I’ve dreamt for decades that there must be a system on the horizon that learns your patterns to repeat tasks. The common thing you do each morning where you have to read your emails, reply to someone, then do a certain action – such as downloading a file, setting up an account for someone, filing certain documents in a folder. If only there was something watching you perform those steps that could be used as a macro.
Back in the day I was a systems ops and rollout enginer for CSC. Managing the migration and upgrades of thousands of normal office worker’s computers. Think Windows XP to Windows 7. Migrating emails, documents, software I automated the lot. Much to the frustration of my co-workers who enjoyed getting paid by the hour as contractors. I recorded basic macros, key commands, sometimes even mouse movements to overcome tricky obstacles. Add a few time delays or “wait for prompt” dialogues and I got there. Muddling together basic migration apps we could deploy en-mass whilst we enjoyed a beer down the pub.
All the while however I was thinking about our Operating Systems that we use all day long, repeating the same arduos tasks and proceedures. Surely a system should recognise and know I’m repeating something, with frequency, and present a suitable automation or option to that. I’ve even often wondered why menus are simply dynamic – If I keep trundling through a city of menus and eventually find what I needed, why doesn’t that menu remember that I want that option displayed first, as a commonly used thing?
Our systems are not alive. And they should be.
Now with AI booming. Everyone vibe coding. I wonder if we’ll revisit my old dreams. Will anyone take the care or thought to make systems self organising, or will AI simply supersede us before we need to?
Claude Code recognised I had been renaming files it had been generating for me. After a few rounds of iterating it renamed the last one to the naming convention I had been doing.
So we are close.