Who are these people? What is the analog for this corner of the market? Context: I'm a 47y/o developer who has seen and done most of the common and not-so-common things in software development.
This segment reminds me of the hoards of npm evangelists back in the day who lauded the idea that you could download packages to add two numbers, or to capitalise the letter `m` (the disdain is intentional).
Am I being too harsh though? What opportunity am I missing out on? Besides the potential for engagement farming...
EDIT: I got about a minute into Fireship's video* about this and after seeing that Whatsapp sidebar popup it struck me... this thing can be a boon for scammers. Remote control, automated responses based on sentiment, targeted and personalised messaging. Not that none of this isn't possible already, but having it packaged like this makes it even easier to customise and redistribute on various blackmarkets etc.
EDIT 2: Seems like many other use-cases are available for viewing in https://www.moltbook.com/m/introductions. Many of these are probably LARPs, but if not, I wonder how many people are comfortable with AI agents posting personal details about "their humans" on the net. This post is comedy gold though: https://www.moltbook.com/post/cbd6474f-8478-4894-95f1-7b104a...
They can now combine cronjobs and LLMs with a single human sentence.
This is huge for normies.
Not so much if you already had strong development skills.
EDIT: But you are correct in the assessment that people who don't know better will use it to do simple things that could be done millions of times more efficiently..
I made a chatbot at my company where you can chat with each individual client's data that we work with..
My manager tested it by asking it to find a rate (divide this company number by that company number), for like a dozen companies, one by one..
He would have saved time looking at the table it gets its data from, using a calculator.
You know, building infrastructure to hook to some API or to dig through email or whatever-- it's a pain. And it's gotten harder. My old pile of procmail rules + spamassassin wouldn't work for the task anymore. Maintaining todos in text files has its high points and low points. And I have to be the person to notice patterns and do things myself.
Having some kind of agent as an assistant to do stuff, and not having to manage brittle infrastructure myself, sounds appealing. Accessibility from my phone through iMessage: ditto.
I haven't used it yet, but it's definitely captured my interest.
> He would have saved time looking at the table it gets its data from, using a calculator.
The hard thing is always remembering where that table is and restoring context. Big stuff is still often better done without an intermediary; being able to lob a question to an agent and maybe get an answer is huge.
If you are at all tech savvy, you can use n8n to set up a workflow that connects to all your data and provides an interface to talk to it..
This is the route I would recommend, and what everyone is using to build quick "AI Solutions" for businesses.