My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers
A few thoughts and questions:
1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a company, they often rip and replace some of the software vendors with their personal favorites. Well, most software was designed for human users. Now, peoples' agents will use software for them. Agents have different needs for software than humans do. Some they'll need more of, much they'll no longer need at all. What will this result in? It feels like a much swifter and more significant version of Google taking excerpts/summaries from webpages and putting it at the top of search results and taking away visits and ad revenue from sites.
2. I've tried dozens of products in this space. For most, onboarding is confusing, then the user gets dropped into a blank space, usage limits are uncompetitive compared to the subsidized tokens offered by OpenAI/Anthropic, etc. It's a tough space to compete in, but also clearly going to be a massive market. I'm expecting big investment from Microsoft, Google etc in this segment.
3. How will startups in this space compete against labs who can train models to fit their products?
4. Eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model? Presumably. Harnesses get eaten by model-generated harnesses?
A few more thoughts collected here: https://chrisbarber.co/professional-agents/
Products I've tried: ai browsers like dia, comet, claude for chrome, atlas, and dex; claw products like openclaw, kimi claw, klaus, viktor, duet, atris; automation things like tasklet and lindy; code agents like devin, claude code, cursor, codex; desktop automation tools like vercept, nox, liminary, logical, and raycast; and email products like shortwave, cora and jace. And of course, Claude Cowork, Codex cli and app, and Claude Code cli and app.
Edit: Notes on trying the new Codex update
1. The permissions workflow is very slick
2. Background browser testing is nice and the shadow cursor is an interesting UI element. It did do some things in the foreground for me / take control of focus, a few times, though.
3. It would be nice if the apps had quick ways to demo their new features. My workflow was to ask an LLM to read the update page and ask it what new things I could test, and then to take those things and ask Codex to demo them to me, but it doesn't quite understand it's own new features well enough to invoke them (without quite a bit of steering)
4. I cannot get it to show me the in app browser
5. Generating image mockups of websites and then building them is nice
postalcoder
today at 5:51 PM
I agree with the sentiment but I think for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access. But, by granting agents full access, you immediately turn the computer into an extremely adversarial device insofar as txt files become credible threat vectors.
For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue. That hurts growth. I don't disagree with your general points, though.
> for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access
At this point it's a foregone conclusion this is what users will choose. It'll be like (lack of) privacy on the internet caused by the ad industrial complex, but much worse and much more invasive.
The threats are real, but it's just a product opportunity to these companies. OpenAI and friends will sell the poison (insecure computing) and the antidote (Mythos et all) and eat from both ends.
Anyone trying to stay safe will be on the gradient to a Stallmanesque monastic computing existence.
I don't want this, I just think it's going down that route.
There was a recent Stanford study which showed that AI enthusiasts and experts and the normies had very different sentiment when it came to AI.
I think most people are going to say they dont want it. I mean, why would anyone want a tool that can screw up their bank account? What benefit does it gain them?
Theres lots of cases of great highly useful LLM tools, but the moment they scale up you get slammed by the risks that stick out all along the long tail of outcomes.
ryandrake
today at 6:34 PM
I agree, in general we are going to find that ultimately most employee end users don't want it. Assuming it actually makes you more productive. I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase? You're just giving away that value to your employer.
On the other hand, entrepreneurs and managers are going to want it for their employees (and force it on them) for the above reason.
retinaros
today at 6:25 PM
I dont see companies doing that. it can be business ending. only AI bros buying mac mini in 2026 to setup slop generated Claws would do that but a company doing that will for sure expose customer data.
> For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue.
Strongly agreed.
I saw a few people running these things with looser permissions than I do. e.g. one non-technical friend using claude cli, no sandbox, so I set them up with a sandbox etc.
And the people who were using Cowork already were mostly blind approving all requests without reading what it was asking.
The more powerful, the more dangerous, and vice versa.
canarias_mate
today at 6:31 PM
[dead]
How many of these threat vectors are just theoretical? Don’t use skills from random sources (just like don’t execute files from unknown sources). Don’t paste from untrusted sites (don’t click links on untrusted sites). Maybe there are fake documentation sites that the agent will search and have a prompt injected - but I haven’t heard of a single case where that happened. For now, the benefits outweigh the risk so much that I am willing to take it - and I think I have an almost complete knowledge of all the attack vectors.
postalcoder
today at 6:29 PM
i think you lack creativity. you could create a site that targets a very narrow niche, say an upper income school district. build some credibility, get highly ranked on google due to niche. post lunch menus with hidden embedded text.
the attack surface is so wide idk where to start.
Why would my agent retrieve that lunch menu?
MrsPeaches
today at 6:58 PM
This is me!
I’m semi-normie (MechEng with a bit of Matlab now working as a ceo).
I spend most of my day in Claude code but outputs are word docs, presentations, excel sheets, research etc.
I recently got it to plan a social media campaign and produce a ppt with key messaging and content calendar for the next year, then draft posts in Figma for the first 5 weeks of the campaign and then used a social media aggregator api to download images and schedule in posts.
In two hours I had a decent social media campaign planned and scheduled, something that would have taken 3-4 weeks if I had done it myself by hand.
I’ve vibe coded an interface to run multiple agents at once that have full access via apis and MCPs.
With a daily cron job it goes through my emails and meeting notes, finds tasks, plans execution, executes and then send me a message with a summary of what it has done.
Most knowledge work output is delivered as code (e.g. xml in word docs) so it shouldn’t be that that surprising that it can do all this!
nonameiguess
today at 8:59 PM
How does this obviate the need for software? In order for what you asked to be possible, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Figma all still need to exist and you need licenses for them.
If you can figure out the next step and say "Claude, go find me buyers and sell shit for me without using any pre-existing software," have at it. It can't be social media, I guess, since social media is software and Claude is supposed to get rid of software.
At a certain point, why do we even need computers? Can't we just call Claude's hotline and ask "Claude, please find a way to dump $40 million in cash into my living room. Don't put it in my bank account because banks use software."
I am starting to use Codex heavily on non-coding tasks. But I am realizing it works because I work and think like a programmer - everything is a file, every file and directory should have very precise responsibilities, versioning is controlled, etc. I don't know how quick all of this will take to spread to the general population.
Most knowledge workers aren't willing to put in the effort so they're getting their work done efficiently.
> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
I agree this is going to be big. I threw a prototype of a domain-specific agent into the proverbial hornets' nest recently and it has altered the narrative about what might be possible.
The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX. You don't need to spend much time developing user interfaces and testing them against customers. Everyone understands the affordances around something that looks like iMessage or WhatsApp. UI/UX development is often the most expensive part of software engineering. Figuring out how to intercept, normalize and expose the domain data is where all of the magic happens. This part is usually trivial by comparison. If most of the business lives in SQL databases, your job is basically done for you. A tool to list the databases and another tool to execute queries against them. That's basically it.
I think there is an emerging B2B/SaaS market here. There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.
> There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.
Sort of agreed, though I wonder if ai-deployed software eats most use cases, and human consultants for integration/deployment are more for the more niche or hard to reach ones.
> The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX.
I strongly doubt that. That’s like saying conversation is the ultimate way to convey information. But almost every human process has been changed to forms and structured reports. But we have decided that simple tools does not sell as well and we are trying to make workflow as complex as possible. LLM are more the ultimate tools to make things inefficient.
louiereederson
today at 5:50 PM
Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise systems/tools. A runtime environment must be developed to do that but where that of the agent ends and that of the enterprise systems begins is a totally open question.
> Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise systems/tools.
What would make it not be a monolith? To me it seems like there'll be a big advantage (e.g. in distribution, user understanding) for most people to be using the same product / similar interface. And then the agent and the developer of that interface figure out all the integrations under that, invisible to the user.
louiereederson
today at 8:41 PM
I mean there is a runtime layer that needs to be developed, and some of it may live in CC/Codex and some might live in the various enterprise systems. Someworkflow automations and some amount of the semantic layer may for instance exist in your CRM/ERP/data platform. Yes the front-end would be owned by the chat interface, but part of the solution may exist in the various enterprise systems. This would be closer to a distributed system than a monolith. The demos and marketing language point to this as the direction of travel (i.e. the reference to Atlassian Rovo, etc.).
eldenring
today at 5:37 PM
I think the coding market will be much larger. Knowledge work is kind of like the leaf nodes of the economy where software is the branches. That's to say, making software easier and cheaper to write will cause more and more complexity and work to move into the Software domain from the "real world" which is much messier and complicated.
Yes, and the same thing will happen in non-coding knowledge work too. Making knowledge work cheaper will cause complexity to increase, more knowledge work.
eldenring
today at 5:56 PM
I don't think so, the whole point of writing software is it is a great sink for complexity. Encoding a process or mechanism in a program makes it work (as defined) for ever perfectly.
An example here is in engineering. Building a simulator for some process makes computing it much safer and consistent vs. having people redo the calculations themselves, even with AI assistance.
The history of both knowledge work and software engineering seems to be increasing in both volume and complexity, feels reasonable to me to bet on both of those trendlines increasing?
Yes, I have a theory - that higher efficiency becomes structural necessity. We just can't revert to earlier inefficient ways. Like mitochondria merging with the primitive cell - now they can't be apart.
Totally agree, AI interfaces will become the norm.
Even all the websites, desktop/mobile apps will become obsolete.
> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
I disagree. There is a major gap between awesome tech and market uptake.
At this point, the question is whether LLMs are going to be more useful than excel. AI enthusiasts are 100% sure that it’s already more useful than excel, but on the ground, non-technical views do not reflect that view.
All the interviews and real life interactions I have seen, indicate that a narrow band of non-technical experts gain durable benefits from AI.
GenAI is incredible for project starts. A 0 coding experience relative went from mockup to MVP webapp in 3 days, for something he just had an idea about.
GenAI is NOT great for what comes after a non-technical MVP. That webapp had enough issues that, if used at scale, would guarantee litigation.
Mileage varies entirely on whether the person building the tool has sufficient domain expertise to navigate the forest they find themselves in.
Experts constantly decide trade offs which novices don’t even realize matter. Something as innocuous as the placement of switches when you enter the room, can be made inconvenient.
> market uptake.
I think the market uptake of Claude Cowork is already massive.
You know what happens to a predator who makes its prey go extinct?
AI is doing the same
jorblumesea
today at 5:49 PM
really struggling to understand where this is coming from, agents haven't really improved much over using the existing models. anything an agent can do, is mostly the model itself. maybe the technology itself isn't mature yet.
My view is different. Agent products have access to tools and to write and run code. This makes them much more useful than raw models.
Yes, I think they unlock a whole new level of capability when they have a r/w file system (memory), code execution and the web.
> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.
They won't.
Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature.
> And eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model?
No. Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble. People don't want "personalized interfaces that change every second based on the whims of an unknowable black box". They have plenty of that already.
This is effectively how I treat my AI agents. A lot of the reason this doesn't work well for people today is due to context/memory/harness management that makes it too complex for someone to set up if they don't want a full time second job or just like to tinker.
If you productize that it will be an experience a lot of people like.
And on the UI piece, I think most people will just interact through text and voice interfaces. Wherever they already spend time like sms, what's app, etc.
noelsusman
today at 6:54 PM
Just yesterday my non-technical spouse had to solve a moderately complex scheduling problem at work. She gave the various criteria and constraints to Claude and had a full solution within a few minutes, saving hours of work. It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python to implement a scheduling optimization algorithm. She only vaguely knows what Python is, but that didn't matter. She got what she needed.
For now she was only able to do that because I set up a modified version of my agentic coding setup on her computer and told her to give it a shot for more complex tasks. It won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big opportunity for whoever can translate the experience we're having with agentic coding to a non-technical audience.
> Just yesterday my non-technical spouse
> It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python
And she knows those a hundred lines of python work correctly and give her correct result because in this instance Claude managed to produce a working result. What if it didn't? Would vague knowledge of Python have helped her?
> It won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big opportunity for whoever can translate the experience we're having with agentic coding to a non-technical audience.
Even though I agree with the sentiment, we've tried non-coding coding how many times now? Once every 5 years? Throwing LLMs into the mix won't help much when in the end you leave the end user hanging, debugging problems and hunting for solutions.
zozbot234
today at 8:39 PM
Scheduling solutions are easy to verify. For other problems, verification would be harder.
There's no such big opportunity, as the number of programmers' spouses is quite limited. Again, and as the GP rightly suggested, some of the HN-ers here need to go and touch some normie grass, so to speak.
More to the point, nobody wants to be more efficient for the sake of being efficient, we all want to go to work, do our metaphorical 9 to 5 without consuming too much (intellectual and not only) energy, and then back home. In that regard AI is seen as an existential threat to that "lifestyle" and it will be treated as such by regular workers.
> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature.
Most people are indifferent to computers. A computer to them is similar to the water pipeline or the electrical grid. It’s what makes some other stuff they want possible. And the interface they want to interact with should be as simple as possible and quite direct.
That is pretty much the 101 of UX. No deep interactions (a long list of steps), no DSL (even if visual), and no updates to the interfaces. That’s why people like their phone more than their desktops. Because the constraints have made the UX simpler, while current OS are trying to complicate things.
So Cowork/Codex would probably go where Siri is right now. Because they are not a simpler and consistent interface. They’ve only hidden all the controls behind one single point of entry. But the complexity still exists.
> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature.
What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this.
> Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble.
In the past week I've taught a few non-technical friends, who are well outside the tech bubble, don't live in the SF Bay Area, etc, how to use Cowork. I did this for fun and for curiosity. One takeaway is that people at startups working on these products would benefit from spending more time sitting with and onboarding users - they're very powerful and helpful once people get up and running, but people struggle to get up and running.
> People don't want "personalized interfaces that change every second based on the whims of an unknowable black box". They have plenty of that already.
I obviously agree with this, I think where our view differs is I expect that models will be able to get good at making custom interfaces, and then help the user personalize it to their tasks. I agree that users don't want something that changes all the time. But they do want something that fits them and fits their task. Artifacts on Claude and Canvas on ChatGPT are early versions of this.
> What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this.
LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"?
Or at "do my taxes"?
> how to use Cowork.
Yes, and I taught my mom how to use Apple Books, and have to re-teach her every time Apple breaks the interface.
Ask your non-tech friends what they do with and how they feel about Cowork in a few weeks.
> I think where our view differs is I expect that models will be able to get good at making custom interfaces, and then help the user personalize it to their tasks.
How many users you see personalizing anything to their task? Why would they want every app to be personalized? There's insane value in consistency across apps and interfaces. How will apps personalize their UIs to every user? By collecting even more copious amounts of user data?
jeffgreco
today at 7:33 PM
> LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"?
Yes?
===
edit: Just tested it with that exact prompt on Claude. It asked me who I was traveling with, what type of trip and budget (with multiple choice buttons) and gave me a detailed itinerary with links to buy the flights ( https://www.kayak.com/flights/ORD-LIS/2026-06-13/OPO-ORD/202... )
> Or at "do my taxes"?
codex did my taxes this year (well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough)
William_BB
today at 6:24 PM
> well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough
You can't seriously believe laymen will try to implement their own tax calculators.
of course not.
what I believe is that laymen will put all their tax docs into codex and tell it to 'do their taxes' and the tool will decide to implement the calculator, do the taxes and present only the final numbers. the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented.
William_BB
today at 6:53 PM
Yeah, good luck trusting the output!
check back in a couple of years!
William_BB
today at 7:13 PM
Ah right! Reminds me of AGI by 2025 :D
tsimionescu
today at 6:39 PM
If your prompt was more complex than "do my taxes", then this is irrelevant.
it was many hours of working with codex, guidance and comparing to known-good outputs from previous years, but a sufficiently smart model would be able to just do it without any steering; it'd still take hours, but my input wouldn't be necessary. a harness for getting this done probably exists today, gastown perhaps or something that the frontier labs are sitting on.
> but a sufficiently smart model would be able to just do it without any steering;
Yeah, yeah, we've heard "our models will be doing everything" for close to three years now.
> a harness for getting this done probably exists today, gastown perhaps
That got a chuckle and a facepalm out of me. I would at least consider you half-serious if you said "openclaw", at least those people pretend to be attempting to automate their lives through LLMs (with zero tangible results, and with zero results available to non-tech people).
ravenstine
today at 7:30 PM
Sounds fascinating! If you wrote an article on this I bet it'd have a good shot at making it to the home page of HN.