Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t see it that way. Even if Claude could give me code without hallucinating (in my experience it is a 30-35% success rate on giving me code that actually works and doesn’t use APIs it makes up as it goes), it cannot come up with real world problems to solve. For example, it isn’t going to notice that I need help managing my calendars and want an AI assistant that can read my calendar and email me my agenda for the day and the week, find scheduling conflicts, and suggest dates and times that align with social norms and my habits for get togethers with friends. It cannot notice that my car’s Bluetooth prioritized the last phone it was connected to and not my phone. It cannot notice that my 3D printer has a frame skew that needs to be corrected. It cannot notice that a set of solar panels could be optimized with a bunch of liners actuators and a cloud tracking camera. Those are meatspace problems that Claude cannot see. It might get more capable but it can’t design a product or a service.

Coincidentally, I want this AI assistant as well. I built a proof of concept and it worked really well, so I'm building a more multi-user version so my friends can use it as well.

The really nice thing about it is that I gave it memory, so a lot of these behaviours are just things you teach it. For example, I only programmed it to be able to read my calendar and add events, and then told it "before you add an event, check for conflicts" and it learned to do that. I really like that sort of "programming by saying stuff" that LLMs enable.

I'm looking forward to seeing where this experiment goes, email me if you want access/want to discuss features. I don't know if I'll open it up to everyone, as LLMs are costly, but maybe I could do a "bring your own key" thing.

Do you have a demo of it one can check?

I only started working on it on Saturday, so nothing very useful yet. It's at https://www.askhuxley.com/ and I want to focus on making something really useful instead of on monetization, so you'll have to bring your own API key, but I'd love it if you wanted to bounce some ideas and use cases off each other. I know what things are useful to me, but I don't know what's useful to other people, and I'd love to get new ideas.

Feel free to email me (email in profile) if you'd like to try it out. Right now it only does weather and Google Calendar, but adding new integrations is easy and the interesting thing is the fact that it can learn from you, and will behave like a PA would, while also being proactive and messaging you without you having to message it first.

I did make a prototype a while ago, which I integrated with a hardware device, and that was extremely useful, being able to do things by me teaching it. For example, it only had access to my calendar and its memories, but I told it (in chat) to check for and notify me of conflicts before adding an event, and told it the usual times of some events, so then I'd say "I'm playing D&D on Thursday" and it would reply with "you can't, you have an appointment at 8PM". This sounds simple for a human, but the LLM had to already know what time D&D was, that it's something I can't do during appointments, and that I wanted to be informed of conflicts, which are all things that I didn't have to program, but just instructed the LLM to do.

Yes, but product designers can talk to the AI and they wouldn't need developers to implement their ideas.

For some things, yes. For a lot of things, not really. Think of it like this: if product designers could just treat human software developers as idea -> code translators then we wouldn’t have developers making quite so many crucial decisions. Just translate the spec to code. But in reality engineers end up making the bulk of the decisions and often drive the product’s direction because of what is possible. Engineers also think up base tech that enables new products. An AI cannot stand in front of a radar dish with a sandwich in its pocket to discover microwave ovens.

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