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0 pointsbob10292mo ago0 comments

> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.

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.

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4 comments · 4 top-level

skydhash2mo ago

> The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX.

I strongly doubt that. That’s like saying conversation is the ultimate way to convey information. But almost every human process has been changed to forms and structured reports. But we have decided that simple tools does not sell as well and we are trying to make workflow as complex as possible. LLM are more the ultimate tools to make things inefficient.

duskdozer2mo ago

>The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX

Seems pretty questionable to me. Describing things in natural language can be quite imprecise and verbose.

voncheese2mo ago

>UI/UX development is often the most expensive part of software engineering.

I disagree with this as a blanket statement. At least in the tech world (i.e. tech companies that build technology products), UI/UX is often less expensive than the platform and infrastructure parts of the technology products, certainly at any tech that runs at scale.

cjbarber2mo ago

> 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.

Sort of agreed, though I wonder if ai-deployed software eats most use cases, and human consultants for integration/deployment are more for the more niche or hard to reach ones.

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