread (New Orleans, New York and Miami), and places without (Northern California and the Midwest).
> That said, a lot of European bread is also trash.
Yes thank you for pointing this out. I've noticed even the bakeries around me (in Switzerland) aren't that great; for me the best are from the farmers markets and even still you have to be discerning for which are actually good. On the other side I've had some fantastic bread in the US from specialty bakeries.
Solving the problem of european tourists being unable to figure out that they have to walk to the bakery section of the supermarket rather than the shelf-stable bread-like products section if they want something they consider bread does not sound like much of a business opportunity.
>Solving the problem of european tourists being unable to figure out that they have to walk to the bakery section of the supermarket rather than the shelf-stable bread-like products section if they want something they consider bread
Every supermarket I can locally go to has a bread-on- the shelf section, as well as a very fresh bread section. Not to mention 'bread shops' exist.
Don't underestimate the ability of tourists from anywhere to not understand how to look around a shop.
Finding bread in America that isn't over-overloaded with sugar is very difficult.
Quite a few of my family take their own bread to the US.
Of late, the problem has been solved as, apart from work, people just aren't travelling there anymore - for non bread-related reasons, of course.
For the US fam that now travel back to the eu (an awful lot) more, they go wild for eu bread: it just doesn't taste like cak, /sp - i mean cake.
Because this isn't the sort of problem some tech bro entrepreneur can solve. Its a systematic problem in the whole supply chain that end with consumer demand. And this is harder to do, once that whole supply chain has been destroyed. You need to shift the whole culture in terms of what they value and how it works.
The openai agent builder launched 2 days ago is basically inspired by n8n. n8n when launched wasn't an AI tool, it was inspired from numerous enterprise integration tools like Mulesoft, which were inspired by dozens of other enterprise tools, some launched even decades ago.
If you haven't tried you should check it out. Its an amazing way for no-coders to build something substantial in a relatively quick manner.
Under the assumption that AI has perfect accuracy. Perhaps you dodged the correct diagnosis and get to die 6 months later due to the lack of treatment. Might as well flip a coin.
> Doesn't have to be "perfect accuracy". It just has to beat the accuracy of the doctor you would have gone to otherwise.
They made an absolute statement claiming that AI will "at least" let them dodge false diagnosis, that implies a diagnostic false positive rate of ~0%. Otherwise how can you possibly be so confident that you "dodged" anything? You still need a second opinion (or third).
If a doctor diagnosed you with cancer and AI said that you're healthy, would you conclude that the diagnosis was false and skip treatment? It's easy to make frivolous statements like these when your life isn't on the line.
> What do you call a doctor who was last in his class in medical school? A doctor.
How original, they must've passed medical school, certification, and years of specialization by pure luck.
Do you ask to see every doctor's report card before deciding to go with the AI or do you just assume they're all idiots?
We replaced Slack with Mattermost for one of the teams - and guess what we don't miss Slack there. Threads, push notifications everything works fine and you get more features at least compared to the free version of Slack
So is the winning strategy here to pick anything but the top dogs in the game and hope they never make the big leagues and start behaving like shit? Mattermost just seems like another risky dependency
You can self-host Mattermost. It seems that is likely what they are going to be doing from the article since they talked about how important it is to own your data.
It always felt weird to me that glorified IRC could command such a price premium. Admittedly, a bunch of engineering was put in place to make things work, but it was still just humans chatting with each other for what is probably tiny amounts of data storage.
