>My wife and I had a really complicated spreadsheet for tracking how much we owed our babysitter – it was just complex enough to not really fit into a spreadsheet easily. I vibecoded a command line tool that's made it a lot easier.

Ok, please help me understand. Or is this more of a nanny?

Not technically a nanny, but not dissimilar. In this case, they do several types of work (house cleaning, watching 1-3 kids, daytime and overnights, taking kids out.) They are very competent – by far the best we've found in 3 years – and charge different rates for the different types of work. We also need to track mileage etc. for reimbursement.

They had a spreadsheet for tracking but I found it moderately annoying – it was taking 5-10 minutes a week, so normally I wouldn't have bothered to write a different tool, but with vibe coding it was fairly trivial.

As a Linux and Windows user I'm feeling unseen.

Well, the benefit here is the application of fluoride, which isn't something most people are actively thinking about maximizing.

For pure text responses, agree 100%. Gemini falls way short on tool/function calling, and it's not very token-efficient for those of us using the API. But if they can fix those two things or even just get them in the same ballpark like they did with flash and flash-lite, it would easily become my primary model.

Hah, I quit Prime and they just gave it back to me. No charge. I can't cancel it. I can't figure it out, but perhaps they realized that their margin on me before I canceled was well over the cost of Prime? I'm not sure, but I still only use it a fraction of what I used to...

Long running agents?

Yeah, Apple watches are a non-starter for me. Zero chance I'm charging my watch daily.

Put it on the charger while you’re showering and it’ll be charged enough to run until your next shower. And doing this consistently helps in forming a routine.

Does this use a local STT model, or is our data leaving our computer?

If your computer can run the local STT model, then no data leaves your machine — which applies to most modern computers. However, if you're using a particularly old laptop, it will default to cloud-based STT.

Are you using an off the shelf model or have trained your own? What accents is it tuned for?

So, if you don't subscribe, do they pay you to offset the worse gas mileage your car has to carry around but never have access to?

I'm not a lawyer, but is this not a class action suit waiting to happen?

Presumably, AI has advanced in 10 years?

Do you believe there's a threshold to how good this stuff can get, or do you think it's all infinite upside?

Obviously not infinite, but humans have very real limitations too. We've all seen them.

A materialist could logically conclude that it still has some way to go.

Well I'd probably consider myself a materialist but I'm not sure I'd agree. The evidence to me seems that it can really only come from two places: additional compute or new breakthroughs in AI learning. Compute's coming, certainly, but that only has the potential to improve things if it's added in conjunction with a commensurate AI breakthrough. I think the trend in improvement for transformer could be logistic, not exponential, like a lot of the snake-oil salesman like to state. And while there's plenty of evidence for compute there isn't much for the AI breakthrough that leads to an exponential jump, and if it does exist it's a trade secret, so until we know we don't know.