They are very much useful, I even have an example in the beginning. They wouldn’t be plundered from the zones and sold for crazy money if they weren’t useful. I’m also not saying that what AI is dropping now is akin to alien artifacts. I’m posing the question of whether it may get there.
Usefulness doesn’t always rely on understanding. And it’s not a new thing in mathematics to have an answer without fully understanding it. We’re talking about a change in the rate of that happening, not a new phenomenon in itself.
I am Russian, read it in the original. But I'm scarred by being forced to read meandering classics from a very young age, so I may just have a more visceral negative reaction to it that I have to get over.
I tried "Monday Begins on Saturday" and had a pretty hard time getting through it. But I have to give it another chance - and check out the ones you mentioned.
Fair, “answers” is probably more precise than “knowledge.” That gap between answers and understanding is the whole point of the post, so I think we mostly agree.
It doesn't assume, it just observes. It has the capacity to use computers better than us, more persistently, in a more scalable way, to solve problems we haven't solved before like Navier-Stokes and many more to come. You can argue all you want about whether it's intelligent or not and what it means, but the solution is now here for us to process, understand, and integrate forward into our model of the world.
I think devil’s in the details on all of your examples, although I very much agree with your overall point - it’s so nuanced in terms of timing, current capabilities, etc.
Re: chatbots were tried but it’s a wrong model for a deterministic system. It’s the best one for a probabilistic one.
Re: chatGPT auto-router - 1) I suspect explicit model selection matters less in agentic contexts (this thing is coordinating a bunch of other agents for me) vs QA context where you want to make sure you’re getting the best answer. 2) I suspect auto-routing matters less now that models are way better
It does not at all. ChatGPT is trying to be an everything app and it’s extremely convoluted by this point and hard for most people to make sense of, especially if you’re not in tech.
That’s pretty much the question the article tries to answer! TL;DR - good product design, personality mechanics, and ad-funded tokens is what makes it different.
Those are all quite mature products which they have maintained and grew super well. They haven’t had a good track record in consumer AI, there’s no coherent product strategy or offering. They had some localized hits like NotebookLM and nano banana but it hasn’t translated into organic growth and usage for Gemini
What are you talking about? This is my substack and the article is a very in-depth write up that a lot of people found value in. Nothing low effort or purely promotional with this one.
It’s different in that it’s basically another abstraction layer. It has long-term memory (vs project by project) and constantly reviews its output to improve its skills and create new ones. Hermes can actually spin up codex or Claude code sessions for you as well. Telegram gateway is a huge plus as well. Codex and Claude mobile solutions right now are buggy and more for one specific thread of work vs a general delegator and chief of staff so to say.
Will be taking this for a spin imminently. What seems to be very unique here vs other canvas tools are the generative UI controls.
If you’re confused about why everyone is shipping their own canvas tool - this is what I wrote when I reviewed Stitch from Google in my newsletter:
“every SOTA (State-of-the-Art) model can already do this. Give it a prompt, it'll spit out an HTML design. Ask for 10 responsive variations, you'll get them. Stitch is a Ul and context harness on top of Gemini, in the same way Claude Code is a harness on top of Claude's models. This means every Al lab will likely ship their own version, and they'll all interoperate because at the end of the day it's all HTML and markdown.”
More generally, this is a competition of where the product development work starts and lives. The business value will accrue to those who become a destination, not a plugin.
AI can now power a new sort of tool that supports the entire process (not just coding or just design). So there’s no reason for Anthropic or any other lab to give that up to another tool.
Paper Design etc all have the same fundamental problem as Figma - they’re designed for a process that won’t exist as we know it within a few years (and arguably half way there already). All of these canvas-based design tools assume that people want / need to directly manipulate things on a canvas fist before building vs going straight to building it (and by building I also mean you can ask Claude to build you 10 prototypes for different directions so exploration is not dead, just starts elsewhere).
Whoever is able to act as the central store for all your context and be the integration point for all your agents running on top (including your proprietary ones) will have leverage in the ecosystem. Everyone else will be the supplier. The more context you have from different places (code, tickets, PRDs, markdown files, CRM, etc) and the deeper your agents plug into all of this, the harder it'll be to switch away to something else painlessly.
It is truly staggering to see a tool used by (almost) every large tech company in the world so quickly lose ground. I don't think they're done done, but their position in the value chain has shifted drastically.
Yep, my experience as well coming from Big Tech although they'll be buoyed by intertia for some time. And yes, source of truth just makes more sense in code, so I don't think there's much of a moat there either. I think there's still value in this collaboration layer, but collaboration will change substantially as well and take a different shape. The world where the design team spends weeks / months designing, refining, and doing crits on the same file just doesn't make sense now - it was driven by the high costs of implementation so the decisions had to be made upfront. That's going to change.
Long-term yes. Assuming we'll reach a world where an agent is your primary interface, has access to all you need, and will spin up dynamic UIs for you when needed.
I'm sure that's part of it but I think it's a very small part of the story. They've been pushing hard on internal AI creation tools for a while, and those clearly didn't take hold.
I don’t think so. Your product / tool has to be extremely specialized and deeply necessary to pull of a walled garden MCP. The more likely alternatives are that someone else comes along with a better (open) integration, the model internalizes your tool’s capabilities, or the AI labs themselves build 1st party competitors.
The result is less that I want to go to Figma directly and more that I just want to skip it entirely. So, assuming the power of these aggregator agents keeps growing, the onus is on these tools to create useful integrations or get subsumed by a model capability or another tool with a better integration. It sounds like your experience is similar - you bypassed the tools with bad integrations instead of going to them directly.
Definitely don’t believe AI is going to “one-shot” Figma. But Figma was built for a world where product design is a stand-alone step in a series of discrete steps with hand-offs between them. It was a place where design started and ended, for a while at least. If people don’t see it as a starting point anymore, it becomes a very different business & product.