That might be the worst advert I've ever seen. People looking up at childish Ai glow up god beings on huge screens in distinctly childish environments, with cliched decision-makers gasping for West Wing energy...repulsive.

These recent product announcements sound like entirely plausible satire, but unfortunately most of these pages are not actually intended to be a joke, it's not even amusing, but mostly tiring.

Grok-bot 2.0

Early on in my career as a software engineer, I was told by my managers that I had to sell my ideas as an elevator pitch to get anywhere. If I couldn't explain why a feature or fix would improve the business, it would go into the wastebin.

Colour me surprised then when I see, since circa 2024, an absolute deluge of AI products coming from these companies, each with their own naming scheme, marketing page, and accompanying hype post, and despite giving them MORE than the 30 second elevator pitch interval, I am left not understanding what it is they want to sell me. I have claude, I have codex, I get my work done just fine with each. I don't need another product for this. Any software these companies try pushing always ends up being something I could've made with their own AI models in a day and then never end up using. What's the end game here? What's the goal? What's the moat? I'm not sold on a single product outside of codex and claude code.

It's a labour saving device. Just like you would use a dish washer to do the tedious work of washing dishes, use a vcr to watch tedious television for you, and an electric monk to believe things for you, you can now use an agent to doomscroll for you.

They must have edited out the 1 in 5 times the agents crap the bed and mess up something important.

I have not tried it yet but this looks as risky as openclaw, which I also won't use. What if it does something I would not have approved and I only found out about it later? Knowing how often agents go off the rails when I'm coding, I would hesitate to let one do other tasks. I would prefer to white list tasks one at a time as I gained trust.

I spend literally all my work day, and a good bit of my personal time, talking to agents, getting them to do things on my behalf. Almost always pretty tightly sandboxed. I just don't understand how people using these things haven't had catastrophic failures yet.

I minted what I thought was a minimal-permission Github token for a single action, and the agent I gave it to discovered it had more permissions than I thought, and made use of those permissions. Who is trusting these things with write access to their lives?

So essentially, another attempt at giving codex to regular people.