I’ve been watching the launch of Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots somewhat… bemusedly, if you will. Being a regular Verge reader/listener, I am partial to Nilay Patel’s take that Silicon Valley’s “software brain” mentality has obscured both a lot of the actually practical uses of AI, and the unvarnished truth that the vast majority of people simply don’t care—or that they do care about the privacy and productivity impacts.
Being too close to the coding agent madness (I am still poking at various agent harnesses, and feeling guilty about spending too much time yak shaving rather than actually using them for achieving more in other domains), I think that we’re at a weird plateau where:
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We definitely have far too many interpretations of what an agent harness is
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There is zero standardization on workflows (skills and MCP servers are still duking it out at both ends of the extensibility spectrum, but every user ends up creating their microcosm of weird little agent integrations)
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I feel we’re coming to another plateau of decreasing returns, because even as models keep getting (arguably) smarter, what you can do with them beyond flashy demos hasn’t really gelled into useful outcomes yet.
Or maybe there are now just too many useful outcomes lost in the noise—it’s actually hard to tell. But if you thought we had far too many note taking apps (and workflows) in the world, this continued Cambrian explosion of agent-related things will seem very familiar.
However, unlike coding agents and all the hustle currently pervading the startup world, mainstream consumer agents target the way you go about managing your life—which may or may not involve note taking, but is quite likely a very personal, somewhat inconsistent and occasionally messy process–just like note taking.
And I think AI is not going to be much help with that, other than remove toil (yes, it will sort out your inbox for you and research your travel itinerary). But I keep seeing funky lifestyle demos, agents that shop online (why the heck would anyone trust an agent to buy clothes for them?) and other fairly contrived examples that I (and I suspect most people) would never delegate to another person, let alone an AI that would love to have access to my credit card number and tell advertisers I would love to know more about their products.
Somehow, I don’t think there is a good fit here. I think there’s a pretty decent chance that the idea of a Her-like assistant, however seductive, neither fits the way most people think about AI nor the sales and advertising business models that I can glimpse just underneath the surface.