An AI product should probably start with knowing what model (e.g., arch, version, quant, etc.) you're actually using. Opaque providers make that quite hard.

People are constantly complaining about GPT/Claude constantly changing under their apps without notice.

I'd argue the overwhelming majority of consumer-facing AI products aren't serious products to consumers.

I'm mostly referring to needless AI chatbots shoehorned into various places.

Show me more than 8 items in the recent history list, so I don't have to manually navigate to the same directory repeatedly (Claude)

I don't mind if it's in the cloud if I consent. I always prefer a local-first option. I'm usually attracted to products that offer that. Maybe there are extra features or functionalities if my data is stored on the cloud, but any product that offers a local-first approach is always my preference.

Whatever it is, it won't be sold as an AI product. Coding and writing tools are probably the easiest to predict. An AI hiding in IntelliSense popping up and warning you that your lacking the proper exception handling, that you're leaking memory and offers to add the missing code, is already doable. Just don't label it as AI, it's realtime security screening for your code.

Or writing an article in Word or Google Docs, having a built in fact-checker akin to the spell/grammar checker is clearly useful. Pink squiggly line, your facts are incorrect, click to fix. Hell built that thing into Facebook or X. Again, it's not completely out of the question to add that right now and have it add the correct sources.

LLMs are clearly useful, but they aren't really a product, they are an engine you can put into other things.

Claude Code does most of this stuff now already, in terms of verifications and citations, almost to a fault.

Would look like a human (robot) you give an access card and point at a desk and it replaces that employee.

I have been dwelling on the "No First-Person Output" problem.

I fully agree with the author's point that it's an incoherent interface for a tool. But more than that, it's a constant irritating reminder to me that these LLMs aren't actually thinking or synthesizing new ideas. The LLM is fundamentally not a person, and does not have a human's context, so representing itself with human pronouns and speech patterns is fundamentally contradictory and inaccurate. Author gets into that with the apologies, but once you start noticing it, it's everywhere.

If these programs were actually capable of thinking, and committed to veractiy, they would represent themselves in a new way, and it would be insightful and interesting. We the users wouldn't have comfortable and misleading language masking the 'alien intelligence' and it would be a weird adjustment, but we would be adjusting instead of pretending.

What you're identifying is a more fundamental bifurcation in why people are interested in AI. Some people have intent, a vision, something they know is possible but lack the technical skills or time to bring into reality. Others want the computer to handle the intent, the technical aspects, the decision-making, the whole process, but be able to go back and specify changes reactively when they don't like something about the result. It seems the latter cohort is much larger.

Really refreshing read. This feels glaring in so many of these, and the methods to get things to "behave" of just slapping additional markdown prompts at various levels is both silly and ineffective.