i understand that this is a recurring trope for computer folks that came up in the basic->dos->win era, but there's a definite analog to me between the era of cuisine where people stopped making their own mayo or bought tv dinners and the current era of computing where making your own exe is prohibitive and inconvenient

a sort of corollary to this, because i’m obsessed with comparing things to food and cooking, is that i think one of the most rewarding things in cooking is learning to quickly or at least comfortably prepare your own comfort foods. chicken fingers, karaage, mac n cheese, hamburgers, burritos, rice balls, french fries. there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s highly convenient to acquire prefab as it were, but few things compare to making your own fast food imo, or like, having that fluency with it to know what it is you love about it and to feel some agency over it. doesn’t take anything away from going out for it either, just makes it a more nuanced thing.

i keep harping on this point because it feels frustrating to me: i can and will routinely make something like mayonnaise/bearnaise/holladaise for a nice breakfast, i'll spend an afternoon making pasta, or a whole day (or more) preparing some makhni or daal or birria. these are valorized as perhaps extreme, but like, totally normal activities—it's normal to make a fancy weekend meal, and even if people aren't expected to do this, it's not beyond the pale to routinely spend a day cooking some elaborate food for the week or whatever.

everyone will tell you that it's a fool's errand to make your own todo app, or to make any app for yourself, it's just too expensive when you can get a 'better' one 'off the shelf' or when you can get equivalent functionality from separate tools. i think this is probably technically true for the food i make as well, but the deltas in time required are so different. Even a really talented developer can only get so far in an afternoon or day and the alternatives to diy'ing are so much more compelling: a todo list on paper, the system reminders app, whatever. I know that the adages are as much about cost effectiveness as they are balancing technical skill and executive function, but it's also weird that we tell people: this skill you have honed, save that for the office, amigx.

to continue this thread, i think people understand intuitively that there’s a serious benefit to not using an app for many things.

that said, we have contorted our existence around a series of applications and workflows in order to, broadly speaking, be able to Search everything. We understand Search is something obviously useful that our computers can do for us, so we prefer systems that enable Search even if we know them to be ineffective compared to the alternative (i.e. writing something down on paper is a lot faster than opening and using a todo list app generally).

when i think of what people love about chatgpt, i think it's that people are aware that the promise of natural language input is secretly the ability to bypass applications altogether but still retain all 'the good parts' (search, queryable data, etc). and you can see this in lots of the openai demos: chatbots as agents to do tasks in existing applications, often in concert across multiple applications.

but what does this say about the applications and their providers? beyond the marketing hype from openai, is the fervor for these demos a signal that application ui as we know it has failed? and to that end, what is the benefit of those embodied applications existing at all and not just being a series of apis.