I do feel people will end up using this for things where a deterministic rule could be used - more effective, faster and cheaper. See this starting to happen at work...'We need AI to solve X....no you don't"
I do feel people will end up using this for things where a deterministic rule could be used - more effective, faster and cheaper. See this starting to happen at work...'We need AI to solve X....no you don't"
Maybe. The problem of "execute task on a cron" is something I've noticed the industry seems to refuse to solve in general, as if intentionally denying this capability for regular people. Even without AI, it's the most basic block of automation, and is always mysteriously absent from programs and frameworks (at least at the basic level). AI only makes it more useful on "then" side, but reliable cron on "if" side is already useful.
Most of the industry today is educated to avoid manual hacky solutions on single servers. You need to have fancy UI, frameworks with easy feedback and layers on top of layers who maintain other layers. Cron is an ancient tool with arcane syntax which offer barely anything out of the box, you have to know it and work it to get something out of it.
And there is also the mindset to avoid boring loops, and prefer event driven solutions for optimal resource-usage. So people also have a kind of blind spot for this functionality.
I don’t recall if IFTTT had/has a basic cron or not, but it sure has/had put a lot of basic automations in the hands of the general public. Same for Apple Shortcuts, to some extent, or Zapier.
This is a larger topic that's worthy of a comparably large rant, which I really don't want to do right now, but to keep it short, in my subjective view:
- IFTTT was great when it started; at some point, it became... weird, in a "I don't even know what's going on on my screen, is this a poster or an app" kind of way.
- Zapier is an unpenetrable mess, evidently targets marketers and other business users; discovery is hard, and even though it seems like it has everything, it - like all tools in this space - is always missing the one feature you actually need.
- Yahoo Pipes, I heard they were great, but I only learned about them after they shut down.
- Apple Shortcuts - not sure what you can do with those, but over the years of reading about them in HN comments, I think they may be the exception here, in being both targeting regular users and actually useful.
- Samsung Modes and Routines - only recently becoming remotely useful, so that's nice, even if vendor-restricted.
- Tasker - an Android tool that actually manages to offer useful automation, despite the entire platform/OS and app ecosystem trying its best to prevent it. Which is great, if your main computer is a phone. It sucks in a world of cloud/SaaS, because it creates a silly situation where e.g. I could nicely automate some things involving e-mail and calendars from Tasker + FairEmail, but... well my mailboxes and calendars lives in the cloud so some of that would conflict with use of vendor (Fastmail) webapp or any other tool.
Or, in short: we need Tasker but for web (and without some of the legacy baggage around UI and variable handling).
The sorry state of automation is not entirely, or even mostly, the fault of the automation platforms. I may have issues with some UI and business choices some of these platforms made, but really, the main issue is that integrations are business deals and the integrated sides quickly learned to provide only a limited set of features - never enough to allow users to actually automate use of some product. There's always some features missing. You can read data but not write it. You can read files and create new files but not edit or delete them. You can add new tasks but can't get a list of existing ones. Etc.
It's another reason LLMs are such a great thing to happen - they make it easy (for now) to force interoperability between parties that desperately want to prevent it. After all, worst case, I can have the LLM operate the vendor site through a browser, pretending to be a human. Not very reliable, but much better than nothing at all.
Similarly short on reply here, but quickly: IFTTT: hah, I agree. It was awesome when it was more about IoT than Spotify to Google Sheets.
And re: Zapier: yes, that’s the key to Zapier, from my experience: usage in marketing and the “power user” base.
Re: shortcuts: (I live in the Apple ecosystem) Shortcuts + AppleScript is gold on macOS. Shortcuts + iOS is about to be game changing - it already changed the game, it’s just nobody has been playing it, because it’s not “fun”.
After Siri+Gemini+Shortcuts, everyone will be playing it, I suspect, even on Android, it will get built somehow.
> Or, in short: we need Tasker but for web (and without some of the legacy baggage around UI and variable handling).
n8n, node-RED and others already exist. There are many tools for automations, and I guess most of them can also do cron-like jobs.
Node RED is still unwieldy for the masses, as easy as it is for a consumer to install, it’s not necessarily as easy to use.
Consumer grade automations built on node-RED? I suppose it depends on the market, but most people aren’t going to want to fiddle with it, I suspect.
A plugin for Chrome might be able to take off though, or some killer mobile app, but it needs to run on a cheap phone and control things without having to keep track of loops and logic and variables and all the fun stuff.
None of the tools here are for the masses. Automation in itself is already hard to grasp for the average user, and while some of those are simpler to start than others, they all are wall to climb.
Agree. How would you solve this in general, what would be the ingredients? People use things like zapier, n8n, node-red to achieve this today but in many cases are overkill.
Honestly, you just need cron (and Ruby/Python/bash/whatever) on an EC2. It's not very fashionable, but it works, will continue to work forever, and costs hardly anything.
To use an example in the article, what does
> Analyzing CI failures overnight and surfacing summaries
Look like on ec2 with python? Because with Claude, it’s that prompt, and with your solution it’s infra + security groups + multiple APIs + whatever code you actually write
I would suggest the prompt is an example of garbage in that's going to produce garbage out. Sitting down to confront the problem you're solving will show this, while Claude is going to happily spit out what looks like a plausibly functional system.
So for example the only "analysis" of CI failures are which systems failed and who/what committed the changes to those things. The only way AI would help me here is if the system was so jank that the sole primitive i can use is textual analysis of log files. Which granted is probably real for a lot of software firms, but I really hope I have better build and test infrastructure than that.
> I would suggest the prompt is an example of garbage in that's going to produce garbage out. Sitting down to confront the problem you're solving will show this, while Claude is going to happily spit out what looks like a plausibly functional system.
I think this shows the value.
> Which granted is probably real for a lot of software firms
Here's the rub though; for many many people it's a huge improvement over what they have right now.
I'd start with solving the UX issues, specifically expectations and UI around scheduling jobs.
Expectations - the functionality of "do X on a timer" needs to be offered to users as a proper end-user feature[0], not treated as a sysadmin feature (Windows, Linux) or not provided at all (Android). People start seeing it on their own devices, they'll start using it, then expecting it, and the web will adjust too[1].
UI - somehow this escapes every existing solution, from `cron` through Windows timers to any web "on timer" event trigger in any platform ever. There already exists a very powerful UI paradigm for managing recurring tasks, that most normies know how to use, because they're already using it daily at work and privately: a calendar. Yes, that thing where we can set and manage recurring events, and see them at a glance, in context of everything else that's going on in our lives.
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<rant>
I know those are hard problems, but are hard mostly because everybody wants to be the fucking one platform owning users and the universe. This self-inflicted sickness in computing is precisely why people will jump at AI solutions for this. Why I too will jump on this: because it's easier than dealing with all the systems and platforms that don't want to cooperate.
After all, at this point, the easiest solution to the problems I listed above, and several others in this space, would be to get an AI agent that I can:
1) Run on a cron every 30 minutes or so (events are too complicated);
2) Give it read (at minimum) access to my calendar and todo lists (the ones I use, but I'm willing to compromise here);
3) Give it access to other useful tools
Which I guess brings us to the actual root problem here. "Run tasks on a cron" and "run tasks on trigger" are basically just another way of saying unattended/non-interactive usage. That is what is constantly being denied end users.
This is also the key to enabling most value of AI tools, too, and people understand it very well (see the popularity of that Open Claw thing as the most recent example), but the industry also lives in denial, believing that "lethal trifecta" is a thing that can be solved.
</rant>
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[0] - This extends to event triggers ("if X happens, then") automation, and end-user automation in all of every-day life. I mean, it's beyond ridiculous that the only things normal people are allowed to run automatically are dishwasher, and a laundry machine (and in the previous era, VCRs).
[1] - As a side effect, it would quickly debullshitify "smart home" / "internet of things" spaces a lot. The whole consumer side of the market revolves around selling people basic automation capabilities - except vendor-locked, and without the most useful parts.
> See this starting to happen at work...'We need AI to solve X....no you don't"
Same. Sometimes it is just people overeager to play with new toys, but in our case there is a push from the top & outside too: we are in the process of being subsumed into a larger company (completion due on April the 1st, unless the whole thing is an elaborate joke!) and there is apparently a push from the investors there to use "AI" more in order to not "get left behind the competition".
Its self perpetuating, I was talking to CEO of a Series A level B2B SaaS company here in UK recently. Most of the propspects his sales team are hitting are re-allocating their wallets to only looking for products that use AI on back of senior management pushing them to do so.
This company already does some pretty cool stuff with statistics for forecasting but now they are pivoting their roadmap to bake in GenAI into their offering over some other features that would be more valuable to their clients.
I feel this would be more useful for tasks like "Check website X to see if there are any great deals today". Specifically, tasks that are loosely defined and require some form of intuition.
And even in that case if you give the agent a tool to access website X efficiently it'll work a lot better. Like, say, a CLI tool that can take a website product URL for that specific site and return the opengraph data of the item price on it + any sale price.
I'd say that's almost fine if they can start expressing intent correctly and thinking what good looks like. They (or some automated thing if you're building "think for them" type of products instead of "give them tools and teach them to think how to use them") can then freeze determism more and more were useful
I wrote this to help people (not just Devs) reason about agent skills
https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/building-agent...
And this one to address the drift of non determism (but depending on the audience it might not resonate as much)
https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/error-compound...
The problem I'd think, for the average user, would be writing the 'then' part of any deterministic rule — that would require coding, or at least some kind of automation script (visual or otherwise) that's basically coding in a trench coat, which for most people is still a barrier to entry and annoying. I think that's why they'd use AI tbh — they can just describe what they want in natural language with AI.
AI will become this colleague who sucks at everything, but never says no, so he becomes the favorite go-to person.
People are loading huge interpreted environments for stuff that can be done from the command line. Run computations on complex objects where it could be a single machine instruction etc. The trend has been around for a long time.
Standard pendulum swing. Most people want to disengage their thinking circuits most of the time, so problems can't be evaluated one by one. There is no such thing as "this is a good solution for some problems". It can only be "this is a good solution for all problems". When the pendulum swings this far, this hard, it will swing all the way back eventually.
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