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> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user

That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :)

I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is that these people just ask Claude to do whatever it is they need done. Codebase needs managing? They just ask Claude to do it. No idea how to deploy an app? They just ask Claude to do it.

Any app built on top of this stack to 'make it easier' is competing with 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'.

True story, heard yesterday from a consultant who was working with some VP type (not a large company, but still high management): VP uploads a spreadsheet to Claude and tells it to remove column F.

The power of Excel is not what it was. Nor is the power of ordinary thought.

We're building something along these lines, but since our roots are a consulting business, we're still building around the idea that there needs to be an expert integrator doing the front-loading work of discovery/decomposition/scoring of tasks/implementing them as those agents. These tools are terrifying to anyone not quite technical, and it turns out, people are bad at decomposing their own work, let alone describing it in a box with a blinking cursor.

We're obviously going to be holding ourselves back in terms of scale and in terms of not being a "true" SaaS with this approach, but my thesis is that we get much higher quality results and higher compliance/activation and can charge more for the bespoke model backed by our own platform.

> I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user.

I haven't tried it, or know a lot about it, but isn't this the whole claw thing?

> Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them.

This is probably fine as long as the code is acting on local resources. The moment you have vibe coded software interacting with shared state or database the risk increases exponentially and all it takes to have a bad day is a poorly worded prompt from one of those users.

Some oversight by humans or automated guardrails will probably reduce those instances.

I'm trying to do this with orcabot.com

A figma like dashboard for turning ClaudeCode, Gemini Cli, Codex into an OpenClaw but with security measures to break the lethal trifecta while running on a VM.

But it's not quite there in terms of usability. I agree that is the hardest part of the equation. It's something I'm constantly experimenting with and haven't found the solution to it yet. Open to feedback!

I am building a product in that space :)

It's targeted for creatives atm. For the few in private testing, it's been amazing what they're able to do with the little tooling I've given them. It is a legitimate change in their daily drive.

I wouldn't want to build a business that was so dependent on a massive third-party that can either cut off my access or copy my design at any time of their choosing.

Lovable?

Yes, totally agree. Spent a few years in operations consulting and our clients' people were doing such amounts of mind-numbing repetitive work you wouldn't believe. Funny thing is, they are so used to it, they don't realize how wasteful it is. Yet, they are "afraid" of AI and new technologies in general, because it is something new and unfamiliar. However, when you show them something simple, e.g. how to write an Excel formula, they feel extremely motivated and empowered. So yes, if anyone can make AI feel less "scary" and approachable so that ordinary non-tech-savvy people can click around and see how they can automate some basic stuff, it will make them feel they have superpowers.

> whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user

You mean UX? Isn't Claude Cowork supposed to be 'Claude but for normies'? As for Claude Code / OpenAI Codex for non-programmers, believe Replit, Loveable, & others are trying & succeeding.

WhatsApp comes to mind in how its sole focus on replacing SMS (rather than Skype/AOL/MSN Messenger/YChat/GChat) meant it had no (user-facing) password/username, no elaborate signup, no login, no chat/friend requests, no sync etc. & became the biggest social network right under the nose of well resourced competitors with worldwide distribution, like Google & Facebook.

Whoever does it everyone else will just prompt the same UX.

[dead]

I was just thinking about that earlier this week.

Claude can write code pretty well, but there are just a few tasks that I need to do to orchestrate everything. If it could do those tasks well even some of the time it would be about 10x more useful.

I agree and that's what i'm working on (for businesses) - an all-one-one consolidated AI application that's setup and ready for non-technical users.

It's called Zenning AI - we're a small team in London, testing it with a few companies at the moment!

We’re (harriethq.com) trying to do this by reframing it as a “provisioning” challenge - how do you get your connectors installed on non-technical desktops, how do you give some easy pre-bake recipes that wake them from their dogmatic slumber

Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.

Reminds me of openai paying Kenyans $2/hr to flag violent and toxic stuff for them and a bunch of people ending up with ptsd

OCR based invoice recognition has been a solved problem for well over a decade. Source: I've consulted for a company doing that. No exploitation. No LLMs. Just clever engineering.

In my neck of the woods, B2B invoices are now required to be delivered over the Peppol network in UBL format, which further improves reliability.

Doesn't necessarily eliminate the need for an accountant, because the chosen UBL standard has lots of room for interpretation and ambiguity, and it's impossible to uniformly decide how process an invoice based on the invoice alone (e.g. is this deductible? is this even a business expense at all? which ledger should this go in? etc).

AI: Actual Indians^WMalagasy

Were they sore about it?

Or don’t tell me, if it’s well worth the 24min watch

> For 120 €/month they are reading about 1000 to 4000 invoices per day and check and tag them for AI training.

AGI will solve poverty, btw. Any second now. Just need 500 bil more bro.

>[on] the Datadog pricing page…showing the use-cases must have more adoption.

Interesting, sometimes they want to show you they’ll simply charge 2-3 percent of your monthly spend (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/?product=audit-trail#produ...)

The reality is, for a lot of people, they do not care about risk or implication or cost, as so long as they see things moving forward, especially if they do not understand what they are dealing with. The desire of 'build, build, build', to these people does not have a downside because they do not have the knowledge of what the implications of that actually means nor is there a culture associated with the duty of care that should come with the liability associated with other people's data.

Also, small business contracts likely do not have the same type of language around indemnity/SLAs, so it is easier for the harms of this type of system to go unpunished because those who are harmed are even less knowledgeable.

Don't forget Microsoft researchers finding that multi-agent, multi-tool workflows result in at least 20% of the original content getting corrupted in the chain: https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/11/microsoft-resea...

"someone..." with enough social media weight that is.

It's just like getting Google support.

> D.3. Limitations of Outputs; Notice to Users. It is Customer’s responsibility to evaluate whether Outputs are appropriate for Customer’s use case, including where human review is appropriate, before using or sharing Outputs. Customer acknowledges, and must notify its Users, that factual assertions in Outputs should not be relied upon without independently checking their accuracy, as they may be false, incomplete, misleading or not reflective of recent events or information. Customer further acknowledges that Outputs may contain content inconsistent with Anthropic’s views.

Must be nice being able to ruthlessly lie with "this is the future" marketing claims, while hiding behind this term of service.

Of course, should it be as cost efficient as claimed and if you don't use it but everybody else does, you might be pushed out of the market.

A deacde ago Xero, Shoeboxed, Calendly, Payment Evolution, and a time tracker eliminated all my overhead.

I scaled to 30+ people with automated administration. My cost was under $150 a month for everything we needed to run a successful consultancy and product business. Our accountant was blown away by how simple his life was.

I'm constantly amazed at how it has gotten much worse in the resulting decade.

Wrappers around LLMs promise to bridge that gap. I'm sure it can do well for the vast majority of cases. But I do wonder what the outliers would cost.

E.g traditional automation + humans handling the drag = $4,000 per month with a couple of known blunder each year

vs traditional automation + AI = $400, with unknown number of blunders.

Of course it depends how much a blunder costs, to solve, or swallow. But I would bet that accounting errors even for a small business would cost the business on the long run. And that's assuming we don't yet have adversarial behavior which we can expect to come from both the inside and the outside.

I’ve given it access to my small business books for the last few months (attended sessions only) and so far it’s helped me clean up countless errors made by humans, at the expense of a small handful of duplicated transactions that got shaken out pretty quickly.

It's a fascinating angle they've taken to give Claude your payroll. I guess we've reached this part of the AI race and they're running ahead of people realizing what it can do.

> those people don't have the kind of security hygiene instincts that make CC a sane choice for coders.

Coders don't all have those kind of security hygiene instincts either

You say that as if a tonne of people haven't already hooked their agents up to all their services on YOLO mode.

I'm sure there are innumerable Adderall infused "startups" vibe coding this exact thing right now.

I think everyone of us has Claude fatigue, except a few fanboys with financial incentive.

Just today there are 3 stories on front page about Claude--seems to me someones PR is working overtime

Small businesses are bigger than you think they are. A company with $100 million revenue per year could still be a small business.

You might be assuming small businesses have less than ten people. That’s a category of small business called a “micro-business” or microenterprise, depending on funding model.

Any business greater than Dunbar's Number should not be considered small.

Damn, that's an order of magnitude higher than the rest of the world.

Never in my life would I have thought a business with more than 100 employees could be considered small. In the EU the cutoff is 50.

It's an inconsequential competition because both are giving away products that are somewhere between non-functional and barely-functional while torching a mountain of borrowed money. Both will go bankrupt if not bailed out by the government.

AMD and Intel in the late 90s/early 00s? Remember the race to 1Ghz (and leaving Motorola and IBM behind with the PPC)?

It's mostly marketing and hype. This "product" is a collection of vibecoded skills.

> Anthropic vs OAI fierce competition

What competition? To have competiton, you need to have a market. And to have a market, you need to have a well defined product or service. What these guys are offering is a toy, for which they desperately try and invent new potential use cases every week. Metaverse, NFT and Blockchain once again, "supercharged" by trillions of VC money, soon coming for your pension fund too. What could go wrong?

why? you could leverage that and with some nice prompt injections get a raise :D

If I've learned anything in my career it's that you'll find your most dependable people in payroll.

theres a pretty clear underlying system somebody needs to make "git for business"

I think it's essentially this plugin? https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins/tree/ma...

Abusive in what way?

Havent removed it yet. What recourse do you have if it does? Can you hold anthropic accountable?

All of those tasks—planning payroll, settling books, forecasting, ranking, reminding—involve read access to financial operations, not write access.