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Comment by jillesvangurp

3 hours ago

Deep integrations are hard and the AI companies are just winging it when it comes to eating their own dog food. Their apps are bare bones, somewhat flaky, and overall not that impressive from a UX point of view.

It's very obvious that while their AI teams are top notch, their product teams are very middle of the road. Including design. Even though they apparently engaged Jony Ive, I can't actually see his 'touch' on anything they have. You'd expect them to have a much higher level of ambition when it comes to their own products. But they seem stuck getting even the basics shipping. I use Chat GPT for Desktop. It's alright but it seems to have stagnated a bit and it has some annoying bugs and flakiness. Random shit seems to break regularly with releases as well.

Another good example of the lack of vision/product management is the #1 and oldest use case for LLMs since day 1: generating text. You'd expect somebody to maybe have come up with the genius idea of "eh, hmm, you know, I wonder if we can do better than pasting blobs of markdown rendered HTML to and/from a word processor from a f**ing sidebar".

Where's the ultimate agentic word processor? The ultimate writing experience? It's not there. Chat GPT is hopelessly clumsy doing even the most basic things in word processors. It can't restructure your document. It can't insert/delete bits of text. It can't use any of the formatting and styling controls. It can't do that in the UI. It can't do that at the file level. It's just not very good at doing anything more than generating bits of text with very basic markdown styling that you might copy paste to your word processor. It won't match the styling you have. Last time I checked Gemini in Google docs it was equally useless. I don't have MS Office but I haven't heard anything that suggests it is better.

For whatever reason, this has not been a priority (bad product management?) or they simply don't have the creativity to see the rather obvious integration issues in front of them.

Yes making those is a lot of work and requires a bit of planning. But wasn't the point of agentic coding that that's now easy? Apparently not.