Shop notes: The last application
Hi all,
Another week that just flew right by. Obviously, there’s a lot going on in the world right now. Hope you’re all well.
Last week I teased the new landing page for Collaborator. This week lemme give you a quick peek at the UI.
In fact, I offhandedly tweeted a 10-second video of the Collaborator WIP app yesterday before stepping out to dinner, and to my surprise it’s gotten quite some pickup. Just goes to show: algos will do their thing, an also I think the macOS animated desktop hit just the right gradient to bring out the Claudiness of the graph view.
Just over a month ago I had the chance to practice my new pitch with the Betaworks team. I vibe-crafted a classic 10-slide deck, but we were barely able to get past the first slide. On it I had written, “agents + file = the last application” (paraphrasing somewhat). There was a lot of discussion on this.
Honestly, I wrote this statement somewhat hastily. I was trying to capture a certain brief zeitgeist, exemplified by Boris Cherny’s admission that he hadn’t opened an IDE all of December but was shipping faster than ever.
In the month since that conversation I’ve been trying to understand (1) how seriously do I myself take this idea, and (2) if taken seriously, what does it portend?
I think the answer is: people will still want UIs, but most people will use one or a few interfaces for everything, and they will be thin wrappers around increasingly sophisticated agent systems and the files they work on.
And Collaborator is my take on a great version of that interface.
More soon!
Have a good weekend all,
Yiliu