> that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user

That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :)

I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is that these people just ask Claude to do whatever it is they need done. Codebase needs managing? They just ask Claude to do it. No idea how to deploy an app? They just ask Claude to do it.

Any app built on top of this stack to 'make it easier' is competing with 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'.

This feels like sort of what openclaw is ^^ helping out in real estate/prop management right now and have been thinking same things

> killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user

That would be a capable 'personal assistant', or 'executive assistant', of 'chief of staff'.

Why? because the point is, just like in real life, to abstract away the complexity, irrespective of domain.

"Average user" implies someone not skilled or savvy in the domain you're thinking of. For a medical doctor, the 'average user' is not-a-doctor. For a technologist, the average user is not-a-technologist. For an insurance specialist, an average user is not-an-insurance-specialist. Etc. etc.

The personal assistant, exec assistant or chief of staff are themselves not necessarily experts in any domain, but they do rely on specialists to get stuff done.

So the UI for this killer app is basically voice input, keyboard input, camera input (mirros of human output) in the user's language with natural language interaction, and the output is voice and monitor/screen, and possibly a robotic arm/hand/body (mirrors of human input). Anything more complex than that would require tailoring it to a domain/domains.

If you doubt this analysis, think of all those folks for whom the IE/Chrome icon was/is "The Internet". Sure, you can go one level deeper with having them put in URLs, or operate email through the aol/gmail bookmark or desktop icon, maybe open documents/files from 'My Documents', but are they going to go any deeper than that, for the 'average user'?

>90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use.

I really thought Airtable would take off because it was even more of a "database that a normal person could actually use".

We're building something along these lines, but since our roots are a consulting business, we're still building around the idea that there needs to be an expert integrator doing the front-loading work of discovery/decomposition/scoring of tasks/implementing them as those agents. These tools are terrifying to anyone not quite technical, and it turns out, people are bad at decomposing their own work, let alone describing it in a box with a blinking cursor.

We're obviously going to be holding ourselves back in terms of scale and in terms of not being a "true" SaaS with this approach, but my thesis is that we get much higher quality results and higher compliance/activation and can charge more for the bespoke model backed by our own platform.

True story, heard yesterday from a consultant who was working with some VP type (not a large company, but still high management): VP uploads a spreadsheet to Claude and tells it to remove column F.

The power of Excel is not what it was. Nor is the power of ordinary thought.

> I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user.

I haven't tried it, or know a lot about it, but isn't this the whole claw thing?

> Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them.

This is probably fine as long as the code is acting on local resources. The moment you have vibe coded software interacting with shared state or database the risk increases exponentially and all it takes to have a bad day is a poorly worded prompt from one of those users.

Some oversight by humans or automated guardrails will probably reduce those instances.

I don't think it needs to specifically be a coding agent for the average user, creating apps for whatever they want to do, just something that can use code and has appropriate access for what they're already asking it to do (instead of the model bullshitting to them that it can do it, annoying them), and some way to make it repeatable when needed, like skills.

I'm currently doing something like this in the internal model-independent LLM chat app I work on at a F100, specifically targeted at our everyday users. <input type="file" webkitdirectory> lets the user give the model read and write access to a local folder (and OPFS lets us reuse the same fs tools we give the model for files manually attached to the chat, or for files tools want to create if they haven't granted folder access).

Every time we used to release a new version it was "still can't handle the 6MB Excel file I drop into it" when that was being extracted to CSV and added to context - now it can poke about in the big Excel file directly with SheetJS to pull the sheets/headers and inspect the shape of the data, and use locally sandboxed code execution to write code against either extracted data or the spreadsheet itself via SheetJS for pivot tables and such (all locally - none of which need go into the context).

The base models are good enough at tool calling (I really mean Claude, though, the GPTs just go on a tear calling tools with no context for the user) they're already decent at automating stuff for the user without a dedicated harness (our default system prompt is still "You are a helpful AI assistant", lol). Add tools for Graph API stuff, and now it can pull the nightly batch file from a support inbox, unzip the spreadsheet within, diff it against yesterday's and generate an import file for new users and draft an email to welcome them, something that used to be a daily support task (which I'd already automated most of - but now you don't need a dev for this kind of thing). Or go find the big 450,000+ row spreadsheet that's being automated somewhere on SharePoint, pull it down in 150,000 row chunks (Graph Excel REST API limit) and write code to go figure out whatever the user is asking.

Having implemented and used it, I like this setup so much it kinda ruined Claude.ai and ChatGPT.com for me, so I've hooked up similar access for them using a browser extension to add the folder picker input, with the extension talking to a local server to tell it which folder to give access to, and Claude/ChatGPT talking to the same server over MCP via a CloudFlare Tunnel to work with the selected folder.

I'm trying to do this with orcabot.com

A figma like dashboard for turning ClaudeCode, Gemini Cli, Codex into an OpenClaw but with security measures to break the lethal trifecta while running on a VM.

But it's not quite there in terms of usability. I agree that is the hardest part of the equation. It's something I'm constantly experimenting with and haven't found the solution to it yet. Open to feedback!

I am building a product in that space :)

It's targeted for creatives atm. For the few in private testing, it's been amazing what they're able to do with the little tooling I've given them. It is a legitimate change in their daily drive.

Non-engineer average user here: this is what cursor is for!

Microsoft is trying this with copilot, but they are calling everything copilot so YMMV.

> a UI that makes claude code accessible

Isn’t that literally Claude’s web UI?

I wouldn't want to build a business that was so dependent on a massive third-party that can either cut off my access or copy my design at any time of their choosing.

> whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user

You mean UX? Isn't Claude Cowork supposed to be 'Claude but for normies'? As for Claude Code / OpenAI Codex for non-programmers, believe Replit, Loveable, & others are trying & succeeding.

WhatsApp comes to mind in how its sole focus on replacing SMS (rather than Skype/AOL/MSN Messenger/YChat/GChat) meant it had no (user-facing) password/username, no elaborate signup, no login, no chat/friend requests, no sync etc. & became the biggest social network right under the nose of well resourced competitors with worldwide distribution, like Google & Facebook.

Yes, totally agree. Spent a few years in operations consulting and our clients' people were doing such amounts of mind-numbing repetitive work you wouldn't believe. Funny thing is, they are so used to it, they don't realize how wasteful it is. Yet, they are "afraid" of AI and new technologies in general, because it is something new and unfamiliar. However, when you show them something simple, e.g. how to write an Excel formula, they feel extremely motivated and empowered. So yes, if anyone can make AI feel less "scary" and approachable so that ordinary non-tech-savvy people can click around and see how they can automate some basic stuff, it will make them feel they have superpowers.

I really believe that the Spreadsheets UX is great for mainstream users and that is what drives me for my coding agent that uses the sheets UX: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo

Super early stage but I am really happy to read your comment.

> 90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use. I think we'll see something similar with coding agents.

If you look closely, people we already creating databases and doing computation. But on paper. Spreadsheet software move the medium to the digital and with that brings a lot of convenience. Same with email, instant chat, and shopping on the web. The killer app is not about bringing something new, but making an old problem easy to solve.

The issue with LLMs is that it makes errors. Uncontrollably. And even if you can spot the obvious ones, there’s always some you won’t be able to catch unless you’re a subject expert. I’ve never seen a random people willing to monitor a piece of tech.

Lovable?

Whoever does it everyone else will just prompt the same UX.

I was just thinking about that earlier this week.

Claude can write code pretty well, but there are just a few tasks that I need to do to orchestrate everything. If it could do those tasks well even some of the time it would be about 10x more useful.

I agree and that's what i'm working on (for businesses) - an all-one-one consolidated AI application that's setup and ready for non-technical users.

It's called Zenning AI - we're a small team in London, testing it with a few companies at the moment!

We’re (harriethq.com) trying to do this by reframing it as a “provisioning” challenge - how do you get your connectors installed on non-technical desktops, how do you give some easy pre-bake recipes that wake them from their dogmatic slumber

Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.

Reminds me of openai paying Kenyans $2/hr to flag violent and toxic stuff for them and a bunch of people ending up with ptsd

AI: Actual Indians^WMalagasy

> For 120 €/month they are reading about 1000 to 4000 invoices per day and check and tag them for AI training.

AGI will solve poverty, btw. Any second now. Just need 500 bil more bro.

OCR based invoice recognition has been a solved problem for well over a decade. Source: I've consulted for a company doing that. No exploitation. No LLMs. Just clever engineering.

In my neck of the woods, B2B invoices are now required to be delivered over the Peppol network in UBL format, which further improves reliability.

Doesn't necessarily eliminate the need for an accountant, because the chosen UBL standard has lots of room for interpretation and ambiguity, and it's impossible to uniformly decide how process an invoice based on the invoice alone (e.g. is this deductible? is this even a business expense at all? which ledger should this go in? etc).

Were they sore about it?

Or don’t tell me, if it’s well worth the 24min watch

Closing books and running payroll feel like solved problems with today’s saas and high stakes if you mess up.

This is one of those areas I would spend more time checking the outputs than it would take me to click the button myself.

For a preview of how this will go, take a look at this:

https://accounting.penrose.com/

LLMs are bad at deterministic output.

Full stop.

I was thinking about this more and more lately. There is really no escaping this , because even if you are sensible in your choices your vendor or service provider may not be. It will introduce a new level of randomness to our interactions that as a society we may not be quite ready for.

From the more obvious possible issues: no payroll, massive refund overpayment, legally binding agreement that puts the business at disadvantage.

FWIW, I like the idea, but I sure as fuck would not let LLM touch real money or pieces that can allow to move it around.

I suspect that the time spent on accounting or the money spent on accountants will influence decisions made by small-small business owners (1-5 staff range), in that some will take these risks. Admin is a huge pain for very small businesses.

> Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even though we admit we're in the wrong for anti-competitively burning credits?

I'm quite sure at the time that they said they wouldn't give compensation, not that they wouldn't refund them.

These are solved problems that can be extremely efficiently optimized with ML based solutions that require zero LLMs in the loop. This is business compliance on the line so good luck trusting claude on this. Deranged

Reminds me of this case: https://iqf.ie/the-man-who-stole-100-million-from-google-and...

This opens that surface area of attack again, but now on a much larger scale, if not careful

We joke, but I bet this will help to drastically reduce ScamInc's revenue.

>[on] the Datadog pricing page…showing the use-cases must have more adoption.

Interesting, sometimes they want to show you they’ll simply charge 2-3 percent of your monthly spend (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/?product=audit-trail#produ...)

Then I have good news, you can save even more money by cancelling your Claude plan and using GnuCash for free, without having to worry about the inevitability of having your financials hallucinated.

What is Claude using to keep the books, if not Quickbooks?

3k is like 1/50th of the penalty you're going to get if you make a mistake on your taxes, trust me I know, and Anthropic isn't going to be covering those penalties.

IRS is going to make a ton of money off you naive people. Get a better CPA who's not committing malpractice like your current one.

To be fair we are already having these kind of stories because of human mistakes or lack of competence. The question is like autonomous driving, is the rate going to be higher or lower or same.

I doubt an LLM is calculating withholding. I presume 99.9% of the actual logic will still execute in QuickBooks or Paychex etc. Lots of this sounds like cross system orchestration against well defined APIs. Yes, there's still danger, it could use the APIs wrong, but humans can use the GUI wrong too

Aren’t all of these problems solved just by Claude asking the user to confirm that $X should be paid.

It's okay, the employee won't be checking their paystubs either. Too complicated. They'll ask Claude to do it for them. "Looks good, bro". Then they go to the bank and apply for a mortgage and guess what, Claude is there too and they get vibe-qualified for a mortgage!

If you thought society was just an imaginary collective delusion before, now it can be collective hallucination too.

Certified AI Auditor jobs incoming.

The reality is, for a lot of people, they do not care about risk or implication or cost, as so long as they see things moving forward, especially if they do not understand what they are dealing with. The desire of 'build, build, build', to these people does not have a downside because they do not have the knowledge of what the implications of that actually means nor is there a culture associated with the duty of care that should come with the liability associated with other people's data.

Also, small business contracts likely do not have the same type of language around indemnity/SLAs, so it is easier for the harms of this type of system to go unpunished because those who are harmed are even less knowledgeable.

Don't forget Microsoft researchers finding that multi-agent, multi-tool workflows result in at least 20% of the original content getting corrupted in the chain: https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/11/microsoft-resea...

"someone..." with enough social media weight that is.

It's just like getting Google support.

A deacde ago Xero, Shoeboxed, Calendly, Payment Evolution, and a time tracker eliminated all my overhead.

I scaled to 30+ people with automated administration. My cost was under $150 a month for everything we needed to run a successful consultancy and product business. Our accountant was blown away by how simple his life was.

I'm constantly amazed at how it has gotten much worse in the resulting decade.

Wrappers around LLMs promise to bridge that gap. I'm sure it can do well for the vast majority of cases. But I do wonder what the outliers would cost.

E.g traditional automation + humans handling the drag = $4,000 per month with a couple of known blunder each year

vs traditional automation + AI = $400, with unknown number of blunders.

Of course it depends how much a blunder costs, to solve, or swallow. But I would bet that accounting errors even for a small business would cost the business on the long run. And that's assuming we don't yet have adversarial behavior which we can expect to come from both the inside and the outside.

> D.3. Limitations of Outputs; Notice to Users. It is Customer’s responsibility to evaluate whether Outputs are appropriate for Customer’s use case, including where human review is appropriate, before using or sharing Outputs. Customer acknowledges, and must notify its Users, that factual assertions in Outputs should not be relied upon without independently checking their accuracy, as they may be false, incomplete, misleading or not reflective of recent events or information. Customer further acknowledges that Outputs may contain content inconsistent with Anthropic’s views.

Must be nice being able to ruthlessly lie with "this is the future" marketing claims, while hiding behind this term of service.

Of course, should it be as cost efficient as claimed and if you don't use it but everybody else does, you might be pushed out of the market.

Yeah, until I prompt inject your agent with steno'd text on an invoice and it sends me all your money, or convince it to nuke your business over a week or so because it now think's you're an actual North Korean spy and it's a matter of national security.

These takes are so uninformed. We live in a country completely captured by the multi-million dollar advertising campaigns that are meant to make us behave in whatever way makes the 1500 richest people the most amount of money possible.

I’ve given it access to my small business books for the last few months (attended sessions only) and so far it’s helped me clean up countless errors made by humans, at the expense of a small handful of duplicated transactions that got shaken out pretty quickly.

It's a fascinating angle they've taken to give Claude your payroll. I guess we've reached this part of the AI race and they're running ahead of people realizing what it can do.

i think its obvious they see themselves as google and not meta. theyre targeting b2b and will slowly squeeze out subscriptions towards everything is a token credits. eventually there wont be model selection and just varying credit types and conversions.

Since the "grand" idea is that all they need is the "god model with infinite parameters requiring infinite energy", the business model will align there.

You say that as if a tonne of people haven't already hooked their agents up to all their services on YOLO mode.

> those people don't have the kind of security hygiene instincts that make CC a sane choice for coders.

Coders don't all have those kind of security hygiene instincts either

A lot of companies have Microsoft or Google as primary service providers. Which means all their documents are cloud first. Anthropic is just another provider there. The model of "everything is online" is the same.

MS Excel was a latecomer. VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet as we today know them and it was a resounding success. There weren't much concerns, there weren't really a reason to be concerned. It was not a probabilistic tool made by fascist billionaires for explicit fascist purposes exploiting the poor and destroying the environment. No. It just crunched numbers on a very accessible interface.

Ps.: see http://www.bricklin.com/firstspreadsheetquestion.htm on whether VisiCalc was the first or not.

Any business greater than Dunbar's Number should not be considered small.

Damn, that's an order of magnitude higher than the rest of the world.

Never in my life would I have thought a business with more than 100 employees could be considered small. In the EU the cutoff is 50.

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation. Whether you believe that makes a difference or not, they need to at a minimum pay lip service to that.

> his vision for the future was that “the model just knows”

Possibly, could also just mean that they've internalized the bitter lesson. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

I think everyone of us has Claude fatigue, except a few fanboys with financial incentive.

Just today there are 3 stories on front page about Claude--seems to me someones PR is working overtime

Small businesses are bigger than you think they are. A company with $100 million revenue per year could still be a small business.

You might be assuming small businesses have less than ten people. That’s a category of small business called a “micro-business” or microenterprise, depending on funding model.

I'm sure there are innumerable Adderall infused "startups" vibe coding this exact thing right now.

100% agree that _should_ be totally unacceptable, but how many of these small businesses will actually care? Especially those which are primarily or exclusively non-technical

Many yes, but most small businesses I see use google photos and google drive and gmail. That ship has sailed and colonized new lands. Though I would prefer same as you.

It's an inconsequential competition because both are giving away products that are somewhere between non-functional and barely-functional while torching a mountain of borrowed money. Both will go bankrupt if not bailed out by the government.

AMD and Intel in the late 90s/early 00s? Remember the race to 1Ghz (and leaving Motorola and IBM behind with the PPC)?

It's mostly marketing and hype. This "product" is a collection of vibecoded skills.

> Anthropic vs OAI fierce competition

What competition? To have competiton, you need to have a market. And to have a market, you need to have a well defined product or service. What these guys are offering is a toy, for which they desperately try and invent new potential use cases every week. Metaverse, NFT and Blockchain once again, "supercharged" by trillions of VC money, soon coming for your pension fund too. What could go wrong?

If I've learned anything in my career it's that you'll find your most dependable people in payroll.

why? you could leverage that and with some nice prompt injections get a raise :D

theres a pretty clear underlying system somebody needs to make "git for business"

I think it's essentially this plugin? https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins/tree/ma...

Wtf giving a non deterministic model access to use money! Seriously skynet ( terminator reference) isn’t going to be thru control of weapons it will be by buying itself and building a million trillion financial empire

Abusive in what way?

Havent removed it yet. What recourse do you have if it does? Can you hold anthropic accountable?

All of those tasks—planning payroll, settling books, forecasting, ranking, reminding—involve read access to financial operations, not write access.