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Comment by dvt

6 months ago

Suffers from the same problem as all other AI "workflows"--no one wants to fucking chat with a computer (Brave sort-of does this, and it's god-awful). A chat interface should only be used as a fallback if the agent is too dumb to figure out what I want.

A chat interface works for ChatGPT because most folks use it as a pseudo-search, but productivity tools are (broadly speaking) not generative, therefore shouldn't be using freeform inputs. I have many thoughts on fixing this, and it's a very hard problem, but simply slapping an LLM onto Chrome is just lazy. I don't mean to be overly negative, but it's kind of wild to see YC funding slop like this.

And that's exactly what this is: slop. There's no technical creativity here, this isn't a new product segment, it barely deserves the "hey bro, this might be a feature, not a product" startup 101 criticism. It's what ChatGPT would spit out if you asked it what a good startup idea would be in 2025. All we need to do, even if we were being as charitable as possible, is ask who's doing the heavy lifting here (hint: it's not in the Github repo).

6 comments

dvt

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brulard  6 months ago

What do you see as an alternative? This is exactly what people need. To give quick instructions and have agent work on tasks across webpages/webapps. You say you "have many thoughts on fixing this". Can you share a better vision?

  • dvt  6 months ago

    Yes, it involves "recipes" for different "action types" based on a few things (past behavior, sensible "default" behavior, the context, etc.). For example, when looking at a storefront, the agent might want to give a few options (off the top of my head):

        - It knows you're low on milk, so it suggests buying milk
    - It can get a list of all deals, maybe even cross-checking with other storefronts
    - It knows your sister was looking for a planter, and it found a particularly cheap one, so it suggests texting it to her
    - Etc.
    - (You can of course still chat with the thing, if you so desire)

    These recipes are difficult to come up with and hard to generalize (they also need to be categorized, and likely accurately picked from a [RAG?] database), but imo this is the future if AI agents, not yet another chatbox.

sunnybeetroot  6 months ago

Have you used Cursor or Claude Code or any others? I want to chat to a computer and get it to do my programming over writing the programming myself.

doctorpangloss  6 months ago

Like hundreds of millions of people want to chat with a computer. At least.

  • dvt  6 months ago

    This is simply not true in the productivity space (which is the context here). People just want to get shit done.

    • immibis  6 months ago

      By chatting with a computer. People in paper offices didn't want to "use a computer" either but they wanted to "get shit done" and using a computer ended up being the way to get shit done.