Comment by jameslk
5 days ago
Muse, Dots, and other always-on agents may be the end of the PC era. Once you’re asking agents to do things on their own virtual machines, it’s game over. Everything moves to the cloud
Anyone wondering "why would I use this when I can use (OpenClaw|Hermes|my own computer)" -- these new services are not really meant for you. They're meant for the non-tech savvy and for the next generation of AI-natives who won't know anything other than how to use these type of services
For your casual user, these services will be hard to beat, since they’ll handle all the expensive and hard parts of using computers. No computer purchase necessary, no troubleshooting with tech support, etc. They’re also scalable where you could have not just one agent with one computer at any time, but many
In return, the agent providers would own your compute and data. I can even see them offering this low cost or for free so they can train off of users. Lock in would be insane
For privacy reasons, I really hope we find equally useful, private alternatives on our own hardware
I would say 99 percent of people who use computers could not even really identify what it is these dot agents do
Its a matter of time.
Computers arent actually intuitive at all. Even a mouse and keyboard literally take weeks of practice to learn.
Imagine picking up a new product that will take you weeks of practice to use at basic level. And then you have to learn how to do every little thing in the OS.
Via what interface would people use the agents? Voice to text on a smartphone? That's clunky and slow and only works in quiet areas where you can talk freely. And mouse and keyboard is really not that hard. If anything was going to kill PCs, smartphones & tablets would have done it, but everyone I know still has at least a laptop. Overall I think getting people to trade in the freedom of having their own personalized devices for a remote agent is a much harder sell then you're making it out to be.
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> Imagine picking up a new product that will take you weeks of practice to use at basic level
This does not work on developers. Their empathy fails them here - because they absolutely would try a new product that takes weeks of practise. They like (or at least tolerate) learning complex+cool new things, thats why they are developers...
For advanced users, always-on agents that run on your computer where all of your files/apps already are are much more powerful. I think the big AI co's skip this bc it's a smaller market and not as casual
I'm working on an open version that runs agents on your machines and brings a polished UX, and good parallel divide-and-conquer coordination
...did you just describe openclaw?
Very similar in principle, but I'm aiming for something very different in UX - namely, a polished client app built for creating and messaging with an agent that coordinates work across many subagents
I find Telegram, Messages and the like to lack the fidelity I'd want for managing such stuff. And the official OpenClaw app is ... well, it's weird that they shipped that
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The way it looks to me, the set of people who know what dots/muse actually do and why the are useful, and the set of people who don't use computers, don't overlap much.
I don't think you'll be able to make most non-tech savvy general population understand what those services do that a regular chat window does not.
I think the writing is on the wall for operating systems and apps as we know them today. I think there will still be a use case for local files storage and processing, however. So phones and computers won't go extinct, but our relationship to them will change significantly. The interface layer will become an AI, which will seamlessly transition from local to cloud based on compute needs. I give it less than a year before OpenAI or Anthropic announce their own "OS".
I don't know... a HUGE amount of people love to game on their PCs.
I'm working on a project that solves some of this [1]. It runs agents in Docker and proxies the ACP connection via websocket, with WASM-based plugins in that proxy so you can get in between your client and the agent if you want.
It currently tears down the container after the session, but it wouldn't take much to leave it running post-connection and make a mode that continually re-uses the same container.
It's also possible to intercept ACP read/write file and shell commands via one of the WASM-based plugins if you wanted to execute them in a separate VM/container. I'd have to double check on FS permissions for the Docker socket; I think plugins have no file access currently because I haven't figured out a permission system for it yet. The whole plugin system is new and I'm still working out some of the edges.
Feedback and feature requests welcome!
[1] https://github.com/SethCurry/abyss
> next generation of AI-natives who won't know anything other than how to use these type of services
Truly frightening. And, unavoidable.-
(Should surprise no one, I guess that "Agents" are superceding and subsuming human agency. Itself).-
In your mind why do people use computers? The universe is filled with non-technical people who not only have laptops but even go out of their way to buy docks and huge screens and ergonomic keyboards etc
Now, lots of those people have all the data "in the cloud" (a trend that's been around for a very long time), but the actual mechanism for interacting with things exists, right? People want a large screen just to read things.
At one point all the AI churning is supposed to lead to _some_ output for _someone_ right?
Software is going to replace hardware. All that will be left is glowing outlines in the air. I've seen it on Instagram so it must be true. That's made possible by AI, as I recall.
Of course Dots will be the end of the PC era. Every innovation of the last twenty years was the end of the PC era and dots are just as good as those.
I'll jump in here and mention Moose OS. It's a debian based open source OS that allows you to run these agents, and whatever OSS container you want. You can start with the hosted version and move to your own box at any time.
I think lock in in is the thing we should try to avoid from now on, especially when it comes to our personal data. Products like muse and dots are attractive when they have a free tier but someone always needs to pay the bill.
Windows had linux, IE had firefox and iOS had Android. I'm sure we'll see a relatively open assistant harness that token providers will rally around (at some point once the burgeoning field of assistants settles a bit, with clear use cases and value propositions)
This makes me surprisingly excited for the iPhone Duo - I didn't like it at first, but seeing it through this lens, seems like Apple is competing for the "AI-native device" of the future.
Posts like this are why I don’t trust many posters and their views on here. Out of touch.
> next generation of AI-natives
oh please current generations can't barely use a keyboard
I think that’s kind of the point. People won’t be touch typing on a desktop keyboard. They’ll be using their voice or phone keyboards. They’re certainly proficient at that.
They would have used the voice by now and yet we're still all here correcting errors made by the touch keyboard. And no no one sane would use the voice in public or in office thinking out loud. Especially for doing basic things like pushing a button
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Don't you worry, working on it as you sleep(literally given the timezone diff :)
> end of the PC era
wait till you hear about smart phones