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▲ raxy 3 hours ago

Am I one of very few people that believes LLM apps don't solve or replace a large number of apps.

Take all these basic lifestyle CRUD apps. Maybe it's a skill issue on my part, but whenever I've tried to use LLM apps over any sort of medium-to-long-term time scale for tracking something (ie. endurance running training), within about a month it begins hallucinating, recalling the wrong things, linking the wrong bits of data to other bits of data (dates, distances, heart rate data, workout paces etc), and it does all of this even when pointed to a basic spreadsheet or simple text file to keep it onboard with what happened where. It just seems to look at these files, and then look at it's own context and confuse all the details based on its own context.

Every other month, some brand new shiny model is released and it's exactly the same deal every time. I think the underlying technology simply can't deal with these sorts of goals. A whole range of apps for lifestyle tracking don't seem under threat, in my opinion, if this is the best its capable of.

Many other things I can't imagine wanting an AI to do for me, especially anything involving payments, bookings. There was a discussion the other day on here about AI being used to order takeout. Why would somebody want to delegate one of their last personal decisions to a LLM?

▲mjburgess 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What you're saying is true now, but given the existence of grok-bot and similar dots (et al.) there is now an amassing amount of training data for "personal assistants" -- so in a couple of generations time, you'll find frontier models will be extremely capable in these areas.

Harnesses have been developed for this, and its also fairly trivial to do large scale verifiable-rewards post-training for "personal assistant" style things. eg., invent a booking website, invent a PA GUI-aware harness, and reward the model when a successful booking takes place. Do that 1bn times.

▲littlecranky67 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am in the pro food-order delivery department. I just want to tell my phone, "Hey Siri I want to order at Restaurant X, we are two people, no desert - make suggestion" and it shows me the order on the display with total price, arrival time and the selected food items. If I want, I can command changes - or simply say "Yes thats good, confirm the order" and be done. This is especially useful as I mostly order the same things across 2-3 restaurants, that is most of the time the suggestion is probably right.

▲raxy an hour ago | parent [-]

If it works for you, that's great.

Is a "recent orders" or "reorder" feature not enough to meet this demand if you frequently order the same thing from the same place? I don't quite understand the need for a middleman LLM here.

When you're asking for suggestion, is that a completely random suggestion to try new dishes or a pre-selected range to randomise from a choice of things you've already pre-screened?

▲littlecranky67 an hour ago | parent [-]

You got it backwards. The middleman is not the LLM. The UberEats app on my device is the middleman. The app introduces a UI, uses service calls to communicate with UberEats backend. But that is no longer needed.

UberEats should have a MCP service that is discoverable by agents - lets call her Siri. I tell Siri what I want, and Siri is checking via that MCP API what restaurants, what type of food, prices, ratings etc. Then Siri is free to generate whatever UI is needed to present the order. This could be generated HTML, but also be read back to me with voice, or even displayed on my Apple TV if I was just watching a series.

I am a professional frontend/UI dev working as a freelancer, and I myself think there will be no more market for creating UIs for the product - the UI is something that will be generated on the fly by the LLM agent for the end-user in what ever way and context the end-user specified. All you need is access to the data and services - MCP just entered the room.

▲aurareturn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't doubt your experience with a basic lifestyle CRUD app today.

However, about 1 year ago, AI coding agents were laughed. Now the vast majority of code is written by them.

Intelligence getting exponentially cheaper per token. At some point, there will be an inflection point where "it just works".

▲raxy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The lifestyle monitoring thing is something I've been testing with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude for the last year or two now, and it doesn't ever seem to get any better.

I may be completely out of the loop here, so forgive me if I'm missing details, but I always have and continue to believe that the coding prowess of LLM agents more-or-less comes down to the sheer abundance of data it has trained off of on the web, and that code itself is ideal for LLM by the way it is discrete and syntax-bound, same as the way LLM can write very well provided they've read more-or-less the same sequence of text before in abundance. For the speed advantages it provides in coding, and for the accuracy it has for well-established information, LLM is a very useful technology.

I just don't follow how they are going to do the same thing with such granular telemetry data, such as datasets from a day of nutrition or a workout. The values are continuous, minute, and are so parallel to noise in the way they are provided. Take running. If you dumped a .fit file from a Garmin or other watch with a series of heart rate values, paces, elevation levels, GPS co-ordinates, respiration rate, vertical oscillation etc, and you trained on a bunch of files like this, the values are so discrete that I can't understand how it would connect them and tokenize them across different people or even the same person's various workouts, with the high degree of factors (nutrition, climate, illness/injury state and severity) that can alter those values. It's no longer about just tokenizing text, but with advanced calculations.

I've seen second-hand through friends in running with apps like Runna that it produces plans that aren't suited for them at all. There's simply too many small variables that these things don't seem to be able to map. It gets caught up on summaries of runs. It can give general advice about things, but it doesn't have the level of detail or understanding necessary to give good guidance. Strava "AI" and Garmin "AI" just make a 2-3 line summary from the average data from the entire run or workout.

Perhaps this is something that is already being worked on, and I would be happy if it was, but I just can't personally see how LLM can work with such datasets in a detailed way, beyond the useless summaries Garmin and Strava give "You ran 10km in 35:00, with a pace of 3:30/km. This shows that your speed is improving". I would love an explanation/links on how LLM can get around this if anybody is willing to spend the time providing it. Happy to have my mind changed.

▲tonyedgecombe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>Now the vast majority of code is written by them.

Is that really true outside of the HN bubble? I'd like to see some studies that back it up.

▲ElFitz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A good alternative for your example is to make it create a stateful artefact (Claude) / whatever OpenAI calls ChatGPT.

And there, it has a database of sorts, running god knows where on god knows what, and you have a single-user web app that you may or may not ever open and see (since your favorite AI agent can just read and update it for you anyway).

Today it’s still something the user has to suggest / request.

Tomorrow? If they put a bit of effort these models will reach for building these one-off ephemeral or long-lived hyper-custom apps the same way they now reach for a python sandbox for basic arithmetics and statistics.

Looking for a flat? Scheduled task + CRM like artefact for it to monitor, maintain, and update.

Looking for holidays? Your own personal shareable moodboard with destinations and what not.

Have a use case or task for which chat or editing text docs is a frustrating way of correcting or giving feedback? Have it build a dedicated, custom artefact just for that.

When you encounter a use case where LLMs limits show, make them build tools.

▲raxy an hour ago | parent [-]

Your last line is actually very insightful. I was just looking at LLM from the chat app perspective.

I wonder how open these services will be to data storage if they do become a "universal app". If I used LLM to make an app for tracking training for endurance running, and I slapped an 800kb .fit file in there each day, the storage for all of these files would probably be fine, but without condensing each run down to a textual summary like Garmin/Strava currently does ("You ran 10km in 35:00, at a pace of 3:30/km. This improved your speed/{vague motivational LLM quote}"), wouldn't the context become enormous after a pretty short duration, causing huge costs? Genuinely curious.