In my opinion, this post misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the model of an OS running various off-the-shelf apps for various tasks will soon become obsolete. But it's not the idea of the OS that's outdated - it's the idea of apps. Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly? The future isn't a bunch of extremely personalized apps - the future is a single AI assistant doing all the work.
An AI assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. An application written by an AI assistant, if it doesn't just call an LLM at runtime, will mostly likely produce the same answer for the same inputs. That is, unless there's something intrinsic to its business logic that makes it nondeterministic.
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
I want an agent studio and execution sandbox where my LLM driven assistant builds and maintains my apps with a receipt or transcript like history of what it did to create each app. Determinism built per use case with non deterministic assistance orchestrating the build and management layer. Extra credit if I can trivially share and collaborate with others per “deterministic silo” via a shared link. Something like Claude Code + AWS Lambda|(Docker|Podman) + Tangled.org with LLM code generation for my phone and workstation.
The LLMs empower for building, the determinism improves output-expectation alignment. It’s fundamentally an on device software factory, hypervisor, and storage system.
If the code works good enough, it works good enough. If good enough is insufficient for success criteria, you’ll have to trade app evolution velocity and flexibility for more determinism via more human effort (“artisanal hand crafted”), evaluated on a per use case basis. “Does this software have to be good? How good? Have I hit diminishing returns yet?”
Pros and cons to code being cheap to generate now, it’s always about tradeoffs. I don’t want to build cars, I want to drive cars.
Only in the sense that your build-a-car will be "good enough" as long as you never find out why your palms are always itchy, and you never press the brake so hard it stops working, and nobody determines which of the cars started the fireball during the accident.
People suck at "good enough". All major engineering disasters were something "good enough" for somebody. People burn down their houses with "good enough" electrical work.
Cattle can do complex tasks too. Including managing other cattle.
Think of all those bad sci-fi movies where aliens take over Earth, enslave all humans and treat them like cattle. Very competent cattle that's put in charge of local governments, scientific research etc. but very much still cattle where individuals are entirely interchangeable and killing them is just everyday work. This is me and AI assistants. (I'm the aliens.)
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
kevindamm · · focus · HN ↗
Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.
toomuchtodo · · focus · HN ↗
The LLMs empower for building, the determinism improves output-expectation alignment. It’s fundamentally an on device software factory, hypervisor, and storage system.
Terr_ · · focus · HN ↗
Remember when everyone was talking about treating computers as cattle rather than pets?
This seems like a weird inversion. Programs as pets instead of cattle. Toxoplasmosis, ahoy...
toomuchtodo · · focus · HN ↗
Pros and cons to code being cheap to generate now, it’s always about tradeoffs. I don’t want to build cars, I want to drive cars.
Terr_ · · focus · HN ↗
People suck at "good enough". All major engineering disasters were something "good enough" for somebody. People burn down their houses with "good enough" electrical work.
Xirdus · · focus · HN ↗
Think of all those bad sci-fi movies where aliens take over Earth, enslave all humans and treat them like cattle. Very competent cattle that's put in charge of local governments, scientific research etc. but very much still cattle where individuals are entirely interchangeable and killing them is just everyday work. This is me and AI assistants. (I'm the aliens.)