This is the right general idea, but it does read as an ad for Cloudflare OS.
Every tech company is scrambling to be the stable foundation for people in enterprise to build cute little one-off apps safely. It's a perfectly fine pattern, but it's hard to imagine a world where Cloudflare becomes the default. Much easier to imagine Google or Microsoft adopting whatever UI/UX patterns work well and tying into enterprise data natively.
I hate that they called it that. I hope they change the name, to me an OS implies... an OS. I don't want to hear marketing excuses about that, I don't need every other company copying CloudFlare butcher a useful descriptor and now we have a bunch of "AI OS" type apps out there. Just call it what it is... an Agent Workspace. They could have called it CloudFlare Agents or something to that effect?
A dummy way to take the comment direction by cherry picking your disapproval of word "OS".
Who cares. Is engineer same as programmer? No. But people use it interchangeably.
Is Agent OS a real traditional OS? Maybe or Maybe not, depending on context of how to interpre it.
Just deal with CloudFlare OS instead of whining about it.
unless you do something about it.
As I said elsewhere: The future of tools like github is a platform for manual testing, where you write a prompt, the AI proposes a change and you can experiment with the UI and attach notes for the next iteration. AI can take user requests, prioritize, aggregate into tickets, and turn them into pull requests.
For a lot of end users, this may be enough, no programmers will be needed to get software built and shipped. For the rest, it lets programmers fill the remaining gaps, doing the manual testing to make sure the system works correctly, test for regressions and make sure the LLMs add those to the test suite, and then manage monitoring the rollouts. The bulk of development work going forward is manual verification that the LLM understood the user request correctly.
I'm not as sure that this idea of plugins will pan out; AI will want to make changes to support what it produces.
I see a different future. A future where software developers are approached by clients with requirements in the form of an LLM generated program. They do it because they are at a point where LLM fails to make new changes without breaking existing stuff.
Maybe it won't be a program, but just some LLM context as some data dump.
This program or context will take up the role of a PM. Developers will refer to the program, or ask context for clarifications and the developer will build the actual program with or without the help from LLMs.
I expect this to be automated too, and in the end boil down to paying for more tokens to fix the program.
Code too messy to be editable by an LLM is already too horrible for humans to touch. Fixing vibecoded software as a service will boil down to reverse-engineering requirements from the messed up program, and prompting a better model to design it properly and rewrite.
Eventually models will be trained to do this themselves, so it won't be a service you ask a dev for, it will be an extra charge on your AI subscription.
> I see a different future. A future where software developers are approached by clients with requirements in the form of an LLM generated program. They do it because they are at a point where LLM fails to make new changes without breaking existing stuff.
That's not gonna happen :-/ I've already had clients tell me they only want it modified, and their expectation is that it's only a days worth of work to make it work.
Who knows. I don't take on any dev work anymore that involves modifying existing applications, anyway. Too many have been of the form "Look, we did 99% of it, we just need you to do the 1% remaining" with the expectation that finding and fixing bugs in a vibed 90kSloC application is only a few minutes to a few hours of human labour.
In reality, if you bring me something that Claude Code itself can't make changes to without breaking, it's going to be at least a week of billable hours before I know where to start.
How is what you're describing technically different than the quoted section? GP was correct, they just didn't realize that they were describing something bad instead of something good.
That is sad. But if what I imagine is true, they will grow wiser after they have lost enough $$$ with scammers who agree to do it in a day and pocket the funds and give back an even more broken program.
the program itself is kind of useless. the client will send it anyway to demonstrate a proof of concept but hopefully the dev will build from scratch
what's important is the spec. the poc isn't a spec because the dev is being hired exactly because that software doesn't solve the problem fully - whatever it has missing is the important bits
this spec will probably be generated by a llm, but there is some noise added. if the client can send their prompt, alongside the whole llm session (maybe with sensitive tool calls redacted), the dev would have everything
> It took me thirty minutes with Codex and GPT-Sol. The thing is fast, it does not ask me for anything, and it does the one job I wanted: it launches applications.
This is quite funny, actually. When I wanted something similar (just play MP3s, without playlists, special indexes, etc), it also took me 30 minutes.
In 2002.
I still use it daily - a wish application displays entries matching the filter using the locatedb to get a list of all MP3s to find them and mpg123 to play them. This is the application that I have used the longest in my life, unchanged and unmodified from day 1, and it still tickles me that it took 30m.
I'm pretty certain, had LLMs not existed, that I can make an application finder using locatedb (perhaps store a private index as well) and a GUI in about 30m using wish as the front-end.
(Just for reference, here's my no-frills MP3 player)
---------------------------------------------
I assume the 30 minutes didn't involve learning how to use wish.
There are tons of apps I could build in 30 minutes using a development environment I'm familiar and productive with already, but LLMs don't have that restriction.
This is exactly what I did a few days ago: I created my own "small software" to solve my own need: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330939. Let me tell you: it works, it works really well, and I don't feel like, "Hey, the options out there are better."
In fact, the options available are outdated in terms of frameworks and bloated with features to please all kinds of customers. They try to do everything but end up doing everything poorly.
Every tech company is scrambling to be the stable foundation for people in enterprise to build cute little one-off apps safely. It's a perfectly fine pattern, but it's hard to imagine a world where Cloudflare becomes the default. Much easier to imagine Google or Microsoft adopting whatever UI/UX patterns work well and tying into enterprise data natively.
I hate that they called it that. I hope they change the name, to me an OS implies... an OS. I don't want to hear marketing excuses about that, I don't need every other company copying CloudFlare butcher a useful descriptor and now we have a bunch of "AI OS" type apps out there. Just call it what it is... an Agent Workspace. They could have called it CloudFlare Agents or something to that effect?
---
A dummy way to take the comment direction by cherry picking your disapproval of word "OS".
Who cares. Is engineer same as programmer? No. But people use it interchangeably. Is Agent OS a real traditional OS? Maybe or Maybe not, depending on context of how to interpre it.
Just deal with CloudFlare OS instead of whining about it. unless you do something about it.
For a lot of end users, this may be enough, no programmers will be needed to get software built and shipped. For the rest, it lets programmers fill the remaining gaps, doing the manual testing to make sure the system works correctly, test for regressions and make sure the LLMs add those to the test suite, and then manage monitoring the rollouts. The bulk of development work going forward is manual verification that the LLM understood the user request correctly.
I'm not as sure that this idea of plugins will pan out; AI will want to make changes to support what it produces.
Maybe it won't be a program, but just some LLM context as some data dump.
This program or context will take up the role of a PM. Developers will refer to the program, or ask context for clarifications and the developer will build the actual program with or without the help from LLMs.
Code too messy to be editable by an LLM is already too horrible for humans to touch. Fixing vibecoded software as a service will boil down to reverse-engineering requirements from the messed up program, and prompting a better model to design it properly and rewrite.
Eventually models will be trained to do this themselves, so it won't be a service you ask a dev for, it will be an extra charge on your AI subscription.
That is what I wonder. Two things.
1. Is there enough training data in that format, to do it?
2. Is there enough incentive for the LLM companies to do it? I mean they got to charge the client for the tokens upto that point..so..
That's not gonna happen :-/ I've already had clients tell me they only want it modified, and their expectation is that it's only a days worth of work to make it work.
This LLM stuff is still quite new; I wouldn’t be surprised if people are still asking for your help wrong.
Who knows. I don't take on any dev work anymore that involves modifying existing applications, anyway. Too many have been of the form "Look, we did 99% of it, we just need you to do the 1% remaining" with the expectation that finding and fixing bugs in a vibed 90kSloC application is only a few minutes to a few hours of human labour.
In reality, if you bring me something that Claude Code itself can't make changes to without breaking, it's going to be at least a week of billable hours before I know where to start.
what's important is the spec. the poc isn't a spec because the dev is being hired exactly because that software doesn't solve the problem fully - whatever it has missing is the important bits
this spec will probably be generated by a llm, but there is some noise added. if the client can send their prompt, alongside the whole llm session (maybe with sensitive tool calls redacted), the dev would have everything
This is quite funny, actually. When I wanted something similar (just play MP3s, without playlists, special indexes, etc), it also took me 30 minutes.
In 2002.
I still use it daily - a wish application displays entries matching the filter using the locatedb to get a list of all MP3s to find them and mpg123 to play them. This is the application that I have used the longest in my life, unchanged and unmodified from day 1, and it still tickles me that it took 30m.
I'm pretty certain, had LLMs not existed, that I can make an application finder using locatedb (perhaps store a private index as well) and a GUI in about 30m using wish as the front-end.
(Just for reference, here's my no-frills MP3 player) ---------------------------------------------
There are tons of apps I could build in 30 minutes using a development environment I'm familiar and productive with already, but LLMs don't have that restriction.
In fact, the options available are outdated in terms of frameworks and bloated with features to please all kinds of customers. They try to do everything but end up doing everything poorly.