> The other big thing was making research actually persist across sessions. Most agents treat a single deliverable (a PDF, a spreadsheet) as the end goal. In investing that's day one.
This is a problem with pretty much everything beyond easy single-shot tasks. Even day-to-day stuff, like e.g. I was researching a new laptop to buy for my wife, and am now enlisting AI to help pick a good car. In both cases I run into a mismatch with what the non-coding AI tools offer, vs. what is needed:
I need a persistent Excel sheet to evolve over multiple session of gathering data, cross-referencing with current needs, and updating as decisions are made, and as our own needs get better understood.
All AI tools want to do single session with a deliverable at the end, that they they cannot read, or if they can read it, they cannot work on it, at best they can write a new version from scratch.
I think this may be a symptom of the mobile apps thinking that infects the industry: the best non-coding AI tools offered to people all behave like regular apps, thinking in sessions, prescribing a single workflow, and desperately preventing any form of user-controlled interoperability.
I miss when software philosophy put files ahead of apps, when applications were tools to work on documents, not a tools that contain documents.
You may be interested in a local MCP used as a connector, persistent memory on cheap hardware with tools for basic documentation and such. I'm sure finding a way to wrangle Excel into the mix wouldn't be too difficult. Shameless plug of my project that satisfies most of your needs: https://github.com/ASIXicle/persMEM, I'm sure there are many others.
Interesting you mention non-coding AI apps because this seems pretty trivial to do with any harness (have a master file, update it over sessions + snapshots etc).
Most non-coding AI tools are meant for general consumers who normally don't care if they have to do a new search each session + the hacky memory features try to tackle this over the long term. Also you can always supply it with the updated file at each prompt and ask it to return by updating the file. (if you really want to do with something like ChatGPT).
And I think its a bit hyperbole to extrapolate this to "software philosophy is changing". Like most apps still work on documents/data? Not sure what you meant there
This one-shot content generated is quality-less, no-focus. I would not, but cannot help to use the word, garbage. That's why some time you see a picture or a piece of video, or even some content, you can smell it is AI. And AI smell stinks.
The real useful AI content(for this case, the financial goal) generation is a long term efforts, and current AI agent is not good at it. That's why the author created this platform(or App) to help people achieve there.
I think the reason why AI-generated content is garbage is because the people who use AI to create them have no general skills in content-creation and also bad taste. I know what's good content and what's bad content so I can work with an AI to rapidly iterate and remove all the bad parts it generates.
But most people who one-shot content barely bother to read it, let alone edit or polish. And that's why it stinks. I doubt that better AI agents will solve this. Writing powerful content is actually a pretty hard and subjective task; writing boilerplate marketing copy is very easy and mostly objective.
If the idea is that people who don't understand content will use it to generate content, then its logical to conclude they don't understand why their content stinks as well and will continue to publish the said content.
I feel almost 100% of content published (even on high-tier publications like The Guardian) have AI involved in creating them but their strong editorial processes prevent shit like "It's not LIKE THIS BUT LIKE THIS!" type text to be present 100 times in a 500 word article.
People need to understand writing is a skill and an art. AI can emulate it but so far, no model seem to have genuine creativity or skill in their writing unless you wrestle with it (but at that point it is YOUR skill that you're using to make the AI better).
> Most non-coding AI tools are meant for general consumers who normally don't care if they have to do a new search each session + the hacky memory features try to tackle this over the long term.
They do care. The vendors don't. Or rather, they're not prioritizing it.
Technically, two of the major players own office suite software, into which they integrate AI, and it's kinda starting to become usable for something. But it is still a bit ridiculous that there's nothing in mainstream tools themselves between single-shot document output and full Computer Use in Claude Desktop. Multi-document edit wouldn't be that hard to make as an extension of "canvas" mode in these tools.
> Like most apps still work on documents/data? Not sure what you meant there
I mentioned mobile. Most apps don't work on data documents, they work in private databases, and collaborate with the OS to keep you from accessing your data directly.
It is absolutely a philosophical change. The core unit of computer use in desktop era was a file. Data belonged in files, which were owned by users. Applications were used to operate on those files. In the mobile era, the core unit of computing is an app, which owns the data, and may or may not graciously let other apps access a partial, non-canonical copy by means of "Share" menu.
This is a problem with pretty much everything beyond easy single-shot tasks. Even day-to-day stuff, like e.g. I was researching a new laptop to buy for my wife, and am now enlisting AI to help pick a good car. In both cases I run into a mismatch with what the non-coding AI tools offer, vs. what is needed:
I need a persistent Excel sheet to evolve over multiple session of gathering data, cross-referencing with current needs, and updating as decisions are made, and as our own needs get better understood.
All AI tools want to do single session with a deliverable at the end, that they they cannot read, or if they can read it, they cannot work on it, at best they can write a new version from scratch.
I think this may be a symptom of the mobile apps thinking that infects the industry: the best non-coding AI tools offered to people all behave like regular apps, thinking in sessions, prescribing a single workflow, and desperately preventing any form of user-controlled interoperability.
I miss when software philosophy put files ahead of apps, when applications were tools to work on documents, not a tools that contain documents.