Do We Need AI Browsers? What Are Claude Skills? - EP99.22

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Do We Need AI Browsers? What Are Claude Skills?"

This Day in AI Podcast (EP99.22) — October 24, 2025
Hosts: Michael Sharkey & Chris Sharkey

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Episode Overview

Michael and Chris Sharkey dive into the week's new crop of AI browser announcements, specifically ChatGPT Atlas and the Microsoft Copilot AI browser. They debate the necessity (or lack thereof) of AI-integrated browsers, critique their real-world usefulness, and discuss broader trends in AI’s relentless march into every digital corner. The episode’s latter half explores a feature Anthropic launched—Claude Skills—and why it might actually represent meaningful progress compared to the cosmetic "innovation" of browser sidebars.

The vibe throughout is humorous, candidly exasperated, and a little irreverent: “We were promised AGI and we got a web browser.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "AI Browser" Trend: ChatGPT Atlas and Microsoft Copilot

• AI Browsers as Repurposed Features
  Chris compares the never-ending tweaks in AI software to Marge’s endlessly-altered dress in The Simpsons—different superficial covers, fundamentally the same underneath.
  • "We've got sort of the ChatGPT, the chat paradigm, if you will. And then it's getting repackaged, repurposed up." (Chris, 00:07)
• ChatGPT Atlas:
  • A Chrome-based browser, Mac-only at launch (“makes sense when Copilot announced their own version of this exact same browser only a day later.”)
  • Main feature: an integrated chat sidebar that acts in the context of the current page.
  • OpenAI’s examples are underwhelming: shopping lists, booking travel, beach day reminders.
• Lack of Practical Utility
  Chris tried using Atlas for an actual task:
  • “I think it spun for like nine or ten minutes trying to click around and operate like one control on the website...I just didn’t find it very useful.” (Chris, 02:40)
  • He predicts people will treat these browsers as tech demos, not tools for work.
• Browser Should Be a Neutral Shell
  Chris and Alex (guest) discuss the fundamental expectation that browsers shouldn't be all-absorbing platforms:
  • “A browser should be a neutral shell, like a window to the Internet and the Internet is the applications…Do you really always want them watching and storing memories?” (Chris, 03:32)
  • Concerns about privacy, prompt injection, safety, and unnecessary AI onboarding.

2. Surveillance & Censorship Concerns

• AI Deciding What You Can See
  Chris recounts an example where searching for Hitler videos returns a safety warning rather than actual results:
  • “You're now bringing a browser onto your computer that is, one, monitoring you and how you use the Internet…And then, two, now has the safety police of the model deciding what you can and cannot research or consume or do.” (Chris, 07:37)
• Not for Enterprise Use
  • “People in corporate environments…can never EVER use a browser like this…in terms of transmitting data…you’ve breached your rules.” (Alex, 08:05)
  • Security, compliance, and privacy are potentially compromised.

3. The Arms Race of Market Share

• Disguised Play for User Data
  • The hosts are skeptical about AI browsers as genuine innovations versus attempts to capture data and usage patterns.
  • “They literally just want to get access to everything you're looking at for whatever reason to like maybe add some value, maybe make it slightly better for you, but also get training data.” (Alex, 09:26)
• Distribution Over Usefulness
  • Chris: “They're basically bribing people that aren't paying for ChatGPT by giving them extra usage for making it the default browser at the system level.” (Chris, 15:37)
  • Equates it to “rich guy billionaire market share wars.”

4. Microsoft Copilot AI Browser & Humanist AI

• Nearly Identical to ChatGPT Atlas
  • Copilot’s Edge-based browser introduces similar chatbox-centered features after Atlas’s Mac launch.
  • “So wait, it looks exactly the same.” (Chris, 19:30)
• Marketing Gimmicks: “Humanist AI”
  • “All of today’s Copilot announcements boil down to one core idea: We’re betting on humanist AI. An AI that always puts humans first.” (Chris, 18:20)
  • The hosts ridicule the notion, seeing it as superficial.
  • “It’s just like marketing…We were trying to replace humans and now we’re not.” (Alex, 19:31)
• Frustration with Lack of Progress
  • Repeatedly, Chris and Alex express fatigue with “yet another chat box in a browser,” lamenting the lack of real newness.
  • “I just think a year later, like, come on, a year later and where are we? Like, I mean, not much has changed.” (Chris, 22:06)

5. Real AI Use Cases: Where the Value Actually Is

• Power of Contextual, Agentic Workflows
  • Chris outlines his real-world use: a custom MCP assistant in Simtheory that accesses support tickets, internal databases, Stripe, and documentation to automate responses.
  • “Every time I use it, I'm like this thing is magical...as it's responding to common things over time it's getting better.” (Chris, 25:30)
• Preference for Substance Over Skin-Deep Features
  • What’s truly exciting is exposing tools and data to the AI to revolutionize productivity—“absolutely incredible power that’s sitting there right now if a company…is able to expose it.”
  • Alex describes an example where an AI agent queries a database, interprets results, and produces solutions in minutes rather than days. (29:28)
• Desire for More OpenAI/Anthropic Tutorials
  • “A lot of people in the community have been asking for us to do some tutorials …and we plan to do it because we think it’s a different way of working and once you discover it it really is pretty game changing.” (Chris, 28:11)

6. Claude Skills: Actual Progress and Potential

• Transition Away from Browsers to Power User Paradigms
  • The episode’s final segment introduces “Claude Skills”: containers of instructions, scripts, and resources for task-specific enhancement.
  • Alex says the more he dives in, the more significant Claude Skills seem:
    • “It’s actually an incredibly powerful paradigm of working and it’s going to be a little bit tricky with the words like skills and tools and all these things to understand the difference. But there is a distinct difference and there are major direct advantages to… [TBC in next episode].” (Alex, 35:16)
• Optimism for Customizability and Productivity
  • Idea: Instead of manually guiding the AI through context building (the “foreplay” analogy), you can predefine that ramp-up in a reusable “skill.”
  • “How do you get the AI in that flow state straight away? So you sit down, you open your 16 chat windows or whatever and then you're just getting stuff done, launching tasks asynchronously, and being a power worker.” (Alex, 27:34)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Simpsons Marge Dress Analogy
  “AI is being repurposed from that episode in the Simpsons where Marge has the dress…and then she keeps changing it up all the time, but it's really fundamentally the same dress. That's what it feels like is happening in AI right now.”
  Chris, 00:04

• On AI Overreach in Browsers
  “We were promised AGI and we got a web browser.”
  Chris, 10:43

• On Attempts to Win Market Share
  “It’s sort of like rich guy billionaire market share wars, where...they've got the risk board of the world and they're like, if we get this many billion people using this browser, then...we will control the world for the next little while.”
  Alex, 16:03

• Fatigue with Faux Product Announcements
  “If this was the forefront of AI, I'd quit this podcast immediately.”
  Alex, 22:19

• Pointlessness of Current Consumer AI Offerings “It feels like we're getting the sterilized, watered-down version because they think people are stupid...just dumb it down to just the most dumb possible, then maybe they'll use it.” Chris, 32:45

• On True AI Value
  “The second someone has that moment — they're like, I could use it for this, I could use it for that. This is going to change the thing. The AI just did work that would have taken me a week in 30 seconds.”
  Alex, 23:15

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• 00:03 — Simpsons Dress Analogy; Overview of Atlas as “the same dressed-up chat paradigm”
• 02:00–04:50 — Atlas features, hands-on frustration, examples lack real utility
• 07:37 — Safety & censorship alarm bells: “I can’t browse or display videos of Adolf Hitler…”
• 09:26–10:42 — Market share grabs; skepticism of AI browser “innovation”
• 14:03–16:45 — Lowering the bar for mass adoption; “bribing users”
• 18:20–21:42 — Copilot’s “humanist AI;” poking fun at indistinguishable features
• 25:30–29:28 — Real-world AI agent workflows; SimTheory custom MCP example
• 33:26–34:13 — Frustration that vendors don’t showcase genuinely powerful workflows
• 35:16 — Claude Skills introduction and optimism

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Conclusion

This episode is a candid, humor-laced critique of the “AI browser” movement, dismissing it as superficial and likely to fade as quickly as the plug-in frills of the early 2000s web. The Sharkey brothers are much more bullish on meaningful AI progress like customizable workflows and deep tool integration (see: Claude Skills), where the power-user can actually get magical results—and the average user just needs a better invitation, not a browser with more chatboxes.

For listeners wanting to understand why the browser wars are such a sideshow compared to what’s possible with today’s LLM agents, this episode is an excellent summary of both the frustration and optimism in the AI space.

Transcript

[Chris]

This week we have to cover a bunch of releases that feels like AI is being repurposed from that episode in the Simpsons where Marge has the dress, you know, the one where she has the dress and then she keeps changing it up all the time, but it's really fundamentally the same dress. That's what it feels like is happening in AI right now. Like we've got sort of the Chat GPT, the chat paradigm, if you will. And then it's getting repackaged, repurposed up. And of course, one of those repackages and repurposing this week was the introduction of Chat GPT Atlas, a new browser, a Chrome browser really built on Chromium that is essentially, I mean, let's be honest, could have really just been a plugin for Chrome, a chat plugin, Quite.

[Alex]

A browser that is also just an existing browser with a skin on it, right?

[Chris]

Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, yes, it introduces a sidebar. And I think the main premise being that you have the context of the page that you're looking at, which I guess is useful if you want to ask questions about a particular page you're on. I don't personally have this use case much, if ever, when I'm using AI. And yet again, the examples we got from OpenAI were all about travel. It seems just there needs to be many, many ways to book travel. They have done one thing which I think is pretty cool. They have integrated the agent into the actual interface here. So you can basically ask it to go and do things again. Their examples are not great, like go and heading to the beach with the kids tomorrow. Can you grab the usual beach day stuff? And. And where do you mean?

[Alex]

Like, are they buying new stuff from the shop every time they go to the beach? I. I don't know.

[Chris]

Like, again the examples, it's always like book travel or go shopping on Instacart, which like, obviously very few people outside of the US have access to or care about. And look to their credit. I think the design of this Agent mode is. Is really unique and cool. And the fact it can attempt to operate websites and do things in the background in a tab, I think pretty damn cool. But I did put this to the test. It's only available on the Mac right now, so it was like a Mac only release, which made sense when Copilot announced their own version of this exact same browser only a day later. We'll get to that in a minute. But I basically asked it to do a few, like, real tasks, like, you know, like genuinely try and book me A family holiday for next year. Like, genuinely do it. I'm like, can this thing actually do it? And I think it spun for like nine or ten minutes trying to click around and operate like one control on the website. And it, it seems like since we did computer use in SIM theory, like these models, yeah, they've gotten a little bit better, but not good enough to actually complete these. Call it like, you know, broad context tasks where you're just asking it to do something quite random. I just didn't find it very useful and I couldn't see myself outside of a tech demo similar to the original Compute we build, ever really using it again, maybe to fill in like workplace quizzes.

[Alex]

But it's safe and agree to do that, right? Yeah, it'll be like, this is unethical. You need to have the security training.

[Chris]

So I like, I don't really get it. To me, a browser, and maybe people disagree with me. I'm actually curious to hear what people think. But to me, a browser should be a neutral shell, like a window to the Internet and the Internet is the applications. And I, I just can't see getting this browser and then being like, oh, cool, I just want chat GBT integrated everywhere. Like, do you really always want them watching and storing memories, which it does, about what you're browsing, what you're doing, what you're seeing? Like, feels to me like this is like an exercise in trying to train their next computer use model by just monitoring how people use applications on the web. I mean, that's the same thing.

[Alex]

Yeah. It's almost like if they were at least transparent about that, people may actually be inclined to do it. Like, okay, we've spoken before many times about the idea of actually demonstrating to the AI. Here is how I do my security training. Here is how I prepare the weekly Wheat report and actually showing it so it can learn. And I think if you were more explicit about that, then it might actually be interesting to me where I'm like, okay, I kind of get that idea. I'm building skills here. I'm actually teaching it. But not as a daily web browser experience. I have zero interest in that, personally.

[Chris]

Yeah. And the, the one feature I'll give them credit for, which I think is a cool feature, but again, could just be easily integrated into Chrome without the need for a new browser, is you can select text now in any application. So if you're in Gmail, you can select some tags and then click this little dot and then you can prompt it so you can say, hey, like, you know, make this more serious, make this more professional or whatever. Now you could kind of already do this in Chrome. It's not that discoverable, but you can do it. And I do think it's really useful, especially if it has context. But what I've found using this stuff for a while now is the reason I don't tend to use the inbuilt AI in say Google Docs and we've talked about on the show before is it just doesn't have context about the project or whatever it is you're working on. So like you might have called a bunch of MCPs to do research on like a customer or a support ticket or like whatever it might be and you've gathered that beautiful context and then you're like, now can you draft an email response to this person based on all this context? And that's where the AI becomes really valuable. It's that sort of foreplay of context building and then asking it to, you know, get to the main act, which is put right the actual email or edit the email. But I find myself very rarely using that sort of like autocomplete, like make this a bit longer, make it a bit more serious. Like all those examples that I'm were given constantly by product managers at these companies. I just don't know if I'm ever using that. So I like the vision, I like the vision of the tabs and it going off and doing work in the background. The problem is, and feel free to debate me in the comments if you think I'm wrong, but I just don't think it's that useful, if at all. It's just complete slot vaporware that can't actually do anything useful and I just won't use again. It's like people will use it and then be like, well what am I getting? A less secure browser with the risk of prompt injection and chatgpt just integrated everywhere. And then on top of that the safety problem, which is, and let me bring up an example to illustrate this perfectly, someone asked a question to the the search. So when you open a new tab in this browser, it decides to basically give you like some search results and then like a chat style reply. So basically everything becomes chat gbt, right? So someone said look up videos of Hitler. Which yeah, okay, it's extreme, but it's a browser and a computer. It should just like if you put that into Google, it just gives you videos of Hitler.

[Alex]

I mean it's not that extreme. You can go on Netflix and watch Hitler anytime you Want. It's not like, you know, we know he exists. Yeah, you don't have to pretend like he's not real.

[Chris]

So its response was I can't browse or display videos of Adolf Hitler since footage of him and Nazi propaganda are tightly restricted for ethical and legal reasons. So you're now bringing a browser onto your computer that is one, monitoring you and how you use the Internet. I mean, I guess Chrome kind of does too. And then two, now has the safety police of the model deciding what you can and cannot research or consume or do.

[Alex]

Yeah, that's a deal breaker for me. I would never use it for that reason alone. That's crazy. Also imagine people in corporate environments, they can never ever use a browser like this. It would breach almost every security thing you adhere to as a, as a company. Right. In terms of transmitting data. The second you, you happen to open a tab with some sort of personal information about your customers or staff, you've breached your rules.

[Chris]

I don't know, maybe I'm like 100% wrong here, but I think the current state of the AI browser thing is going to go where it's like 20 browsers and then it's going to whittle its way down back to like four main browsers like it is now. And I think the adoption of Google Chrome is just so high and it's so well integrated into Google Suite. And also to their credit with, with Microsoft and Edge, it's pretty much integrated into the Windows experience. Like most people I know on Windows just the got a new machine at least started using Edge and just sort of stuck with it. So I think those browsers and then sort of Safari on the other hand with, with like a new Mac, I just, I don't see how you disrupt the browser. Like, I really don't see how giving up like when you want to search, you want to search. When you want a chat response, you want to chat response. It just, it, I don't know, it, it doesn't make sense to me is.

[Alex]

Like the, the sort of deal isn't very fair. Like really what the companies with buying these browsers and building their own browsers, all they really want to do is man in the middle, you, they literally just want to get access to everything you're looking at for whatever reason to like maybe add some value, maybe make it slightly better for you, but also get training data and see what you're doing and also as we've seen here, have the opportunity to literally change the responses you're getting as you're Browsing the web and filter them out and things like that. So as a user, you're like, what's the trade off here? I'm getting a worse experience that's presumably slower, definitely censored and potentially breaching a whole bunch of security. Things like, it's just not very appealing, I think, to anyone. It's not innovative and really, like, aren't we past the point of people, like, customizing their browsers with like, anime and having 50,000 plugins and bonsai Buddy and all that shit in there? Like, hang on, like, the browser days are over. I don't think people care about that. They care about the applications they're using and getting their job done. I just don't think it's something where they're like, oh my God, I absolutely have to switch to Mac so I can get the Atlas browser and have it click around aimlessly and try and use a select box.

[Chris]

Yeah, I agree.

[Alex]

It doesn't.

[Chris]

It like, I just still keep coming back to, we were promised AGI and we got a web browser. You know, like, why are we here? Like, in the year of agents, it's like, yeah, cool, we got a browser agent that doesn't really do anything.

[Alex]

Yeah. Like, I often think, okay, maybe I'm naive and misguided and, and that's why I don't understand, but it's just a really confusing thing to focus on. Like, with all of the stuff that this technology can do and there's a lot, like, I feel at the moment quite overwhelmed by all of the different elements to models and sorry, not just models, I guess, but like the APIs around the models and what the ways you can work with them. Like, say, with files, with, you know, code usage and code execution. The new anthropic skills thing we'll talk about soon. There's a lot there that's actually new technology, a new way of working that can have massive benefits. I think the MCP thing still has a long way to run in terms of discovering how, just how good it can be be then to. To take a step back and go, okay, well, you know, I need, I need a little helper in my browser to constantly AI ify everything that I do. It's bad enough that Google does it on every single search. Like, if I search for like, you know, where to buy a can of tomatoes, it'll give me the full history of like, why tomatoes go in cans and the benefits of them and the antioxidants or whatever. It's like, I don't need this all the time shoved in my face. And the web browser, like you say it should be like a neutral thing that just gets out of the way and just does what it's told.

[Chris]

Yeah, we need Switzerland to build a web browser, like seriously. But yeah, I think this is the thing right there. There are clear use cases for AI today where it makes sense, where it can be helpful, where automation or running it in a loop or teaching IT skills, as you said we'll get to soon, is really useful and can really enhance your life in your workday and be a net positive. But then it's just this need from these companies now to just put it everywhere. Where it. It is getting to the point where I think the tide is turning, where you're getting into that trough of disillusionment phase of the technology where your average consumer is just sick of it being rammed down their throat everywhere they go because these companies insist on putting it everywhere. And I think by putting it everywhere, you sort of lose focus on that core product. Like the core product of like what is a new product, not a web browser, but a new product, an entirely new product that can enhance someone's productivity and really have a positive effect on GDP and improve society in general or improve your workday or just make you.

[Alex]

Happier or just make the stuff you're doing anyway better. And I think that's the problem here. I think this is a poor use of AI and it's not a good showcase of its functionality. Like, this is probably its weakest ability to. They're taking the thing that it's sort of okay at, that could be done two years ago now and just shoving it in your face. And I wonder, I mean, you could be really cynical and I think one of our commentators had said this before, but they're deliberately trying to make AI seem dumber than it is to distract people from the march towards AGI. But I think that's probably a charitable perspective. The truth is that OpenAI doesn't have the best any models anymore. Not even close. Their models are slow. They're, they're, you know, they're just not that interesting anymore.

[Chris]

I don't know about that. I think GPT5 arguably is the smartest model, like 100, hands down, the smartest model. It's not my daily driver, but it is, I'll acknowledge, I think it is the smartest if for the hardest problems.

[Alex]

Okay, well, I disagree.

[Chris]

I think you're wrong there. Anyway, it's the first time I think we've ever disagreed anyway. So chubby over On X he has a newsletter you should subscribe. GetSuperIntel.com there's the plug for his.

[Alex]

Wow. Did he pay you for that?

[Chris]

No, but I do like his. Or her. It might be a her. I don't know them. They.

[Alex]

Maybe it's an entity like an AI.

[Chris]

Yeah, it could just be an AI. So I'm really trying to see the value in the AI browser, honestly, but so far I don't see any added value. Not even compared to Perplexity. Comment that comment. That's another AI browser, but maybe that's because I'm not the target audience for those who don't work with Chat, gbt, Claude or Gemini. Every day, every hour. It might be exciting to have a browser. You can ask questions, but all the features that have been implemented are ones I could already use in chat GPT. ChatGPT agent summaries follow up questions the advertised features, such as having the agent do tasks for me, would probably take longer than if I did the clicks myself, to be honest. Again, for those who use Chat GBT or AI on a daily basis, this browser will offer little added value. I think it is intended to appeal to those who have not yet come into daily contact with AI. It is intended to lower the inhibition threshold and improve access to ChatGPT, similar to the integration of ChatGPT in a WhatsApp.

[Alex]

Lower the inhibitions by forcing people to use it on every single request.

[Chris]

That's my feeling as well, is like, there's nothing really new here. And quite. What I don't really understand is for distribution, like you, you can kind of tell that like, okay, we have distribution. What if we just create a browser that everyone starts using? So we take away browser share from Chrome and they're basically bribing people that aren't paying for ChatGPT by giving them extra usage for making it the default browser at the system level.

[Alex]

So I think fundamentally that's why I have a problem with it, because it's sort of like rich guy billionaire market share wars where they're playing the game on a totally different level. You know, like they've got the risk board of the world and they're like, oh well, if we get this many billion people using this browser, then, you know, we will control the world for the next little while. Whereas what I care about is the rise and usefulness of the technology itself and pushing the frontiers of what you can actually do with it. But it's different, I guess, if you're a company that's just after power and money. Or whatever other weird sex altruistic goals they have. But yeah, it's just not aligned with what I care about, I guess is the point.

[Chris]

Yeah, I mean this is clearly just a strategy to try and become the next Google through the guise of AI. Like try and own the browser, try and take that window to the Internet away from Google, which they might be successful at. And like they have so many daily active users that they, they may very well be successful. I don't think it, it's that close to Google yet, but it, it could build over time for sure. I wouldn't also be shocked if we, you know, see in a year from now the post, like we're discontinuing Atlas, like we're focusing out, you know, I kind of think that they could be the next Google. Just sun setting a bunch of these projects over time when they inevitably don't stick. We'll see. Maybe.

[Alex]

Yeah. I mean there's nothing wrong, there's nothing wrong with that approach. You just don't want the reputation of that like Google had for a long time, where no one's going to invest in your APIs because you might just delete them.

[Chris]

Yeah, but it's not like anyone's investing time in Atlas apart from just like putting it on their computer. I, I don't know, I think like to me it, it just feels like this hacked together incomplete project where they've just bolted chat GBT into every aspect of the browser possible and I tried to use it for a day just to like give it a fair shot and I just didn't, I don't know, like I didn't touch any of the features or use any of the AI AI things and it like it's missing plugins. I'm not going to link my 1Password in to it. So anyway, I, let's move on because it's just a browser and I, I really even regret talking about it.

[Alex]

Me too.

[Chris]

So Mustafa Sullyman had a bit of a weird event this morning. Thought we'd talk about that. We're going to get to some media stuff later, I promise. Like my fully sick new sunglasses. All of today's copilot announcements boil down to one core idea. We're betting on humanist AI. An AI that always puts humans first. Copilot groups AI browser, our new character Mikko memory updates, copilot health, yada yada. Anyway, wow, I'd love to have something positive to say about this, but if I was Microsoft, I would fire this Mustafa Sullyman. The guy is insane. Like Fully insane. He is just like, what is going on over there? Anyway, so they announced Human centered AI is a bunch of updates. He wrote this like crazy mission statement. Let's look what Human centered Copilot is in the Edge browser now compared to the ChatGPT browser. So wait, it looks exactly the same.

[Alex]

As AI, like really there for the benefit of some other creature other than humans prior to this. Like it's.

[Chris]

You know what I mean?

[Alex]

It's sort of like they're saying, oh, you know, we had it wrong before. We've really got to optimize for the people who are using this, the humans. It's just like marketing.

[Chris]

We were trying to replace the humans and now we're not. So anyway, the in the Edge browser. God, this is just so boring to even go through. We're talking about browsers. We've reached a new low. But anyway, I have to have a.

[Alex]

Do not listen warning on this podcast.

[Chris]

Yeah, I'll record one later and put it at the top of the episode. But so anyway, you open a new tab now and you get the chat like, like the, the Atlas one. You also have another chat button at the top, right? Just in case you forgot when you opened a new Chad tab that you could chat. So there's also chat in the top right. So if you can see this screen in this screenshot, it's absurd. Like, it's truly nuts. Like, why would you want this? So it's exactly the same features, basically. And now it all makes sense why Chat GPT, Atlas was Mac only, at least initially. I think it was because Microsoft and ChatGPT obviously have this weird on and on, on again, off again partnership. And so therefore, you know, they, they like decide, it's like you can release it on this day and then the next day we'll release ours. And so we have Edge as well, with AI fully integrated and TechCrunch reporting. Two days after OpenAI's Atlas, Microsoft relaunches a nearly identical AI browser. So anyway, apparently this is the future. There was a few cool features.

[Alex]

That's the best comment. Apparently this is the future. This is what it was all building up towards, guys, a chat box in a browser.

[Chris]

Like, no one's gonna use this stuff. And it's like someone said, this is a product. This is. This product is a master class in lack of cohesion. Anyone on Microsoft 365, which I'd say is most users cannot access this and instead is presented with M365 copilot, which has none of what's shown here. So it's like they announce all these sort of consumer things that no one can use or care about because most people use AI in their day to day work, let's be honest. And yeah, yeah, like, people are like.

[Alex]

Oh, I can't use it at work, but I can't wait till I get home tonight. And I can, you know, open up my special web browser and chat with the bot.

[Chris]

Yeah. And then there's this Miko character, which is a new sort of bobbly like demon spawn looking cloud thing which if you tap a bunch of times, turns into clippy.

[Alex]

Well, that's kind of funny.

[Chris]

Yeah. Anyway, I, like, I'm not, I'm not trying to poo poo this stuff, but I just think a year later, like, come on, a year later and where are we? Like, I mean, not much has changed.

[Alex]

If this was the forefront of AI, I'd quit this podcast immediately. Like, if we had to talk about stuff like this every week, I'd just be like, who cares? It's just so dull and it's not helpful. And I just can't see anyone getting excited about it, thinking, okay, no, these guys are totally wrong. This is the future of AI and this is what everyone should be using day to day.

[Chris]

But yeah, that's why I think we're in the Marge dress phase of AI, which is just keep cutting the dress different ways, shoving it in pieces, people's faces and being like, look, it's different. When really it's just the same thing. And as you said earlier, there's so much to get excited about here. That. And there's so many things that you can be doing. But they don't seem to be focusing on these use cases. Like, there's no, there's no one sitting around going, what are people actually trying to do that would make their lives more useful? And I've seen figure that out.

[Alex]

I regularly see the delight when people discover for their own, say, company or their own situation what the AI is capable of doing if it can get proper access to their context and tools. The second someone has that moment, they're like, I could use it for this, I could use it for that. This is going to change the thing. The AI just did work that would have taken me a week in 30 seconds. And it's those things that are like, truly goosebump inducing. Like, this is unbelievable. And then the models and APIs just keep improving with things that make that even better. Like, to me, that's the exciting bit where it's actually really doing something that someone has been doing a different way and can now do much, much better, which opens them up to way more possibilities. Like that's what's actually exciting.

[Chris]

Like real practical use case and why I kind of get upset at a lot of these vendors. So at the moment I have a support assistant set up in Sim Theory. I have a custom MCP I built and deployed into it that can essentially tap into Sim Theory's database. Very restricted and controlled in the sense that it can get me account information. I have the help Scout integration which we use for ticketing is basically the ability to read reply update tickets. I've got a bunch of like research tools in there to look things up. I've got stripe to use, get any like account based information or take action from an account point of view. Then I've got a prompt and some knowledge and just these are just like text knowledge files about how I approach certain things or do certain things. I last night was sitting, doing some tickets and I just literally either ask it for what it thinks are the highest priority or cut and paste the URL of a ticket I want to get it to, to respond to. And then it's able to go and decide which is again the use of AI. It'll call like six of these tools, get full context, generally diagnose the problem and solve it and then be like, I've drafted a response, do you want to send it? Just read it for me. It can also do this fairly asynchronously. Like you could, you can open multiple tabs and get it to work on multiple things at once. Or I can just say get the latest 10 and just draft responses and solve them all. And it will do it. And interestingly enough, for speed, I've now switched to Claude Haiku 4.5, which we should talk about for a minute, is a brilliant model. It's fast, it's insanely good at asynchronous tool calling. It's smart enough for these kind of tars. And by doing that every time I use it, I'm like this thing is magical. It's, it's like, oh, there's something not right here. I'll go look over here. Okay, I've matched it up here. Okay, now I'm drafting a response. It's also storing memory so as it's responding to common things over time it's getting better. I'm noticing it responding to things because it's developing core memories. And so the next step of that is like, okay, well I could probably start to put in some sort of asynchronous loop. And I know these things aren't necessarily new, like there's very dedicated applications for these things things. But if you can imagine a lot of these tasks and processes you do in your day to day at work and then being able to teach it, work with it manually for a while and then decide, okay, I think it's at a level where it can work autonomously on some things. So now I'll give it permission and you sort of build up like the foreplay of building up to building the perfect.

[Alex]

We're going to talk about this soon. But I think this is where the idea of skills are going to come in. The idea that, that build up process, the foreplay that gets the AI horny or whatever, you can predefine now in a skill and you can set that up so you don't have to have that session of getting. Because I spoke to you about it during the week, I said I need to remind myself that I am the most productive working with the AI when I just take the time to expose the problem I'm trying to work on. So dot points of here's what I'm trying to do today. Here are all the relevant files that you need to know. Here's the documentation that we need to work with and get all the pieces together and then start saying, okay, what's next, what's next, what's next? Now I really feel like with the right skill building that you can actually do that in a single shot. You can have that ready so you can enter that, that mindset with those skills and then just start in that full context right from the beginning. And I think for me that's the next big thing I'm excited about is how do I get into that state all the time. It's almost like a flow state when you're working yourself, how do you get the AI in that flow state straight away? So you sit down, you open your 16 chat windows or whatever and then you just getting stuff done, launching tasks asynchronously and being a power worker.

[Chris]

But to bring it back to chat, GBT and Copilot and all these announcements and why I get disappointed, right, is we know the power of being able to call all these different tools and build your own custom MCP's that give you access to like your own data to make you more productive like. And a lot of people in the community have been asking for us to do some tutorials on that and we plan to do it because we think It's a different way of working and once you discover it it really is pretty game changing. So we're committing to that. But what is interesting is their implementation right now is. And I think it's because their models suck, honestly at the asynchronous sort of agentic workflows outside of Anthropic's models and then some of the open source ones like GLM and stuff like that. But I think the core problem here is then the vision we got presented a couple of weeks ago is like apps with UI and all this other stuff which can be useful in some scenarios for like reviewing things. But really let's be honest, like what, what matters is that context build up and it going off and doing the work. Like wasn't that the whole premise of all this stuff? And yet we're being painted a vision where we have to click plus and be like I'm going to select the booking.com skill.

[Alex]

Like I mean just this week I was working on a custom MCP with a company and they gave it access to like read only access to a database that had statistics about their industry that they're regularly required to report on. Right. And I said give it a list of like the hardest things that are to that there are for you to calculate and track over different cohorts and make a list of those and let's ask the AI to do it. It did something like 30 separate SQL queries and like hardcore SQL with like coalesce and other keywords in there that us regular people would have to look up, produce like chunks and chunks of data, then use code interpreter to produce multiple graphs and like a 20 page document that they said would have taken them a week to produce normally. Like we're talking about absolutely incredible power that's sitting there right now. If a company, organization, person, whatever is able to expose it in a tool to the AI agentic workflows like the, the power there is absolutely immense. And so you're right, it's, it's just weird that the people who kicked off this whole thing and had tool calling for a long time had mcps in there pretty early on, just don't see that. They just don't see that that's where the actual value is. I just really find it like their actions just don't match. What's the reality of the real value?

[Chris]

This is just like full tilt consumer side and maybe on the other side we get like this sort of enterprise tilt, but it doesn't. Yeah, it just seems like at the moment OpenAI is spread so thin across so many things. Like they're trying to make this sort of agentic, I'll browse the web for you task thing work. And while like I'm such a big believer in it long term, like I think long term similar to like full self driving a car, I think in like six years from now it'll be really common to just get the, the AI in the background to go off and do stuff for you. I think it'll be pretty normal.

[Alex]

We have a unique perspective of this because we're working on Simlink and I already know that I can do a better job than them in terms of controlling the computer. And I'm not saying me personally like I'm some sort of genius, but I'm saying using their models and the looped workflows that have been around for a while now, I know that it's possible to get at least as good results of that. The reason I think I can do better is the context building. Like a huge part of what simlink is going to do is allow you to build a context for the thing that you're trying to accomplish. So like accessing the files on your disk, having somewhere to put outputs, being able to call off to local and remote MCPs to gather more context and then if necessary control the computer, if necessary control the browser to gather more information or log into a portal or whatever the, the action bit is. But it isn't this, this just like raw, empty chat box that's like okay, plan my trip to Chicago. It's, it's a wholly integrated holistic approach that's designed to gather as much context as possible and then take the actions based on like really not like a knowledgeable plan.

[Chris]

It feels like we're getting the sterilized like watered down version because they think people are stupid. Like they're like if we dumb it down to just the most dumb possible, then maybe they'll use it and maybe everyone will adopt it. Like I, I just think honestly to get the most value this stuff, they should just be going max stream, like full all in max stream on like you know, a, like a trainable agent that can do like. Because it's like all the tools are there, right? It's just, it's time consuming to put them together and think through how that will work in reality.

[Alex]

Well yeah, because, because we're small and because like you know, if they, if they were to come out and release some amazing guide for people to do all of the things I just described and then they use their, all their team to make like video after video of, here's how you do it, here's how you build a corporate mcp, here's how you train skills, here's how you move into an agentic world. They've got onboarding tools, videos, all this stuff to do it. That would scare the crap out of me. That would make me be like, oh, what's the point? Like, these guys have just done it all, but they're just moving in such a different direction. I'm like, it's just so confusing to me. Especially like, remember in the early days, Open AI was like, oh, we've partnered with Coke, we've partnered with these guys to deliver corporate insights the world has never seen. And then that sort of will just went away.

[Chris]

Yeah. I mean, it's probably still happening behind the background, but I think the core point is that it felt like it was going from pushing the boundaries of this stuff, like really pushing forward and trying to think, well, what can we do with this stuff? To just the in Asian really of the whole thing to the point of like just. Yeah, just like. Like it's like, you've got GBT5. I know what we'll do. Dumb it down and whack it in a browser like that. That's the best we can come up with right now. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on. So we did want to talk about Claude skills. Claude skills. This came out about the same time as we were recording last week. So we did. We didn't really get to it because we didn't know what it was. So it says Claude can now use skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills of folders that include instructions, scripts and resources that Claude can load when needed. Now everyone's kind of read this. Chris, can you tell us what it actually is?

[Alex]

Yes, I can. So the thing about this is I wasn't that excited when it was announced and didn't really spend a lot of time looking into it, but it's one of these things where the deeper I've gone into it, the more and more significant I think it is in terms of being able to get the most out of the models in the most efficient way. It's actually an incredibly powerful paradigm of working and it's going to be a little bit tricky with the words like skills and tools and all these things to understand the difference. But there is a distinct difference and there are major direct advantages to.