#ai (123 links)
I mean they can but this is actually a fairly balanced take on why it's even more useful to know about right now.
Youch.
- Interview: Bret Taylor of Sierra and OpenAI economist.com
Andrew Palmer discusses the potential and limits of AI agents with the co-founder of Sierra, an agentic customer-service company. Bret Taylor, who is also the chairman of OpenAI, tells Andrew Palmer about the imperfections of the technology, the competition between model-makers and vendors, and how he uses AI to manage.
- Writing code is cheap now simonwillison.net
Coding agent tools can help with most of this, but there is still a substantial burden on the developer driving those tools to ensure that the produced code is good code for the subset of good that's needed for the current project.
- AGENTS.md agents.md
A simple, open format for guiding coding agents.
The genie is good at exploration. So good in fact, that Atsign engineer Chris Swan wrote “getting from idea to code is cheaper than it’s ever been.” But good ideas are a new constraint. “The set of people who have ideas for apps worth building is not everybody. It might be a larger set than the people currently making apps, but it’s finite, and probably not much larger,” Swan suggests.
- Nicolas Bustamante on X: "10 Years Building Vertical Software: My Perspective on the Selloff" / X x.com
When the interface is a natural language conversation, years of muscle memory become worthless. The switching cost that justified $25K per seat per year dissolves. For many vertical software companies, the interface was most of the value. The underlying data was licensed, public, or semi-commoditized. What justified premium pricing was the workflow built on top of that data. That's over.
Some truth in this but lacks nuance.
All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.
- Competence as Tragedy crowprose.com
What does it mean to keep practicing a craft you love when you suspect it's dying?
- I Didn’t Expect an AI Agent to Feel This Unnerving craighepburn.substack.com
I shut down my Clawdbot AI agent after an experience that made me question what I was willing to hand over in exchange for autonomy.
- Why AI won’t wipe out white-collar jobs economist.com
Employment among “business operations specialists, all other”—a grab-bag combining process design, co-ordination and analysis—has jumped by almost 60%, with solid wage growth to match.
- A field guide to sandboxes for AI luiscardoso.dev
- I Love Generative AI and Hate the Companies Building It cwodtke.medium.com
A Ranking from Most to Least Evil
...which is actually still pretty evil.
- Introducing A2UI: An open project for agent-driven interfaces - Google Developers Blog developers.googleblog.com
A2UI was designed to address the specific challenges of interoperable, cross-platform, generative or template-based UI responses from agents. A2UI allows agents to generate the interface which best suits the current conversation with the agent, and send it to a front end application.
- 576 - Using LLMs at Oxide / RFD / Oxide rfd.shared.oxide.computer
Measured take, love the public RFDs.
- The Benefits of Bubbles stratechery.com
- The single source of truth: why you still need a website in the age of AI offbrandkoto.substack.com
Once you embrace this mindset, your website’s core job becomes clear: to act as the single source of truth for both humans and AI. This is the foundation that gives you the freedom to express your brand fully, creating a memorable, immersive experience that can’t be replicated elsewhere.
- Altoids by the Fistful § Scott Smitelli scottsmitelli.com
- A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble linkedin.com
- The New Yorker Roundup culture.ghost.io
Thoughts on "our" culture in three pieces from Kyle Chayka, Kelefa Sanneh, and Joshua Rothman
The vast majority of people on earth are going to drown in a lukewarm bath of AI gruel, and there is probably no effective means of mass resistance on their behalf. The consequences will be very bad. But it also means we’re likely to return to the common pattern of cultural consumption from previous centuries, where sophisticates live in their own separate taste world that is not AI-dominated. I refuse to believe this is an “elitist” position when anyone with self-determination and curiosity is also free to join in this separate taste world, and its members should encourage others to do so.
- AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event theatlantic.com
- Myths, Mess, and What Actually Matters - by Zoe Scaman zoescaman.substack.com
There is no meaningful path to success today that doesn’t deeply embed AI and data into the core of the business. Not as an add-on. Not as a side initiative. And definitely not as something managed in a silo, away from the day-to-day realities of how the business actually runs. It has to be foundational.
- GenAI is Our Polyester culture.ghost.io
Humans have no universal faculty to judge aesthetics: Our appreciation of beauty is highly-contextual and depends on factors other than the raw visual stimulus. Most tech-workers are unaware of this fact, and for them, the fact that AI-art resembles human-art means it must be pretty damn good. But AI art is already in very poor taste: not just because it recycles existing conventions in a way that looks outmoded, but because it's already overly associated with less-than-prestigious institutions. GenAI art has already reached polyester status, and this is just the beginning. Despite all the techno-utopian promises, our brains see it as ersatz.
- LLM Visualization bbycroft.net
- Daring Fireball: Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino daringfireball.net
Brutual but justified takedown.
- There Is No AI Revolution wheresyoured.at
- Computing inside an AI willwhitney.com
I propose a new mode of interaction, where models play the role of computer (e.g. phone) applications: providing a graphical interface, interpreting user inputs, and updating their state. In this mode, instead of being an “agent” that uses a computer on behalf of the human, AI can provide a richer and more powerful computing environment for us to use.
- 15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to oneusefulthing.org
Notes on the Practical Wisdom of AI Use
- Is AI progress slowing down? aisnakeoil.com
Now that they are focusing on products, AI companies as well as their users are re-discovering that software development, especially the user experience side of it, is hard, and requires a broader set of skills than AI model development.
- What’s the impact of artificial intelligence on energy demand? sustainabilitybynumbers.com
Here I’ll look at recent estimates of how much electricity data centres use today, what some medium-term projections look like, and how to square this with recent announcements from tech companies.
- Automated Content Strategy and Tone-of-Voice Metrics jakobnielsenphd.substack.com
AI tools can analyze large volumes of content to provide metrics like readability, style, and sentiment. This allows companies to easily track content quality at scale and steer their content strategy using objective metrics.
- AI vs. Metaverse: Which Is the 5th Generation UI? uxtigers.com
My suggestion for separating the wheat from the chaff is to look at what works for customers in user testing. Does the hyped idea help real users perform useful tasks more efficiently or pleasantly? If so, real-world uptake is likely. Does it look fabulous in demos but fail to help people perform tasks? If so, it’s probably hype that will suffer a well-deserved death within the year.
Hint: it’s not metaverse
- Two AI GPT-4o having senseless conversation youtube.com
Amazing, creepy and disappointing all at the same time. Also, best comment:
This has the same vibe as two toddler's playing house and pretending that they're doing actual work
- AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years uxtigers.com
- Generative UI and Outcome-Oriented Design nngroup.com
GenUI promises highly personalized interfaces — a move from designing for many to tailoring for the individual.
- The Shape of AI shapeof.ai
Companies are reacting by “doing AI”without prioritizing the experience of the people on the receiving end–Design is more important than ever. To respond, we must get smart, fast. This starts with understanding the emerging patterns of interaction, affordances, and heuristics in an AI world.
- Gameplanning the SGE Apocalypse hitsubscribe.substack.com
Let's assume that SGE is a wild success and that Google gambles its entire ad revenue business on replacing search results with direct question answering. This means that your search engine traffic drops to zero tomorrow. What do you do?
- The rise and fall of robots.txt theverge.com
- TfL's AI Tube Station experiment is amazing and slightly terrifying takes.jamesomalley.co.uk
- New design patterns for AI medium.com