Ask HN: Will apps be going away in favor of personal assistants?

I think a chatbot or voice is a horrible interface for most things. There is 0 chance for discoverability, so the application's function is limited by the user's imagination. Most people aren't going to think about the various things a program could solve for them. Even with a UI, most users only use a small fraction of the available options. Without some visual cue to let them know features exist, I'd bet that most users would use even less.

My day job is automation stuff within a large organization. Most people, even within a technical organization, don't seem to think about how the computer can solve problems for them. The other day I used Claude to turn a massive csv dump of data into a dashboard to see trends over time. I don't see other people doing that.. but if Excel had a button for it, I'm sure they would do it.

While I was making a little app that converts text descriptions of events into calendar events[1], I was thinking an LLM could do this: consumes tokens and slower, but can work with even messier text descriptions.

I actually used an LLM to add coverage for the various ways different people represent dates and times in English (actually mostly Korean right now.) LLMs are even great at extracting data from text that is full of misspellings and ambiguous wording. I just give the LLM examples that were not parsed as expected. The LLM figures out the correct output itself, then adds logic so similar text will be parsed correctly in the future.

We've already seen apps that added an AI chat to their interfaces. And other apps use AI to generate "home-cooked" personal apps.

I think we will see a convergence of this: where users can chat with "malleable" apps to create features in the app itself.

So personal assistants will be creating the next generation of apps. Apps that are meant for a single user and/or even only intended to be run a single time before being thrown away.

I proposed this type of UX for Kagi; it could be applied to many types of software: https://doggo-pitch.leftium.com

[1]: https://nl-event.vercel.app, https://github.com/Leftium/nl-event

Some will, some won't. I prefer some webapps to their native ones and vice versa. I used to run some proprietary apps that I replaced with open source ones, often clients interfacing with already self hosted stuff. I rarely touch Kagi anymore because my own hosted model + searxng drops results faster. I don't expect most of these apps to go away just because of agents/assistants alone.

Proprietary apps and services will probably go into protectionism and will shed users in doing so.

Custom launchers and widgets will likely be replaced by user instruction-driven processes at some point.

Instead of making LLMs create scripts behind the scenes for what you want to do, it is more efficient to have LLMs use apps for you. Apps still make sense to me.

Some of them for sure! It's so much easier for me personally to just tell the currently-preferred-LLM-model or agent to do something for me instead of dealing with apps and dashboards!