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AI, Tools and Transformation
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: AI, Tools and Transformation
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am honestly _astonished_ that the current crop of agents are not all written natively for every platform. I tried porting a moderately complex workout app that I’ve built over years (and which includes a whole agentic loop) from web to iOS native. It took me a couple of evenings. There is now no excuse to not offer a native experience for every supported platform when you are a bigger company. Make one of the platf…
Because it’s too complex and not worth the effort. Most users will not care about or perceive the benefit. If they delegate that responsibility to Google via Electron, they can focus on features/bug fixes that move the needle.
This isnt how a company which has "solved programming" would act.
Especially since users do prefer a native experience and having their RAM conserved.
Re: AI, Tools and Transformation
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am honestly _astonished_ that the current crop of agents are not all written natively for every platform. I tried porting a moderately complex workout app that I’ve built over years (and which includes a whole agentic loop) from web to iOS native. It took me a couple of evenings. There is now no excuse to not offer a native experience for every supported platform when you are a bigger company. Make one of the platf…
I have a question about web to iOS native. How do you distribute that app? I’m assuming you’re paying $99 yearly to distribute through the App Store? Is this app meant just for you or for anyone to find? Reason I’m asking is because I’d like to make native iOS apps just for myself rather than progressive web apps. But I haven’t understood the best way to distribute.
If just for yourself, get an Apple Dev account and use TestFlight
Re: AI, Tools and Transformation
#24The way I see it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced. Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just need one function but because it was easier to just import a libra…
There are two forces here and they point in opposite directions. I wrote about this a few months ago: https://blog.musicallyut.xyz/2026/06/02/the-mote-in-ais-eye....
The one you're describing is the pull down. The AI doesn't need the library as a comprehension aid, so it drops a layer and writes the ten lines it actually needs. There's a second reason it might do this: it doesn't trust code written by other AIs, and pulling the functionality in-house shrinks the surface area it has to reason about.
But there's also a pull up. Writing code is getting cheap; making it hardened may not, and that gap doesn't close just because token prices do. If that holds, the economical arrangement is that someone (OSS or SaaS) ships vetted blocks and each user grows their own feature layer on top with their own agent.
Which means the stack gets taller rather than flatter. The top layer is bespoke per user instead of shared, and the bottom layer matters more, not less, because everyone is depending on the same small set of audited pieces.
Re: AI, Tools and Transformation
#25> You need audit, security, maintenance and accountability. I think this is where the role of humans will move towards in the future. Things like accountability can't really be outsourced to AI. This relates to solving the alignment problem: if you give the AI a specific goal and it has to plan sub-goals, how can you be sure the sub-goals align with your interests. For tasks in an isloated environment, this doesn't r…
Of those four, I think accountability is truly the only moat. The other three are varying amounts of both testable and iterated on via adversarial agents steel-manning the implementations. Accountability will not come before AIs achieve legal personhood, and that probably will not happen in my lifetime. And if it does in some jurisdictions (which I am not betting money on, this is a full full AGI scenario after multi…
This is like saying "writing code is solved, all we need now is somebody to blame because it doesnt work"
Re: AI, Tools and Transformation
#26I think this all rings true for where we are right now. The trend is that the agents are becoming superhuman in tasks for which there is a verifiable reward, and analysing a business problem, identifying inefficiencies and turning it into a software specification is not one of them.
However, things are changing so rapidly that I can see that starting to change as well. But it would take much better learning efficiency to understand unknown domains, 100% computer use reliability etc. I suspect we’ll see this by the end of the decade.
Re: AI, Tools and Transformation
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a question about web to iOS native. How do you distribute that app? I’m assuming you’re paying $99 yearly to distribute through the App Store? Is this app meant just for you or for anyone to find? Reason I’m asking is because I’d like to make native iOS apps just for myself rather than progressive web apps. But I haven’t understood the best way to distribute.
If just for yourself, get an Apple Dev account and use TestFlight
Do I need to upload a new build of the app every 90 days? I’d prefer the app to just work forever without thinking about it.
Re: AI, Tools and Transformation
#28> But with AI, now you can make that tool in five minutes, and you don't need to be an engineer, and you don’t need to write code.
I really wish those farcical statements would stop (I know it's not really made by the author itself).
I'm a software engineer, my partner isn't. She used AI to vibe-code scripts to help her analyze large Excel files. It worked, except the script only looked at the first tab of the Excel files, not all of the tab, which could have had disastrous effects if I didn't read the code and realize it was wrong.
Similarly, her team went from using Excel to track project proposals, to vibe-coding a website that's deployed on CloudFront and AWS Lambda. They don't understand any of this technology, have no clue what they are doing, and, more importantly, don't realize that they have sunk tens of hours, if not hundreds, in developing a portal that has absolutely no advantage over the Excel file they used to use. They also don't realize that if I wasn't there as an experienced software engineer fixing the stuff that's broken when my partner asks me for help, their website just wouldn't run at all.
No, non-engineers cannot make their own tools.
Re: AI, Tools and Transformation
#29> But with AI, now you can make that tool in five minutes, and you don't need to be an engineer, and you don’t need to write code. I really wish those farcical statements would stop (I know it's not really made by the author itself). I'm a software engineer, my partner isn't. She used AI to vibe-code scripts to help her analyze large Excel files. It worked, except the script only looked at the first tab of the Excel…
They sort of can. They absolutely can make something small that does a simple job. The problem comes when it is meant to do something more and they sort of manage to bolt that functionality on. Then they get another request.
After a couple such requests it is usually an unmaintainable hell. I use Claude all the time in my work right now, but there are lots of pit falls and stuff you need to do to maintain control over it. Stuff non-engineers have no clue about.
Re: AI, Tools and Transformation
#30It doesn't look like ai will enhance existing tools. AI allows everyone to build their own. Or at all eliminate necessity of any apps
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