Posts tagged with "AI"

OpenAI Bets Big on Building an Everything App→

OpenAI is making a big bet. One as old as time – at least time as measured by the course of app history. Having abandoned Sora and SmutGPT, the company has put all of its chips on an everything app, raising $122 billion to build it and fund its other operations.

If you listen to AppStories, you know this is a topic that goes back to our earliest episodes. Everything apps, known more commonly these days as superapps, have beguiled companies big and small forever. The temptation of “what if we stuffed so much in our app that nobody would leave” is hard to resist, but often fails. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg.

OpenAI is up front about its ambitions:

As models become more capable, the limiting factor shifts from intelligence to usability. Users do not want disconnected tools. They want a single system that can understand intent, take action, and operate across applications, data, and workflows. Our superapp will bring together ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and our broader agentic capabilities into one agent-first experience.

Maybe. Look, I think AI is one of the most significant innovations of my lifetime, but for my money, I also think this a classic example of the mismatch between what users sometimes say they want and what companies want to hear.

However, I’m willing to entertain the idea that AI might be different. After all, it’s closer to a natural language OS than your typical productivity app in just enough ways that it may just work as a sort of super-layer that sits on top of “real” OSes like macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Part of what OpenAI is imagining is straight out of the iOS playbook:

Our consumer scale becomes the front door for enterprise usage, as familiarity in daily life drives adoption at work.

I remember when my old law firm finally caved and swapped Blackberries for the iPhone its employees were demanding. So, it’s not unprecedented that consumer demand can drive enterprise adoption, but historically, it’s rare.

And, while I agree with OpenAI that “Moments like this do not come often,” its comparison of its product to electricity and highways strikes me as a bit much. Will the app that OpenAI is imagining be something that will fundamentally reshape your life or will it be just another thing that competes for your attention, like TikTok? That’s the $122 billion bet OpenAI is making, and based on my experience with everything apps, I’ll take the other side of that bet.

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First Look: Hands-On with Claude Code’s New Telegram and Discord Integrations

Late yesterday, Anthropic announced messaging support for Claude Code, allowing users to connect to a Claude Code session running on a Mac from a mobile device using Telegram and Discord bots. I spent a few hours playing with it last night, and despite being released as a research preview, the messaging integration is already very capable, but a little fiddly to set up.

Let’s take a look at what it can do.

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A Developer’s Month with OpenAI’s Codex→

An eye-opening story from Steve Troughton-Smith, who tested Codex for a month and ended up rewriting a bunch of his apps and shipping versions for Windows and Android:

I spent one month battle-testing Codex 5.3, the latest model from OpenAI, since I was already paying for the $20 ChatGPT Plus plan and already had access to it at no additional cost, with task after task. It didn’t just blow away my expectations, it showed me the world has changed: we’ve just undergone a permanent, irreversible abstraction level shift. I think it will be nigh-impossible to convince somebody who grows up with this stuff that they should ever drop down and write code the old way, like we do, akin to trying to convince the average Swift developer to use assembly language.

From his conclusion:

This story is unfinished; this feels like a first foray into what software development will look like for the rest of my life. Transitioning from the instrument player to the conductor of the orchestra. I can acknowledge that this is both incredibly exciting, and deeply terrifying.

I have perused the source code of some of these projects, especially during the first few days. But very quickly I learned there’s simply nothing gained from that. Code is trivial, implementations are ephemeral, and something like Codex can chew through and rewrite a thousand lines of code in a second. Eventually, I just trusted it. Granted, I almost always had a handwritten source of truth, as detailed a spec as any, so it had patterns and structure to follow.

The models are good now. A year ago, none of them could do any of this, certainly not to this quality level. But they don’t do it alone. A ton of work went into everything here, just a different kind of work to before. Above all, what mattered most in all of the above examples was taste. My taste, the human touch. I fear for the companies, oblivious to this, that trade their priceless human resources for OpenClaw nodes in a box.

The entire story is well-documented, rich in screenshots, and full of practical details for developers who may want to attempt a similar experiment.

It’s undeniable that programming is undergoing a massive shift that has possibly already changed the profession forever. Knowing what code is and does is still essential; writing it by hand does not seem to be anymore. And it sounds like the developers who are embracing this shift are happier than ever.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot: why are some of us okay with the concept of AI displacing humans in writing code, but not so much when it comes to, say, writing prose or music? I certainly wouldn’t want AI to replace me writing this, and I absolutely cannot stand the whole concept of “AI music” (here’s a great Rick Beato video on the matter). I don’t think I have a good answer to this, but the closest I can get is: code was always a means to an end – an abstraction layer to get to the actual user experience of a digital artifact. It just so happened that humans created it and had to learn it first. With text and storytelling, the raw material is the art form itself: what you read is the experience itself. But even then, what happens when the human-sourced art form gets augmented by AI in ways that increasingly blur the lines between what is real and artificial? What happens when a videogame gets enhanced by DLSS 5 or an article is a hybrid mesh of human- and AI-generated text? I don’t have answers to these questions.

I find what’s happening to software development so scary and fascinating at the same time: developers are reinventing themselves as “orchestrators” of tools and following new agentic engineering patterns. The results, like with Steve’s story, are out there and speak for themselves. I wish more people in our community were willing to have nuanced and pragmatic conversations about it rather than blindly taking sides.

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Comet Is the First Agentic Browser for iOS Worth Trying

Comet for iOS.

Comet for iOS.

[Update: Perplexity has released an iPad version of Comet alongside the iPhone version, which you can install using the same App Store links below. However, because it wasn’t part of the TestFlight version of the app that we tested, we were unaware that it was launching with the iPhone version.]

For the past three weeks, I’ve been testing Comet, Perplexity’s cross-platform agentic web browser, on my iPhone Air. The iOS version of Comet, launching today on the App Store and (sadly) lacking an iPad counterpart, follows the expansion of Comet from macOS to Windows and Android devices, and it carries the inherent limitations of Apple’s platform. Comet for iOS is based on Safari’s WebKit engine; you cannot install third-party browser extensions due to iOS sandboxing restrictions; you can make Comet your default iOS browser, but in-app web views in third-party apps will still open with Safari View Controller, not Comet. By and large, Comet on iOS is a skin of Safari, but for the first time since the debut of Arc Search on iPhone two years ago (R.I.P.), I’m actually excited about an alternative to Safari on iOS once again.

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Apple Is Working on an AI Music Tagging System→

Music Business Worldwide (via MacRumors) is reporting that Apple is rolling out a voluntary metadata system for identifying AI-generated content on Apple Music called Transparency Tags. Introduced by Apple in a newsletter sent to music industry partners, Transparency Tags is:

a system of disclosure labels that record labels and music distributors can begin applying to content delivered to Apple Music immediately, and will be required to use when delivering new content in [the] future.

According to Music Business Worldwide, the tagging system covers artwork, tracks, composition elements such as lyrics, and music videos. The publication quotes Apple’s newsletter as explaining that it views Transparency Tags as part of an initial effort toward giving the music industry what it needs to develop AI policies.

Although there are currently no consequences for failing to properly tag AI-generated music, Transparency Tags are a step in the right direction. The music industry and other creative industries are all grappling with how to deal with a flood of AI-generated content in a rapidly evolving environment. I don’t expect to see one approach sweep across industries any time soon, but it’s encouraging to see Apple taking a lead in pushing the conversation forward.

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Six Colors’ Apple in 2025 Report Card

Average scores from the 2025 Six Colors report card.

Average scores from the 2025 Six Colors report card.

For the past 10 years, Six Colors’ Jason Snell has put together an “Apple report card” – a survey to assess the current state of Apple “as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple”.

The 2025 edition of the Six Colors Apple Report Card has been published, and you can find a summary of all the submitted comments along with charts featuring average scores for the different categories here.

I’m so grateful that Jason invited me, once again, to participate in the survey and share my thoughts on Apple’s 2025. As you’ll see from my comments – and as you know if you’ve been listening to AppStories or Connected lately – I’ve been focusing on AI agents, hybrid automation, and splitting my work between iPadOS and macOS for the past few months. The LLM takeoff in the productivity space is accelerating on a weekly basis, and modern AI tools are fundamentally changing the way I get work done. Case in point: this article was written before OpenClaw went viral, and the past month alone has seen so many of my habits and automations get upended by this incredible open-source tool. As I noted in my comments, however, one thing is not changing: iPadOS essentially gets no access to any of these modern AI tools, which are increasingly launching as Mac-only apps or features.

I’ve prepared the full text of my responses for the Six Colors report card, which you can find below.

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OpenAI Launches Codex, a Mac App for Agentic Coding

Today, OpenAI released Codex, a Mac app for building software. Here’s how OpenAI describes the app in its announcement:

The Codex app changes how software gets built and who can build it—from pairing with a single coding agent on targeted edits to supervising coordinated teams of agents across the full lifecycle of designing, building, shipping, and maintaining software.

On first launch, Codex requests permission to access the file system. I granted it access to a subfolder where I stored all my projects, along with the folder that houses an app I’ve been building in my spare time. Those folders and projects live in the left sidebar, where each can be expanded to reveal chat sessions for that project.

Access to your other development tools.

Access to your other development tools.

In the toolbar is an Open button for accessing other development tools installed on your Mac, a Commit button for managing version control, a button that reveals a terminal view that expands up from the bottom of the window, and a diff panel for reviewing code changes. In settings, you’ll find additional customization options, along with tools to hook up MCP servers and integrate skills.

Some of Codex's customization options.

Some of Codex’s customization options.

Codex is not your traditional IDE. Agents are front and center, which in an app that is far more natural to use if you’re new to agentic coding, but the model is similar. While I write this article, Codex has been grinding away in the background performing a code review of my app. After spending time reviewing all the files, Codex asked permission to run commands to do things that it can’t accomplish inside its sandboxed environment.

Automations.

Automations.

The capabilities of Codex are enhanced by skills. OpenAI is kicking off the launch of Codex with a bunch of skills that you can access via its open-source GitHub repo. The app includes a selection of pre-built Automations for repetitive tasks, too.

All in all, Codex looks excellent, but it will take me some time to get a sense of its full capabilities. If you’re interested in trying Codex, you can download it from OpenAI here. For a limited time, the company is making the tool available to Free and Go subscribers, for whom rate limits have been temporarily doubled, as well as Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users.