A career change that left me as a recent graduate in a decimated marketplace missing the bottom ten rungs on the ladder and no interest in getting back into the software world has led me to advanced manufacturing as a metal worker. I code a little, move heavy steel pieces periodically which is a nice way to break up the standing/sitting but not nearly as much as a general laborer, solve lots of problems, keep my trigonometry muscles toned, am forced to take breaks, get paid for my overtime, there’s a union that the company ownership is totally willing to work with, and when I’m not at work, work isn’t with me. There’s something very satisfying about leaving work with exercised muscles, smelling slightly of cutting oil. The money sucks comparatively so early in my career, but the rate increases more for performance than seniority so its rising quickly, the benefits are good, the career trajectory is pointing upwards, and longevity-wise, it’s certainly a whole lot better than gig work.

There’s a huge crisis in US manufacturing: we’re bleeding craft knowledge because off-shoring let companies hire existing experienced workers for decades, so they never had to train a new generation of tradespeople. Now all those folks are dying and retiring and they need people to pick up that deep knowledge quickly. Codifying and automating is going to kill jobs either way, but one factory employing a few people making things for other factories with local materials is better than everything perpetually shifting to the cheap labor market du jour. I’m feeling much more optimistic about the future of this than the future of tech careers.

I think over the next few years, a very large percentage of folks in tech will find themselves on the other side of the fence, quickly realize that their existing expertise doesn’t qualify them for any other white collar jobs where vibe coding experience is a bullet point in the pluses section, that tech consulting is declining even faster than salaried jobs, and that they’re vastly less qualified than the competition for blue collar jobs. Gonna be a rough road for a lot of folks. I wouldn’t invest in SF real estate any time soon.

You will always be able to produce artisanal hand-set code, same as how artisanal woodworking exists alongside industrial manufacturing. There will be a lot less demand for it, and compensation will align accordingly, but it won't go away.

Either the crap truly works and nobody is needed or it does not work. Where is this half-arsed human-agent hybrid vision coming from? The land of plateaued LLM gains?

Wolf now supports multiple clients connecting to the same session via the wolf-ui branch that landed recently. After lots of stability work we are now running that mode in production (and in the latest release) https://github.com/helixml/helix/releases/tag/2.5.3

Yeah that's what we did :) https://youtu.be/vVmnpcnLDGM?si=b6LxW6lmM7843LY0

>I would personally invest into making agents more autonomous (yes hard problem today) then building a desktop video session protocol to watch them do the work.

Seems difficult to research better autonomy without extensive monitoring. You need specific data on before/after effects of changes, for instance.

Join our discord for the beta https://discord.com/invite/VJftd844GE

It's nice for unmodified moonlight clients to be able to connect - they have tons of them, you can even run it on a Nintendo DS

Ha, we'll take it! It's definitely ambitious - we're essentially building a full remote desktop streaming stack on top of an AI stack on private data.

The 'madness' part is probably the part where we said 'let's do hardware-accelerated H.264 encoding and real-time agent control and make it all work with sub-100ms latency.' We think the problem space is worth the complexity.

Itself, more recently

Mainly so you can give the agent access to the desktop as well. Then it can debug your web app in Chrome Dev tools but also you can pair with it with streaming that is so good it feels local

There's also value in being able to run multiple agents in parallel with their own isolated filesystems and runtimes. One agent won't tread on the toes of another whatever they do. You can let it loose and it doesn't matter if it breaks something, you can just spin up another one

This is a great point. Not that far. We also snapshot the desktop for "slow" non-streaming updates to the UI. We could push these into Claude itself to act on or describe or whatever.

That's the next move :-D

For web apps, I'd guess that many of us already do that via Playwright or other MCPs. I'd bet there are people doing something similar with desktop apps too.

The streaming architecture is designed for exactly this - we originally built it for autonomous agents that need persistent development environments. The missing pieces are mostly integration work (mapping Claude's tool use format to our desktop APIs). Would be very interested to hear if others are working on similar integrations - the combination of LLM coding agents + real desktop environments feels like it unlocks a lot of interesting workflows.

I did that a year ago, I imagine it would work better today.

I should have said creator. He seems to have a healthy community backing him, but we should ask him!

Hey! Yeah we are working with partners on fully integrated hardware+software stack for this. We particularly like the RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell chips for this

Vision language models have been trained on how to operate human UIs though, so at least for a while, computer use will be an interesting area to explore. I think debugging web apps and building UIs is a particularly fruitful area for this

Fascinating, wanna compare notes on a call some time?

Interesting, thanks!