Technology

It's a great article, actually click through and read it if you haven't already.

My favorite example of truly effortless communication is a memory I have of my grandparents. At the breakfast table, my grandmother never had to ask for the butter – my grandfather always seemed to pass it to her automatically, because after 50+ years of marriage he just sensed that she was about to ask for it. It was like they were communicating telepathically.

That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer!

The author's point is that natural language is a slow way to communicate, and it's not even our preferred way, so why are we pushing so hard for it?

One of the best productivity tools for me is my CLI shell, which predicts what I'm about to type based on what I've done in the past. There's no AI here, just simple history search. It turns out i do the same thing a lot.

None of this is to say that LLMs aren’t great. I love LLMs. I use them all the time. In fact, I wrote this very essay with the help of an LLM.

The author argues that LLMs are an augmentation to existing tools, not a replacement. Just like the mouse didn't replace the keyboard (my example), LLMs won't replace existing workflows, it'll merely help in the knowledge retrieval stage.

For this future to become an actual reality, AI needs to work at the OS level. It’s not meant to be an interface for a single tool, but an interface across tools.

This is where I partially disagree.

Yes, I think some level of AI makes sense at the OS layer, but its function should be to find the right tool, not to be a tool. For example, "open my budget" would know from context which file that is (family, company, client, etc), which program (GNUCash, Excel, or a URL in a browser), and then pass on context to the app-specific AI, which would know which part to open and be ready for context-relevant questions (is it payday? Was I just looking at concert tickets? Is someone's birthday coming up?).

But even then, the usefulness of a system-wide AI is pretty limited. Most people can efficiently navigate to what they want. Indexes work well to find files (and full text search is feasible), file extensions work well to open the right application, and applications remembering what they were last doing is usually sufficient.

So I see it as more of an accessibility feature at the system level instead of an actual, useful system in itself. However, I really like the idea of different models passing context in some standard way to each other so I can seamlessly move between apps.

But I absolutely agree with the main point here: AI should be seen as an add-on, not a replacement.