Your mental model point is very true. We all had to learn how to google at some point — explaining how to use these tools to someone outside the bubble feels like explaining how googling works to someone. Much of it is intuitive understanding from experience.
My question would be how much we think the processes will change as the models do. Much advice from two years ago is no longer relevant or realistic. Where do we think it will go next?
Does anyone have a really good way to explain to their relatives and friends how using an agent is different from simply using Google?
Just saying ‘fundamentally different’ doesn’t go very far; the best I’ve found is sitting down and giving a demonstration.
It’s also difficult to explain the enormous gap between frontier models and the free ones many people are accustomed to using. Is there a tangible comparison to a normie real-life ‘thing’ that anyone has used successfully?
I have no idea how to explain agents to a non-technical audience - there is SO much that can go wrong with them, it's still very much a technical power-user technology in my opinion.
ChatGPT and Claude can both execute code now, so a safe subset is to show people how to upload files there and have them do useful things with the data.
> Much of it is intuitive understanding from experience.
You’re mistaking domain expertise with tool expertise. You can’t teach a non dev how to use an LLM effectively for dev without teaching them to be an experienced dev. Once you have that knowledge, LLMs aren’t that hard to use.
After spending a couple hours working with it, it feels like a significant jump from 5.3 codex – and I know they said it wasn't theoretically the biggest jump, but this feels like the improvement of Opus 4.5 over again – that minor improvement that hits a tipping point. It just gets stuff right, first try. Its edits are better, more refined, less spaghetti-like.
My question would be how much we think the processes will change as the models do. Much advice from two years ago is no longer relevant or realistic. Where do we think it will go next?
Does anyone have a really good way to explain to their relatives and friends how using an agent is different from simply using Google? Just saying ‘fundamentally different’ doesn’t go very far; the best I’ve found is sitting down and giving a demonstration.
It’s also difficult to explain the enormous gap between frontier models and the free ones many people are accustomed to using. Is there a tangible comparison to a normie real-life ‘thing’ that anyone has used successfully?