Eventually once they have more users they'll do the same thing as Anthropic, of course.
It's all a transparent PR play and it's kind of absurd to see the X/HN crowd fall for it hook, line, and sinker.
Simultaneously, we also hype up the open models that are catching up. That are significantly more discounted, that also put pressure on the big players and keep them in check.
People aren't falling for PR; people are encouraging the PR to put pressure on the competition. It's not that hard.
- Claude: Good for ~20 minutes of work once every 4 hours
- Codex: Good for however long I want to use it.
This is normal behavior and not a cause for such a hyperbolic response.
> To help you go further with Codex, we’re introducing a new €114 Pro tier designed for longer, high-intensity sessions.
> At launch, this new tier includes a limited-time Codex usage boost, with up to 10x more Codex usage than Plus (typically 5x).
> As the Codex promotion on Plus winds down today, we’re rebalancing Plus usage to support more sessions across the week, rather than longer high-intensity sessions on a single day.
We need to force them back into being providers of commodity services and hit this assumption they can mold things in real time on the head.
It's because they don't support OpenCode.
They're doing a slow rollout
i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers
A few thoughts and questions:
1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a company, they often rip and replace some of the software vendors with their personal favorites. Well, most software was designed for human users. Now, peoples' agents will use software for them. Agents have different needs for software than humans do. Some they'll need more of, much they'll no longer need at all. What will this result in? It feels like a much swifter and more significant version of Google taking excerpts/summaries from webpages and putting it at the top of search results and taking away visits and ad revenue from sites.
2. I've tried dozens of products in this space. For most, onboarding is confusing, then the user gets dropped into a blank space, usage limits are uncompetitive compared to the subsidized tokens offered by OpenAI/Anthropic, etc. It's a tough space to compete in, but also clearly going to be a massive market. I'm expecting big investment from Microsoft, Google etc in this segment.
3. How will startups in this space compete against labs who can train models to fit their products?
4. Eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model? Presumably. Harnesses get eaten by model-generated harnesses?
A few more thoughts collected here: https://chrisbarber.co/professional-agents/
Products I've tried: ai browsers like dia, comet, claude for chrome, atlas, and dex; claw products like openclaw, kimi claw, klaus, viktor, duet, atris; automation things like tasklet and lindy; code agents like devin, claude code, cursor, codex; desktop automation tools like vercept, nox, liminary, logical, and raycast; and email products like shortwave, cora and jace. And of course, Claude Cowork, Codex cli and app, and Claude Code cli and app.
Edit: Notes on trying the new Codex update
1. The permissions workflow is very slick
2. Background browser testing is nice and the shadow cursor is an interesting UI element. It did do some things in the foreground for me / take control of focus, a few times, though.
3. It would be nice if the apps had quick ways to demo their new features. My workflow was to ask an LLM to read the update page and ask it what new things I could test, and then to take those things and ask Codex to demo them to me, but it doesn't quite understand it's own new features well enough to invoke them (without quite a bit of steering)
4. I cannot get it to show me the in app browser
5. Generating image mockups of websites and then building them is nice
For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue. That hurts growth. I don't disagree with your general points, though.
I’m semi-normie (MechEng with a bit of Matlab now working as a ceo).
I spend most of my day in Claude code but outputs are word docs, presentations, excel sheets, research etc.
I recently got it to plan a social media campaign and produce a ppt with key messaging and content calendar for the next year, then draft posts in Figma for the first 5 weeks of the campaign and then used a social media aggregator api to download images and schedule in posts.
In two hours I had a decent social media campaign planned and scheduled, something that would have taken 3-4 weeks if I had done it myself by hand.
I’ve vibe coded an interface to run multiple agents at once that have full access via apis and MCPs.
With a daily cron job it goes through my emails and meeting notes, finds tasks, plans execution, executes and then send me a message with a summary of what it has done.
Most knowledge work output is delivered as code (e.g. xml in word docs) so it shouldn’t be that that surprising that it can do all this!
I disagree. There is a major gap between awesome tech and market uptake.
At this point, the question is whether LLMs are going to be more useful than excel. AI enthusiasts are 100% sure that it’s already more useful than excel, but on the ground, non-technical views do not reflect that view.
All the interviews and real life interactions I have seen, indicate that a narrow band of non-technical experts gain durable benefits from AI.
GenAI is incredible for project starts. A 0 coding experience relative went from mockup to MVP webapp in 3 days, for something he just had an idea about.
GenAI is NOT great for what comes after a non-technical MVP. That webapp had enough issues that, if used at scale, would guarantee litigation.
Mileage varies entirely on whether the person building the tool has sufficient domain expertise to navigate the forest they find themselves in.
Experts constantly decide trade offs which novices don’t even realize matter. Something as innocuous as the placement of switches when you enter the room, can be made inconvenient.
I agree this is going to be big. I threw a prototype of a domain-specific agent into the proverbial hornets' nest recently and it has altered the narrative about what might be possible.
The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX. You don't need to spend much time developing user interfaces and testing them against customers. Everyone understands the affordances around something that looks like iMessage or WhatsApp. UI/UX development is often the most expensive part of software engineering. Figuring out how to intercept, normalize and expose the domain data is where all of the magic happens. This part is usually trivial by comparison. If most of the business lives in SQL databases, your job is basically done for you. A tool to list the databases and another tool to execute queries against them. That's basically it.
I think there is an emerging B2B/SaaS market here. There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.
That's why LLMs shine in coding tasks. If you move to other parts of engineering, like architecture, construction or stuff like investment (there is no AI boom there, why?) where there is no so much source text available, tasks are not so repeatable like in software, or verification is much more complicated, then LLM-s are no longer that useful.
In software also I believe we will see soon that a competitive advantage have not those who adopted LLM, but those who did not. If you ask LLM what framework/language/approach use for a given task, contrary to what people think, LLM is not "thinking", it just generates text answer on the base of what it was trained on, so you will get again and again same most popular frameworks/langs/approaches suggested, even if there is something better, yet not that popular to get into model weights in a significant way.
Interesting times, anyway.
They won't.
Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature.
> And eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model?
No. Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble. People don't want "personalized interfaces that change every second based on the whims of an unknowable black box". They have plenty of that already.
a version of Conway's law aimed specifically at agentic communication rather than human.
AI is doing the same
Even all the websites, desktop/mobile apps will become obsolete.
> With background computer use, Codex can now use all of the apps on your computer by seeing, clicking, and typing with its own cursor. Multiple agents can work on your Mac in parallel, without interfering with your own work in other apps.
I mean table stakes stuff, why isn't an agent going through all my slack channels and giving me a morning summary of what I should be paying attention to? Why aren't all those meeting transcriptions being joined together into something actually useful? I should be given pre-meeting prep notes about what was discussed last time and who had what to do items assigned. Basic stuff that is already possible but that no one is doing.
I swear none of the AI companies have any sense of human centric design.
> pull relevant context from Slack, Notion, and your codebase, then provide you with a prioritized list of actions.
This is an improvement, but it isn't the central focus. It should be more than just on a single work item basis, more than on just code.
If we are going to be managing swarms of AI agents going forward, attention becomes our most valuable resource. AI should be laser focused on helping us decide where to be focused.
Opus 4.6 has had many "oops you're right!" gaffes and other annoyances that I let my Claude subscription expire yesterday.
Codex has been more consistent and helpful, but it too is still not quite at the point where you can blindly trust it without verifying the output.
It was the perfect storm and I would have never switched since the first AI I started with was Claude.
:^)
I've finally started getting into AI with a coding harness but I've take the opposite approach. usually I have the structure of my code in my mind already and talk to the prompt like I'm pairing with it. while its generating the code, I'm telling it the structure of the code and individual functions. its sped me up quite a lot while I still operate at the level of the code itself. the final output ends up looking like code I'd write minus syntax errors.
We know how to do a lot of things, how to automate etc.
A billion people do not know this and probably benefit initially a lot more.
When i did some powerpoint presentation, i browsed around and draged images from the browser to the desktop, than i draged them into powerpoint. My collegue looked at me and was bewildered how fast I did all of that.
But that's not how popular, modern software stacks work. They are like "you can do anything, anything at all!".
Consider Visual Basic for Applications - normally your code is together with data in one document, which you can send to colleague. It can be easily shared, there's nothing to set up, etc.
That's not true for JS, Python, Java, etc - you need to install libraries, you need to explicitly provide data, etc. Software industry as a whole embraced complexity because devs are paid to deal with complexity.
Now AI has to use same software stacks as the rest of the industry, making software fragile, requiring continuous maintenance, etc. VBA code which doesn't use any arcane features would require no maintenance and can work for decades.
So my guess is that the bottleneck might be neither models nor harness/wrapper - but overall software flimsiness and poor architectural decisions
Well that guy was me and while I still consider HOLs as weird abstractions, they are immensely useful and necessary as well as the best option for the time being.
SQL is the classic example for so called declarative languages. To this day I am puzzled that people consider SQL declarative - for me it is exactly the opposite.
And the rise of LLMs proof my point.
So the moral of the story is, that programming is always about abstractions and that there have been people, who refused to adopt some languages due to a different reference.
The irony is, that I will also miss C like HOLs but Prompt Engineering is not English language but an artificial system that uses English words.
Abstractions build on top of abstractions. For you code is HOL, I still see a compiler that gives you machine code.
These people HATE that developers have been necessary and highly paid and, in their view, prima donnas. I think most of the people running these companies actually despise developers.
Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.
I swear OpenAI has 2-3 unannounced releases ready to go at any time just so they can steal some thunder from their competitors when they announce something
</tin foil hat>
One concrete example: to set up a launch like today, where press, influencers, etc, all came out at 10a PT. That's all coordinated well in advance!
Credit to them for being media savvy.
These announcements happen so often
I'm still paranoid about keeping things securely sandboxed.
Knowledge work is work most people don't really want to deal with. Ordinary people don't put much value into ideas regardless of their level of refinement
I'm reluctant to run any model without at least a docker.
Ive also been getting increasingly annoyed with how tedious it is to do the same repetitive actions for simple tasks.
If someone manages to make a robust GUI version of this for normies, people will lap it up. People don't want to juggle applications, we want computers to do what we want/need them to do.
I wouldn't have thought this could be the case and it took me actually embracing it before I was fully sold.
Maybe not a popular opinion but I really do believe...
- code quality as we previously understood will not be a thing in 3-5 years
- IDEs will face a very sharp decline in use
Great, now you perform those tasks more slowly, using up a lot more computing power, with your activities and possibly data recorded by some remote party of questionable repute.
This is the real "computer use". We will always need GUI-level interaction for proprietary apps and websites that aren't made available in machine-readable form, but everything else you do with a computer should just be mapped to simple CLI commands that are comparatively trivial for a text-based AI.
Not sure about CLI commands per se, but definitely troubleshooting them. Docker-compose files in particular..."here's the error, here's the compose, help" is just magic
One main thing is to de-couple the repos from specific agents e.g. use .mcp.json instead of "claude plugins", use AGENTS.md (and symlink to CLAUDE.md) and so on.
I love this because I have absolutely 0 loyalty to any of these companies and once Anthropic nerfs I just switch to OpenAI, then I can switch to Google and so on. Whichever works best.
But the real issue I ran into wasn't which model is better. It's that every time I switched, I lost weeks of accumulated context. The AI didn't know my project's conventions anymore, didn't remember the architecture decisions, didn't know what was tried and rejected.
What helped me was separating the project context from the tool. Keep the conventions, rules, and decisions in plain files in the repo. Both Claude Code and Codex can read them at session start. Then the question becomes "which model is sharper this week" instead of "can I afford to lose my context."
The answer to your question: it's mostly a wash on capability. The real cost of switching is the context you don't realize you're rebuilding.
tldr Claude pwned user then berated users poor security. (Bonus: the automod, who is also Claude, rubbed salt on the wound!)
I think the only sensible way to run this stuff is on a separate machine which does not have sensitive things on it.
search, listings, direct reads, browser and computer use all sit behind different boundaries.
hard to tell what any given approval actually buys or exposes.
That said, until models produce verifiably correct work (which is a difficult, if not impossible, bar to clear), I sorta doubt it. Not because humans intrinsically produce better or smarter work (arguably, many humans across many domains already don't vs current models), but because office politics and pushing blame around are a delicate game in corporations.
It's one thing for a product lead to make wild promises and then shift blame to the black box developer team (and vice versa shift blame to the customers when talking to the devs) but once you are the only dude operating the slot machine product generator 5000 the dynamic will noticeably shift, and someone will want someone to be responsible if another DB admin key leaks in production. This sorta diffuses itself when you have 3 layers of organization below you, but again, doesn't really work with a black box code generator.
Reasoning deltas add additional traffic, especially if running many subagents etc. So on large scale, those deltas maybe are just dropped somewhere.
Saying that, sometimes the GPT reasoning summary is funny to read, in particular when it's working through a large task.
Also, the summaries can reveal real issues with logic in prompts and tool descriptions+configuration, so it allowing debugging.
i.e. "User asked me to do X, system instructions say do Y, tool says Z which is different to what everyone else wants. I am rather confused here! Lets just assume..."
It has previously allowed me to adjust prompts, etc.
Or basically any app without MCP capabilities
I ask the AI daily to summarize information across surfaces, and it's painful when I have to go screenshot things myself in a bunch of places because those apps were not made to extract information out of them, and are complete black boxes with a UI on top
I think the latter is technically "Codex For Desktop", which is what this article is referring to.
Does anyone know of a good option that works on Wayland Linux?
I can't see why I'd want an agent to click around Gnome or Ubuntu desktop but maybe that's just me?
I wonder if there’s something off the shelf that does this?
Bunch of startups need to pivot today after this announcement including mine
Codex is still far from ready for regular people. Simply moving a folder that Codex has been working on confuses the hell out of it. I can't figure out how to fix "Current working directory missing. This chat's working directory no longer exists". I've tried asking it to fix the problem and it tries lots of terminal commands and screws around with SQLite. Something this brittle is not for non-developers.
Moving the folder you’re in out from under yourself is okay if you know you did it - but if you don’t, you’re gonna get confused :) And so is an agent!
Now we are using LLM just to adjust font size?
Also third video: "Generate an image for the hero section..."
I can't understand why OpenAI(or Google, or whatever AI companies) thinks it's okay to put an AI generated image for product description. It's literally fake.
It is instructive that they decided to go with weekly active users as a metric, rather than daily active users.
56% is much more impressive than 14%.
This may look bad until you consider that all of them are already desperately strapped for compute. I think the lower DAU is due to a combination of that and people still figuring out how to use AI.
Faster LLMs will be here by next year.
And they've been lovely to work with as we got this put together.
Ok. I upgrade.
"You've hit the message limit, upgrade to Plus for more".
Hmm. They've charged me. There's no meaningful support. I just got scammed, didn't I...
Why is OpenAI obsessed with generating imgaes? Do they think "generate image" is a thing that a software engineer do on a daily basis?
Even when I was doing heavy web development, I can count the number of times I needed to generate images, and usually for prototyping only.
They have AGI now?
I am speechless everytime I see posts like this and the comments following, vote with your behavior stop supporting and enabling the Peter Thiel universe, just a few weeks ago we had an oped about openAI and Sam, look into yourselfs and really reflect on whom you are enabling by continuing to contribute to their baseline
The killer feature of any of these assistants, if you're a manager, is asking to review your email, Slack, Notion, etc several times a day to highlight the items where you need to engage right away. Of course, if your company allows the connectors to do so.
Codex is pretty seamless right now and even after they cut on their 5-hr limits their $20 plan is still a little bit more generous.
I'd still say that Claude models are superior and just offer good opinionated defaults.
Sure we can read the characters in the screen. But accessibility information is structured usually. TUI apps are going to be far less interesting & capable without accessibility built-in.
I was expecting it to use MCPs I have for them, but they happened to not be authenticated for some reason
I got _really_ freaked out when a glowing cursor popped up while I was doing something else and started looking at slack and then navigating on chrome to the sheet to get the data it needs
Like on one hand it's really cool that it just "did the thing" but I was also freaked out during the experience
In order to do this we will eat everyone's lunch.
but there is no link, why would you not make this a link.
boggles my mind that companies make such little use of hypertext
I am getting some strange vibes here ... is AI actually also spying on these developers?
Without 3rd party tools/plugins.
Its clear that it will go in this type of direction but Anthropic announced managed agents just a week ago and this again with all the biuld in connections and tools will help so many non computer people to do a lot more faster and better.
I'm waiting for the open source ai ecosystem to catch up :/
