AI Needs a Copy & Paste Moment
Early graphical interfaces were command-based. They borrowed from the way of thinking required of the command line. Operations were verb-first. That is, a user had to remember a command, type it (or select it) and then specify what to apply it to.
Even with GUIs, something as simple as moving text within a document was a multi-step process with a high cognitive load required of the user. The editor was modal, that is, state-based. The user had to keep track of what mode the editor was in before pressing a key. It required the user to commit to an action before specifying what it acted on. This made error recovery complicated. The text loaded was loaded to a memory buffer which was not protected from other user actions.
Moving text from one application to another likely meant you were at the bleeding edge of computing at the time. The mechanism to do this were obscure, brittle and errors were often left unexplained.
Larry Tesler and Tim Mott invented copy and paste with the key insight of making the operation noun-first. The text is selected, first. The action (cut or copy) is chosen second. The user can paste the text after they choose its new location. They can type something else before pasting. They can paste it twice. They can not paste it at all. The implications in terms of memory are managed by the software, not the user.
This seems obvious now but it was a complete reversal in how computer software was designed for users.
AI needs a copy and paste moment. Users have a task they wish to accomplish in mind. Yet, they are forced to think about their prompting style, manage the content of their context, the size of their context windows and must be careful of compaction and summarization. They have to keep track of what model they are using and what tools and plugins are being called.
Current AI is full of such hidden modes but the technology is often presented to use as magic.