The End of Apps — Kitze, Sizzy.co

Channel: aiDotEngineer

Published at: 2026-04-23

YouTube video id: 4fntwuOoedA

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fntwuOoedA

Wow, back room.
Those are not my slides. There you go.
Hi, I'm K. We probably argued on X. I'm
D on X and I turned 34 years old today.
Decided to do a talk on my birthday
because [ __ ] it. Thank you.
I'd like to torture myself by asking, do
we have anyone from Tinkerer Club here,
please? Just the person sleeping in the
back is like, oh, what did he ask? All
right, I formed this recently. It's an
awesome community where every person
inside is copy and paste of everyone
inside is hilarious to see. If you want,
you can join us. So, I'm going to talk
today about the past, present, and
future of productivity and personal
agents. Starting with my first to-do app
was when I was 10 years old, which is
crazy. I found an old note and a
notebook and some scribbles that are
like barely legible were like I need to
eat my string juice today. I don't know
what a 10-year-old does for a to-do
list, but it clearly had checkboxes and
I've been trying and wrestling to solve
productivity since then. I was anyone
else forever unhappy with todo apps,
please. Like there's no perfect Thank
you. Thank you. It's not only me. So, I
tried like this was probably 15 years
ago. I got so fed up with like the
to-doist and the other ones that I
started using text files way before all
these local markdown blah blah blah. And
I used an Android app called Tasker to
basically manage all of these text
files. I got contextual reminders like
whenever I connect to Wi-Fi, remind me
about something or when I arrive at a
destination or when I bike or blah blah
blah. So I was always trying to figure
out a productivity system. I had like a
Google Home which supported back in the
day if supported to basically cut the
command in half. So when you say tell my
assistant to, you can take the second
half and send it to any of the iftt
services which was pretty cool. And
anytime I would have a to-do around the
house, I would just tell my Google
Assistant and it would just store it. It
wasn't smart. It wasn't AI, but I was
building towards something where I can
offload my thoughts and process them in
a way. I realized that I never wanted a
to-do app. I wanted like sort of like a
life OS. So slowly I've been going to
that direction. In 2017, I I'm bad at
naming, so just ignore the names of
everything I've ever built. So I made
something called toodo, which was like a
todo app, but all the to-dos like shoot
up to the top based on like a priority
system. So if you tag them with
something called health or crisis or
whatever it is, they would just
accumulate all of those points and shoot
higher to the top. So it was kind of
helping me to prioritize things. ADHD
hit, of course, and I forgot about that
one and I started something called
better. This one was kind of hard to SEO
because good luck figuring out SEO for
better apps. So eventually I had to
rebrand it. But I expanded here by
adding to habits, planner events, and a
bunch of other things because I realized
if these three are not together, I can
never make like a mini OS. Then of
course ADHD hit and I switched to a
bunch of other apps. And in 2022 I
started making Benji. It's named after
my dog. My dog is the mascot. That's not
the logo. But the point is I wanted an
app to rule them all. I might have went
a little bit overboard. So the next
slide you're going to see like oh
probably he added routines and calendar
events and like what else? No. This is
how much I hate marketing. If you're
like wait I've never heard of Benji. How
come? Because every time I had the urge
to do marketing and to actually promote
this to people, I was like maybe one
more feature. maybe one more feature.
It's like almost like 3, four years
later and I still haven't properly
wrapped this up. It's still not properly
finished. But I was frustrated with
using a web app for one thing, an iOS
app for another thing. It supports this,
it supports Android, it doesn't support
this. Some of them are subscriptions,
some of them are premium. So I just
wanted all of these features like
mangled into one tool that can sort of
fix my life. Has it? Absolutely not. But
we're going towards that. My vision is
to one day have like a Benji phone and a
Benji OS. And the funny thing is I said
this on a podcast and the guy was like
very ambitious for someone who doesn't
have a landing page for Benji. So I
didn't have a landing page but one day
I'm gonna make like a Benji phone. So
the friction with having like making
this live OS whether it's in notion or
in something else like Benji. The
annoying thing is you have to use forms
to input data. So I oscillate between
two states. I'm either for a month like
logged into Benji and logging everything
and doing all the things or I completely
ignore it. I don't care about what
things are there to do nutrition
whatever. I'm like no no no I don't want
to look at it. And then in a few months
I'll go back into that cycle because
there's a lot of friction in in using
all of these tools. We had the chat GPT
moment. It was awesome. But when chat
GPT plugins came out, I don't know if
you remember that ancient relic that
they now it's transforming to MCPS and
whatever. Um I called my wife and I was
like honey it's over. It's over for all
the apps for all SAS. Like GPD is going
to eat the world. It's all going to be
chat GPD. It's all going to be within
the thing. Benji is pointless. I wasted
years on blah blah blah. 3 years later
she received so many of these calls. She
just ignores me at this And I'm like,
"Oh my god, they dropped a new opus."
She's like, "Uh-huh. Cool. Cool."
Nothing ever happens. But we're going
towards this. Like 2023 before the
models could return JSON, you had to
bully the models to return JSON. I don't
know who remembers this. Like you had to
be like, "Please don't write any
markdown." It's like, "Sure, here's some
JSON." You're like, "No." So you had to
parse it, to cut it, to to like shape it
into form to make some JSON. And I added
a feature in Benji where you can like
press a press a key on your keyboard. It
would record with a microphone and as I
was speaking it would like periodically
cut some of what I was speaking and
basically call it wasn't MCP. It wasn't
anything. It would call APIs in Benji
and you can see your calendar moving
live and your to-dos and everything. And
to people on Twitter this was
mind-blowing. There's like holy [ __ ]
dude you should pursue it. You should
make something out of this. But ADHD I
was like no no no no people like it. It
went viral which means we never have to
talk about this again. So the Benji
assistant still hasn't shipped and I did
nothing about it. Meanwhile, people took
one feature of Benji, which is like, I
don't know, food tracking. They take a
picture with your phone, and it analyzes
calories, and they made multi-millions.
But I have 60 features. There's there's
a lesson in there. So, last October, I I
I realized that, wait, I'm using clot
code. I can use it for more stuff like
it has tool calls, functions, and a
bunch of other stuff. Maybe I can tell
it to do my taxes and end up in jail.
Hopefully not. Uh maybe I can tell it to
organize my email and my to-do list and
a bunch of other things. So when skills
came out, I started like loading my
cloud code with personal skills. But I'm
like, wait, now I have coding skills. I
have personal skills. It gets confused.
Like I started asking people, how do I
go and make this into like a proper
assistant that's like lives on top of
cloud code, but it has tools for other
stuff other than coding. But ADHD was
like, how about we forget about this?
Let's Pete let Pete come up with the
cloudbot and everything else. Like you
don't need to worry about this. So cloud
code had like the wrong shell for me
because it was like terminal based and I
crave for something else. So when Peter
make uh cloudbot back then when I saw
the tweet I'm like oh my god you can
talk to it through WhatsApp or telegram
or whatever for me it was like that's
the moment that's what I needed for my
cloud setup to actually you know evolve
into the next thing. My brain caught on
fire. I think we got like mass
psychosis. It turned into a cult.
Everyone wearing like lobster suits. It
it it's been crazy for a while and I
joined the Discord and it was like less
than a hundred people who had their
Cloudbot set up. Even Pete was like how
did you do this? There's no like
onboarding. There's no like how did you
do it? And I told him what I'm telling
people now. I don't know how the
internals of my setup work. I just ask
either codeex or cloud code to fix it,
to change it, to improve the memory, to
do this, to do that, but I have no
freaking idea. People are like, "What do
you have in your JSON file?" I'm like,
"I haven't seen a JSON file since four
years ago." Like, I don't know. Just ask
my bots and it just fixes the things.
So, for a while, I went like full
lobster mode. This is me at the first
meetup in Vienna in a lobster suit. I
made that logo. actually made the
OpenClaw logo at 2 a.m. at night. Uh, I
like started wearing all of these
lobster merch, doing tutorials, podcast,
guests, talking about all the use cases
and blah blah blah. And finally, what I
liked for someone who's been obsessed
with to-dos and productivity since like
10 years old, I'm like, the future is
finally reachable. like all my files
from Google Drive and iCloud and
presentations I have and photos from
high school and like all the things that
I have like piled up and unfinished
business ideas. I could see how open
clock can just magically, you know, wave
the lobster hands and just fix
everything in my life. So I was
immediately done with all the cloud
models. I I went full hipster mode like
no more Gemini, no more chat GPT, no
more cloud. I wanted to fully I I got
the power of finally owning the
assistant, owning the files, owning the
memory, deleting the sessions if you
wanted to. So it's like it felt fully
local. So naturally I started preparing
all my data for agents. I went from the
guy who was like always using cloud and
stuff to annoyingly self-hosting
everything. Everything has to come off
the cloud. It has to be local on my NAS
on my machine just so my agents can
actually work on it. So these are still
work in progress. The classic work in
progress I'm going to finish one day.
But I started moving to local hosted
like nextcloud image local markdown for
everything that requires a lot of API
calls or MCP and whatever. I would
rather just have it local to work on all
of this locally. I went that far and I
went back to Android. Like I feel like
this thing in a way, you know, like
enchanted me. I'm like, who am I? I
don't recognize myself anymore because I
wanted my agent to be able to read my
notifications, clear my notifications,
install apps, uninstall apps. It can do
anything on an Android phone and on iOS
it can maybe send you a push
notification and if Tim Cook allows. I
was planning to do like 10 15 more
slides. Sorry for the flashbang there.
Uh of use cases, but then they told me
the presentation is exactly 18 minutes.
So I did that one. It's on YouTube. It's
on a bunch of podcasts. I don't want to
talk about probably all of you have
maybe even more use cases than me. But
when we do like we do weekly meetups in
the tinkerer club and we talk mostly
about open claw and I love to ask this
question when I ask them about which use
cases do you have then ask them but
which ones of them you cannot do with
cloud code and with codeex and
immediately it just reduces by 90%
because it's like h yeah I can kind of
do that with cloud code. So, I've been
also asking myself like what is the
value of like having like a package
agent like like OpenClaw? I think that
one-on-one chat with one agent sucks
because if you think about delegating in
your life, if you have like business and
personal and family and blah blah blah,
you don't want to have like one employee
loaded with all the information about
your life talking in like Telegram in a
one-on-one chat about everything. So,
more people started using Telegram
topics. They started using Discord,
Slack, and other stuff just to get
organized. I like the idea of
specialized agents which open claw
supports but not a lot of people use
them because basically they have like
provider model level of thinking a
system prompt or soul a list of tools
and MCPs and a list of permissions. I
like that this is like package and we're
going to talk with this agent about
fitness. Now people talk about LLM
psychosis. I'm out here like going crazy
like these are all of the bots that I
created and I tried to like contain
every bot to have a purpose in my life.
Like some of them are for work, some of
don't take photos of my chats. Uh, so
now I ended up with I have five disc.
The funny thing is like as I keep
talking, keep in mind that my life is
far from solved. It's never been more
chaotic. I've never been late on on
rent, on mortgage, on like customer
emails. It's a mess, but it's a
performative mess, right? So I ended up
with five Discords and each Discord has
many channels and threads and forum
posts and nested thingies and blah blah
blah. And then inevitably, I mean, you
can sense this across the community. I
sense that across Tinker Club because in
the beginning it was an explosion of
signups of people joining the meetup.
They're like, "Oh my god, weekly calls,
we're going to crush the world." And now
if you enter a meetup now, it's like
five people and it's slowly turning into
like um open claw anonymous. And
everyone's like, "Yeah, mine didn't do
like the [ __ ] crown." Josh, man, it
drives
it went a bit depressing, but I think
we'll bounce back. We'll figure out
like, you know, we'll figure it out. Why
is this happening? because it was and
kind of is for me unreliable where it
matters most which is like cron jobs
multi- aents the agents talking to each
other the agents forgetting like
literally in the next message like huh
what what are you saying and I'm like
the message is above you just go one
message above you this is getting fixed
and it's getting updates every day but I
I've yet to see that it's actually you
know working this is not the open clause
or any other agent's fault but Discord
and Telegram were not meant for a life
OS we're just molding them into
something but they'll never be the right
UI for you to manage your life fully.
It's like cope in a way until we get to
something else. We're going to use
Discord or Telegram. And finally, as I
would like to call them, Benthropic,
they ruin the charm of it. Like as soon
as you pull the model, talking to GPT5
talks feels like talking to a box box of
oats. Seriously, it has the personality
of this. Try this. It's like, okay, did
you do that? No, but I told you to do
it. Okay, I'll do it. Did you do it? No.
Every conversation with Open Claw looks
like that in the last and it drives me
nuts. So, what now? Where do we go from
here? I don't know how much time I have
left. It says six minutes. Where do we
go from here? I see like two futures
like fighting for each other and I don't
think that either of them is going to
win in the long run. So, we have these
custom agents like OpenClaw, Hermes, or
whatever else is possible. Uh, and we
have cloud agents because everyone is
trying to grab a slice of the pie. Now,
we have co-work and OpenAI is going to
have a thingy and Perplexity is trying
to make a thing and everyone is trying
to make their cloud thing and those are
the cloud ones. So the custom ones are
never going to work because they're for
tinkerers. And I'm telling you like in
ticker club the people we have people
who are building their own pinball
machines talking about tinkers like they
tinker with everything and everyone is
freaking tired of like trying to make
this thing work. Let alone people who
have lives let alone people who have
like busy lives and jobs and whatever
else. No one will have time to tweak
this. They would just like a served
solution for them so everything works
out of the box. Not me. I'm not I'm not
going to be happy until I you know and
then cloud agents I tried cloud co-work
for like five minutes and I'm like this
is too nerfed. This is not an openclaw
alternative. It cannot do like even like
5% of the things that openclaw can do.
So this is will be for the masses and
but it won't satisfy the tinkers the
people who want to self-host own the
models and blah blah blah. So two
directions here. What am I going to do
like personally for myself and what I
think is going to happen next in the
actual like industry. I'm juggling
currently between OpenClaw, Hermes,
Paperclip. Is anyone using paperclip?
It's like kind of this like cool like
conbon linear like thingy for agents
wasting a lot of credits. I'm trying
plain timmax with codeex a lot of time.
When you reach the peak frustration with
the first three, you're like, "Fuck it."
When you open the terminal, you're like,
"Ah, maybe the agents are not that
smart." So, I'm juggling between all of
this and I'm using all of them daily.
But it's like the hesitation that I have
like I wanted to see where the location
for the venue is and I had two options.
open the website or go to Discord and
I'm like, I don't want to talk to that
box of oatmeal. You know, it's going to
be like, yeah, I'll find the location in
your email. Did you? No. Are you ready
for it? It keeps asking you, are you
ready for the thing you told me to do?
It's crazy. So, I started making my own
thing naturally. You can see the
progression. It's never going to see the
light of day. It's not for people. It's
just an experiment to do it for me. I
call it wolffer. And I'm not making it
for mass appeal. I'm not making it for
everyone to use it. I'm trying to like
how can I make a tiny abstraction on top
of like codeex or cloud code rest in
peace. I I'm afraid to use cloud code
because I might get arrested. So it's
only on codeex for now and it's not
extensible and it doesn't support a
billion providers. So I'll start with
the cons. What sucks you're forced to
use the UI chat of the actual app and
you cannot use telegram or iMessage or
whatever. There's no support for any of
this. It's absolutely the opposite of
Open Claw and Hermes. It's not built
with plugins in mind. It's the idea is
to have everything in it. There's no
memory system. I'm not really selling
the thing, but none of these things are
out of the box. It's not very modular.
It's made by an ADHD squirrel brain that
will forget about it by the end of the
month. And it doesn't have open eye
funding, and it doesn't have a cool
lobster logo. These are the cons. But
the pros and why I would suggest all of
you to maybe dabble with this and try to
make your own um or maybe eventually try
mine if I ever release it for people. It
has predictable conversations. And the
UI that I made, you go to the Wolver
app, like wolffer, whatever the URL is,
and it has like predictable UI that's
like made for multi- aent orchestration
into like multiple topics, multiple
conversations. Like everything was made
for this purpose. It's not like you're
taking Discord and you're trying to mold
it to be for a certain purpose. And my
favorite feature is because I don't
believe in memory of agents. Like people
are like, "Oh, we finally saw Milo
solved memory." I'm like, "No,
absolutely she didn't solve memory."
What I believe in here I have nested
topics. So I have like work projects
Benji Benji customer support. Let's say
that's the nested tree. And when I'm
talking to Benji customer support in the
first prompt, it injects the description
of all the parent prompts. So when I'm
talking to Benji customer support, it
doesn't need to pull from memory or some
magical place. It just looks at the
topic, the parent topic, the parent
topic, the parent topic. It takes all
the descriptions together and it
immediately knows what is my work, what
is Benji, what are my projects and how
do I do customer support. And I can get
more out of that than hoping from some
memory system that's going to pull the
right context out of the the right
place. It kind of works for me. It
supports workspaces. I can switch
between workspaces. I hated that I
couldn't see tool calls. I would like to
see tool calls to collapse them, to
uncolapse them, to see loading spinners.
There's buttons for stopping the thing.
I don't need to use slash commands. Uh
the chron jobs are predictable. And when
you get a chron message, it actually
reads from the entire conversation and
it labels it as chron. So it's not like
where did this come from and why is the
agent kind of lost. There's UI for
managing agents which is like for my
brain I really need it. When I chat in a
topic on the right side I see that the
agent is like Chandler and he has this
model and this capability. So it really
helps me to know who am I talking to and
just tweak and be like no no no you
don't need that capability. Boom it
disappears. Um I would have included
screenshots but the app didn't work cuz
it's on my Mac studio at home. It's a
long story but imagine the screenshots.
is kind of cool and I like that you can
like there's like a knowledge base and
documents that you can write markdown
documents in the thing and you can add
them because in Discord you can only add
other members. There's no dynamic ad to
mention something else and here I can
mention for example hey let's fix the
landing page of Benji just like and then
I would add the landing page of Tinker
Club for example or I can add a
knowledge base or a password or a skill
so I can combine multiple ads so I I
give it the right exact context that it
needs uh for the actual thing. What I
think is going to happen next because
this is definitely not going to be a
mainstream thing. What's going to happen
next in the entire agents and industry
and what are people going to do? This my
prediction. I think the way we use
computers right now is absolutely
insane. Does anyone agree with me? And
have you finally got this? Like when you
open your computer like computers
shouldn't be this way. One person, two,
okay, we have a lot of people. Like I
open my computer after a few hours it
greets me with 17 updates for apps I
haven't used in a while. And it greets
me with like tabs that I had open since
yesterday. like how I imagine in the
future it would need to ingest all the
information about my life like
notifications and emails and everything
and to-dos and everything that's
happening in my life and depending on
how far away I've been for from the
computer it should greet me with the
next task to work on and then the next
one and the next one and it should maybe
give me a break and be like hey enough
let's do this let's do that so in a way
I think the role of AI is going to
inverse so the way we prompt the AI
right now I think it's going to inverse
and the fully productive people will be
the one who delegate 99% of the stuff
for to the AI and then the AI prompts
you. It's like, hey, you didn't send me
a picture of your passport or, hey, what
do you want to do? You basically do
decisions and you basically click like
forms or you answer questionnaires or
whatever it is, but in the background,
there's something constantly working for
you instead of you prompting it all the
time. I agree with this sentiment.
People are like, "But my grandma will
never vip code." That's 100% true
because I think where we're going, we're
actually not going to need most consumer
apps. No, your grandma, your mom or your
friends are not going to VIP code, but
they'll be able to sit in this new
futuristic OS and they'll be able to do
any task that they want to do. Like
either the a the UI is going to pop on
the fly or whatever it needs, but
they'll be doing task and they'll forget
about I need an app to do a task.
They'll just do it. A small set of apps
will survive, but it will be software
for like specialists and people I don't
know who are doing like color grading or
some movie making or music making where
they actually need a software. But
normies will just chat to their computer
and their computer will do things and
the UI will generate on the fly. Uh I
also think it would be the funniest
thing if Apple wins all of this because
local models are getting insanely good
and they're going to get even better
this year and next year. And I think for
most normies, for most people, they'll
be completely fine with a local agent
like Siri getting tool capabilities from
all of their locally installed apps, not
wasting any credits. Their data doesn't
go anywhere and their phone magically is
doing things. the latest Google Pixel
can already launch your apps in the
background and order coffee and do a
bunch of things for you. So, I think
that's where everything is going. So,
I'm over time. Thank you for listening
to my rant. Hopefully, we can discuss
afterwards and thank you very much.
Thank you.