The hard reality is that you are still responsible for all of these things. If anything goes wrong at all, you are liable. Might not be devastating if it's just your shopping list or your photos mangled, but with taxes or bills? Even if the agent is running completely locally in your home, you still won't trust it fully if your livelihood depended on it.

The killer app is only possible if software is fully reliable, which we all know is not the case. Software is just that: software, it still has bugs, undefined behaviour etc. Agents are the same, they just break in different way and fixing them might be even more difficult.

Bottom line: you will always be liable for things happening in your name and we've been sold a fairy tale a very long time ago.

Only when you live alone might you be comfortable constantly speaking with your devices. Only if your life if perfectly predefined can you let your fridge order the same food that just gone stale or has been eaten. And only when you are young and healthy and not in any way differing from the "standard" would you be capable of working like these "researchers" imagine you to.

I'm not that person. I'm constantly failing at doing "triple-finger-taps" whenever I'm in need of one. I have a smartwatch with pedestrian navigation and never bothered to remember which vibration pattern means which turn. I don't configure different vibration patterns for different callers on the phone. I have a folding phone, but I almost never do side-by-side windows and when I do, I need to find out how to do that first -- and then how to leave that mode without losing my mind. I almost never use AI features on my phone not because I don't want to, but because I never remember how to activate them. I don't re-configure my gadgets to "fit my mood". I hate recommendations like "you like X, here's Y, it's the same!" I hate that I can't rest my mouse cursor on websites anymore without selecting something actionable, moving, animating or autoplaying.

All of the examples on the linked page are workflows I would never do this way. I won't be talking to my shopping list to double the ingredients. I won't be drawing gestures with my mouse on a document to activate a voice command. I won't use voice commands in general because as it turns out, I'm not capable of bringing out a complete coherent sentence without pausing and/or changing my mind and/or realizing I'm wrong once.

I appreciate those demos for the progress they are showing. It's impressive and astonishing to see restaurants getting extracted from videos or pictures getting expanded or text edited better than I ever could. It's all modern-day magic in a way. One thing it all isn't is a product. We don't have those anymore -- all we get are gimmicks. We don't do common interfaces anymore either, we are separating people in Google/Apple/Xiaomi camps.

And most importantly we don't use that technology for good except for a bunch of people writing e-mails all day, doing shopping lists and booking one of top restaurants in Tokyo for the same evening on a whim. We are long overdue for a remake of "American Psycho", but this time it will be a documentary instead of a satire.

My passion has always been building something, but my building has always been hindered by a myriad of small paper cuts -- it's just what technology is and, if we are being honest, always has been. It's not being able to recall an exact syntax or a function name for something I know exists, it's frantically searching for whether something I need exists at all and if so, in anything I'm using alredy, it's a CI build not doing the simplest thing after working for months, it's a TypeScript error with a new library not wanting to compile until I change a dozen of things in tsconfig.json, it's my editor deciding not to update diagnostics today at any cost, it's deprecated syntax, it's documentation not describing what functions do and functions not working like the documentation describes them, it's hunting after weird bugs in fourth- and fifth-party code triggered exactly by four people in the world, one of them being me right now.

This list goes on and on and all of those things are great when I finally manage to solve the problems. However, in terms of building things, I find it extremely liberating to have a literal assistant capable of sorting this shit out in seconds or minutes instead of me banging my head against the wall the whole night. Code writing speed wasn't my problem, but I appreciate when I can think about the code as the whole and change it as a whole in an instant. My time spent on building something hasn't changed much in absolute terms, but in the same spent time I will have taken a dozen detours, experimented with alternatives and provided enough context to tell anyone who asks why something is built this way and not another.