The essay is direction-less. For someone looking at a cogent take, I think the recent post by Anthropic's CEO is one such: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technol.... I'm still processing it, but it's put across logically, albeit biased viewpoint.
I'd like to point Simon and others to 2 more things possible in the browser:
1) webcontainer allows nodejs frontend and backend apps to be run in the browser. this is readily demonstrated to (now sadly unmaintained) bolt.diy project.
2) jslinux and x86 linux examples allow running of complete linux env in wasm, and 2 way communication. A thin extension adds networking support to Linux.
so technically it's theoretically possible to run a pretty full fledged agentic system with the simple UX of visiting a URL.
My eventual goal with that is to expand it so an LLM can treat it like a filesystem and execution environment and do Claude Code style tricks with it, but it's not particularly easy to programmatically run shell commands via v86 - it seems to be designed more for presenting a Linux environment in an interactive UI in a browser.
It's likely I've not found the right way to run it yet though.
On the second tab (which is a text/browser interface to the VM) here: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=buildroot , you can start sh shell, and run arbitrary commands, and see output. making a programmatic i/o stream is left as an exercise (to claude perhaps :).
One of the very first experiments I did with AI was trying to build a browser based filesystem interface and general API provider. I think the first attempts were with ChatGPT 3.5 . I pretty quickly hit a wall, but Gpt4 got me quite a lot further.
I see the datestamp on this early test https://fingswotidun.com/tests/messageAPI/ is 2023-03-22 Thinking about the progress since then I'm amazed I got as far as I did. (To get the second window to run its test you need to enter aWorker.postMessage("go") in the console)
The design was using IndexedDB to make a very simple filesystem, and a transmittable API
importScripts("MessageTunnel.js"); // the only dependency of the worker
onmessage = function(e) {
console.log(`Worker: Message received from main script`,e.data);
if (e.data.apiDefinition) {
installRemoteAPI(e.data.apiDefinition,e.ports[0])
}
if (e.data=="go") {
go();
return;
}
}
async function go() {
const thing = await testAPI.echo("hello world")
console.log("got a thing back ",thing)
//fs is provided by installRemoteAPI
const rootInfo = await fs.stat("/");
console.log(`stat("/") returned `,rootInfo)
// fs.readDir returns an async iterator that awaits on an iterator on the host side
const dir = await fs.readDir("/")
for await (const f of dir) {
const stats = await fs.stat("/"+f.name);
console.log("file " +f,stats)
}
}
I distinctly remember adding a Serviceworker so you could fetch URLs from inside the filesystem, so I must have a more recent version sitting around somewhere.
It wouldn't take too much to have a $PATH analog and a command executor that launched a worker from a file on the system if it found a match existed on the $PATH. Then a LLM would be able to make its own scripts from there.
It might be time to revisit this. Polishing everything up would probably be a piece of cake for Claude.
Isn't webcontainers.io a proprietary, non-open source solution with paid plans? Mentioning it at the same level of open source, auditable platforms seems really strange to me.
Technically, it runs on Chrome, so making an open source version is viable. then bolt.diy project was giving opencontainers a shot, which is a partial implementation of the same. But broadly, if this method works, then FOSS equivalent is not a worry, should come soon enough.
No, for every established company that may be hesitant, there's up and comer with nothing to lose who will jump on the opportunity, and the industry will continue moving forward.
"I am still willing to admit I am wrong. That I'm not holding the GPS properly. That navigating with real-time satellite data is its own skill and I have not spent enough time with it. I have changed how I get around before, and I'm sure I will do so again.
Map-reading evangelists, are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at driving a car? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were."
Great exercize, but for most use cases - people will continue reaching for jsPDF.
I think if you have a markdown->PDF function included, where I can send in markdown and get PDF, that would solve quite many needs, and would be useful.
What you like is for yourself. What you seem to dislike are things that improve others (team/stakeholders). Seniors are such because they take on more of the latter.
This will now become even more normalized given that on technical skills seniors are no longer needed for juniors to skill up. AI and the evolving ecosystem will help and assist them way more. In the new world, the more technical and non-technical work you do towards customers/teams/organization, the more senior you become. I see many not liking it, but I'm also seeing first hand that is how it is.
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