Either way… we badly need more innovation in inference price per performance, on both the software and hardware side. It would be great if software innovation unlocked inference on commodity hardware. That’s unlikely to happen, but today’s bleeding edge hardware is tomorrow’s commodity hardware so maybe it will happen in some sense.
If Taalas can pull off burning models into hardware with a two month lead time, that will be huge progress, but still wasteful because then we’ve just shifted the problem to a hardware bottleneck. I expect we’ll see something akin to gameboy cartridges that are cheap to produce and can plug into base models to augment specialization.
But I also wonder if anyone is pursuing some more insanely radical ideas, like reverting back to analog computing and leveraging voltage differentials in clever ways. It’s too big brain for me, but intuitively it feels like wasting entropy to reduce a voltage spike to 0 or 1.
If this direction holds true, ROI cost is cheaper.
Instead of employing 4 people (Customer Support, PM, Eng, Marketing), you will have 3-5 agents and the whole ticket flow might cost you ~20$
But I hope we won't go this far, because when things fail every customer will be impacted, because there will be no one who understands the system to fix it
But this is just not true, otherwise companies that can already afford such high prices would have already outpaced their competitors.
Sadly enough I have not seen this happening in a long time.
It's the "robots will just build/repair themselves" trope but the robots are agents
Oh wait. That's already here and is working fine.
A PR tells me what changed, but not how an AI coding session got there: which prompts changed direction, which files churned repeatedly, where context started bloating, what tools were used, and where the human intervened.
I ended up building a local replay/inspection tool for Claude Code / Cursor sessions mostly because I wanted something more reviewable than screenshots or raw logs.
All Chinese labs have to do to tank the US economy is to release open-weight models that can run on relatively cheap hardware before AI companies see returns.
Maybe that's why AI companies are looking to IPO so soon, gotta cash out and leave retail investors and retirement funds holding the bag.
Regarding the latter, smaller models are really good for what they are (free) now, they'll run on a laptop's iGPU with LPDDR5/DDR5, and NPUs are getting there.
Even models that can fit in unified 64GB+ memory between CPU & iGPU aren't bad. Offloading to a real GPU is faster, but with the iGPU route you can buy cheaper SODIMM memory in larger quantities, still use it as unified memory, eventually use it with NPUs, all without using too much power or buying cards with expensive GDDR.
Qwen-3.5 locally is "good enough" for more than I expected, if that trend continues, I can see small deployable models eventually being viable & worthy competition, or at least being good enough that companies can run their own instead of exfiltrating their trade secrets to the worst people on the planet in real-time.
Of course it's in the areas where it doesn't matter as much, like experiments, internal tooling, etc, but the CTOs will get greedy.
(That's basically what A/B testing is about.)
But the entire SWE apparatus can be handled.
Automated A/B testing of the feature. Progressive exposure deployment of changes, you name it.
At least in my company we are close to that flywheel.
Tickets may well not look like they do now, but some semblance of them will exist. I'm sure someone is building that right now.
No. It's not Jira.
There's a lots of experimentation right now, but one thing that's guaranteed is that the data gatekeepers will slam the door shut[1] - or install a toll-booth when there's less money sloshing about, and the winners and losers are clear. At some point in the future, Atlassian and Github may not grant Anthropic access to your tickets unless you're on the relevant tier with the appropriate "NIH AI" surcharge.
1. AI does not suspend or supplant good old capitalism and the cult of profit maximization.
I am already at the point where because it is just the two of us, the limiting factor is his own needs, not my ability to ship features.
We dont have product managers or technical ticket writers of any sort
But us devs are still choosing how to tackle the ticket, we def don't have to as I’m solving the tickets with AI. I could automate my job away if I wanted, but I wouldn't trust the result as I give a degree of input and steering, and there’s bigger picture considerations its not good at juggling, for now
also, someone rightly predicted this rugpull coming in when they announced 2x usage - https://x.com/Pranit/status/2033043924294439147
The same as charging a different toll price on the road depending on the time of day.
Someone spread FUD on the internet, incorrectly, and now others are spreading it without verifying.
Yes, it was FUD, but ended up being correct. With the track record that Anthropic has (e.g. months long denial of dumbed down models last year, just to later confirm it as a "bug"), this just continues to erode trust, and such predictions are the result of that.
You'll define exactly what good looks like.
Yesterday, I spent the entire day trying to set up "Claude on the web" for an Elixir project and eventually had to give up. Their network firewall kept killing Hex/rebar3 dependency resolution, even after I selected "full" network access.
The environment setup for "on the web" is just a bash script. And when something goes wrong, you only see the tail of the log. There is currently no way to view the full log for the setup script. It's really a pain to debug.
The Copilot equivalent to "Claude on the web" is "GitHub Copilot Coding Agents," which leverages GitHub Actions infrastructure and conventions (YAML files with defined steps). Despite some of the known flaws of GitHub Actions, it felt significantly more robust.
"Schedule task on the web" is based on the same infrastructure and conventions as "Claude on the web", so I'm afraid I'm gonna have the same troubles if I want to use this.
- IFTTT was great when it started; at some point, it became... weird, in a "I don't even know what's going on on my screen, is this a poster or an app" kind of way.
- Zapier is an unpenetrable mess, evidently targets marketers and other business users; discovery is hard, and even though it seems like it has everything, it - like all tools in this space - is always missing the one feature you actually need.
- Yahoo Pipes, I heard they were great, but I only learned about them after they shut down.
- Apple Shortcuts - not sure what you can do with those, but over the years of reading about them in HN comments, I think they may be the exception here, in being both targeting regular users and actually useful.
- Samsung Modes and Routines - only recently becoming remotely useful, so that's nice, even if vendor-restricted.
- Tasker - an Android tool that actually manages to offer useful automation, despite the entire platform/OS and app ecosystem trying its best to prevent it. Which is great, if your main computer is a phone. It sucks in a world of cloud/SaaS, because it creates a silly situation where e.g. I could nicely automate some things involving e-mail and calendars from Tasker + FairEmail, but... well my mailboxes and calendars lives in the cloud so some of that would conflict with use of vendor (Fastmail) webapp or any other tool.
Or, in short: we need Tasker but for web (and without some of the legacy baggage around UI and variable handling).
The sorry state of automation is not entirely, or even mostly, the fault of the automation platforms. I may have issues with some UI and business choices some of these platforms made, but really, the main issue is that integrations are business deals and the integrated sides quickly learned to provide only a limited set of features - never enough to allow users to actually automate use of some product. There's always some features missing. You can read data but not write it. You can read files and create new files but not edit or delete them. You can add new tasks but can't get a list of existing ones. Etc.
It's another reason LLMs are such a great thing to happen - they make it easy (for now) to force interoperability between parties that desperately want to prevent it. After all, worst case, I can have the LLM operate the vendor site through a browser, pretending to be a human. Not very reliable, but much better than nothing at all.
Expectations - the functionality of "do X on a timer" needs to be offered to users as a proper end-user feature[0], not treated as a sysadmin feature (Windows, Linux) or not provided at all (Android). People start seeing it on their own devices, they'll start using it, then expecting it, and the web will adjust too[1].
UI - somehow this escapes every existing solution, from `cron` through Windows timers to any web "on timer" event trigger in any platform ever. There already exists a very powerful UI paradigm for managing recurring tasks, that most normies know how to use, because they're already using it daily at work and privately: a calendar. Yes, that thing where we can set and manage recurring events, and see them at a glance, in context of everything else that's going on in our lives.
--
<rant>
I know those are hard problems, but are hard mostly because everybody wants to be the fucking one platform owning users and the universe. This self-inflicted sickness in computing is precisely why people will jump at AI solutions for this. Why I too will jump on this: because it's easier than dealing with all the systems and platforms that don't want to cooperate.
After all, at this point, the easiest solution to the problems I listed above, and several others in this space, would be to get an AI agent that I can:
1) Run on a cron every 30 minutes or so (events are too complicated);
2) Give it read (at minimum) access to my calendar and todo lists (the ones I use, but I'm willing to compromise here);
3) Give it access to other useful tools
Which I guess brings us to the actual root problem here. "Run tasks on a cron" and "run tasks on trigger" are basically just another way of saying unattended/non-interactive usage. That is what is constantly being denied end users.
This is also the key to enabling most value of AI tools, too, and people understand it very well (see the popularity of that Open Claw thing as the most recent example), but the industry also lives in denial, believing that "lethal trifecta" is a thing that can be solved.
</rant>
--
[0] - This extends to event triggers ("if X happens, then") automation, and end-user automation in all of every-day life. I mean, it's beyond ridiculous that the only things normal people are allowed to run automatically are dishwasher, and a laundry machine (and in the previous era, VCRs).
[1] - As a side effect, it would quickly debullshitify "smart home" / "internet of things" spaces a lot. The whole consumer side of the market revolves around selling people basic automation capabilities - except vendor-locked, and without the most useful parts.
Same. Sometimes it is just people overeager to play with new toys, but in our case there is a push from the top & outside too: we are in the process of being subsumed into a larger company (completion due on April the 1st, unless the whole thing is an elaborate joke!) and there is apparently a push from the investors there to use "AI" more in order to not "get left behind the competition".
This company already does some pretty cool stuff with statistics for forecasting but now they are pivoting their roadmap to bake in GenAI into their offering over some other features that would be more valuable to their clients.
I wrote this to help people (not just Devs) reason about agent skills
https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent...
And this one to address the drift of non determism (but depending on the audience it might not resonate as much)
https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/error-compound...
Grok has had this feature for some time now. I was wondering why others haven't done it yet.
This feature increases user stickiness. They give 10 concurrent tasks free.
I have had to extract specific news first thing in the morning across multiple sources.
"Your plan gets 3 daily cloud scheduled sessions. Disable or delete an existing schedule to continue."
But otherwise, this looks really cool. I've tried using local scheduled tasks in both Claude Code Desktop and the Codex desktop app, and very quickly got annoyed with permissions prompts, so it'll be nice to be able to run scheduled tasks in the cloud sandbox.
Here are the three tasks I'll be trying:
Every Monday morning: Run `pnpm audit` and research any security issues to see if they might affect our project. Run `pnpm outdated` and research into any packages with minor or major upgrades available. Also research if packages have been abandoned or haven't been updated in a long time, and see if there are new alternatives that are recommended instead. Put together a brief report highlighting your findings and recommendations.
Every weekday morning: Take at Sentry errors, logs, and metrics for the past few days. See if there's any new issues that have popped up, and investigate them. Take a look at logs and metrics, and see if anything seems out of the ordinary, and investigate as appropriate. Put together a report summarizing any findings.
Every weekday morning: Please look at the commits on the `develop` branch from the previous day, look carefully at each commit, and see if there are any newly introduced bugs, sloppy code, missed functionality, poor security, missing documentation, etc. If a commit references GitHub issues, look up the issue, and review the issue to see if the commit correctly implements the ticket (fully or partially). Also do a sweep through the codebase, looking for low-hanging fruit that might be good tasks to recommend delegating to an AI agent: obvious bugs, poor or incorrect documentation, TODO comments, messy code, small improvements, etc.
I ran all of these as one-off tasks just now, and they put together useful reports; it'll be nice getting these on a daily/weekly basis. Claude Code has a Sentry connector that works in their cloud/web environment. That's cool; it accurately identified an issue I've been working on this week.
I might eventually try having these tasks open issues or even automatically address issues and open PRs, but we'll start with just reports for now.
Seems trivial.
But you can set up a claude -p call via a cronjob without too much hassle and that can use subscriptions.
Is this assuming you give it git commit permission and it just does that? Or it acts through MCP tools you enable?
It doesnt allow egress curl, apart from few hardcoded domains.
I have created Cronbox in the cloud which has a better utility than above. Did a "Show HN: Cronbox – Schedule AI Agents" a few days back.
and a pelican riding a bicycle job -
https://cronbox.sh/jobs/pelican-rides-a-bicycle?variant=term...
I use it to:
- perform review of latest changes of code to update my documentation (security policies, user documentation etc.)
- perform review to latest changes of code, triage them, deduplicate and improve code - I review them, close them with comments for over-engoneering / add review for auto-fix
- perform review of open GitHub issue with label, select the one with highest impact, comment with rationale, implement it and make pull request - I wake up and I have a few pull request to fix issues that I can approve /finish in existing Claude Code thread
I want also use it to: - review recent Sentry issues, make GitHub issues for the one with highest priority, make pull request with proposed fix - I can just wake up and see that some crash is ready to be resolved
Limit of 3 scheduled jobs is pretty impactful, but playing with it give me a nice idea on how I can reduce my manual work.