The way we use computers will change forever

Go back five years and ask yourself what you would feel is dramatically different about how you do your work. I bet you’d not really envisage much change in the tools you use and the way of working.

But then on 30 November 2022, Sam Altman posted a Tweet with the innocuous post:

today we launched ChatGPT.

try talking with it here:

chat.openai.com

Suddenly the world was exposed to a magical new thing called a Large Language Model. Nobody really knew that GPT meant Generative Pre-trained Transformer, and nor did they care. “ChatGPT” was a phrase that came to everyone’s consciousness in everyday conversation.

Now the computer could talk like us. We could use it to write an email, complete assignments and look up facts about the world.

As the chatbots got more commonplace, our comfort of writing a prompt and watching as the result streamed out became commonplace.

Then they started to do more than respond. They can write code, think longer, research the web and use our computer.

Sounds amazing right? But that’s not the final form of how we interact with computers to get work done.

We’re now seeing a shift in how we treat our AI agents. I didn’t really jump on the OpenClaw bandwagon for a multitude of reasons, but when Grok Bot was released to existing Cursor users, I suddenly realised that computing was about to change forever.

Currently the role you play is to ask AI to assist with your tasks. The response it gives is for you to do something with. It has no responsibility to continue working on your task unless you ask it to.

But with Grok Bot you switch from prompting your agents to messaging them. Suddenly you no longer have to wait for the response before you can continue. You can ask it multiple things at a time and it will handle these.

But what has really taken me aback using it, is that for the first time, I can ask my agent to own the problem.

Because it works by stacking LLM agents, it can break down the problem-solution goals and keep working until it meets the solution.

Suddenly, this doesn’t look much different to how managers work with a team of people. You give it the goal and the process you desire and the agent can work on it diligently.

This will transform how we do work in the future. We will focus on outcomes rather than tasks. We will move faster and further at the same time.

Naturally it wont be a holy grail overnight, but as it improves we’ll find more and more tasks being handed off to a diligent set of agents who understand your expectations.

I’m using it as we speak. I am writing this post using Flowtelic, on my iPhone. The outline, the review and the post to my blog will be handled by my agents, while I spend more time with the family.

And I get to do what I love. Sharing ideas in my own voice. Welcome to the new age of computing.