Is the AI any good? Working ok or are there some bugs still? Also is Siri any better (don’t think it could get worse, but still…)?
My opinion:
stable OS
Siri is marginally better…barely. In light of the current state of the art, it will be very, very disappointing to many – it is still an idiot
the auto summaries are decent
the AI has no discernible connection to personal context
there are features that got rolled into the Apple Intelligence tent, but I think would have been there if Apple Intelligence had never been announced (e.g. wider availability of transcriptions)
the real improvements are what you would typically expect during one of the good OS upgrades but nothing to change the world…just good iteration
Summary, Apple is far behind (at least 2 years by their own admission) and getting further behind. Can they recover? Under Jobs I would say certainly. Under Tim? I think they can buy I don’t have much confidence. Everything Tim as done without Steve (not including projects Steve got started) has been about risk reduction and control. AI is a Wild West and Tim is out of his depth.
As a corollary, Xcode is getting a bit better code completion. Meanwhile the world is way beyond that. Significant improvements to Apple products and developer productivity will be from using tools outside of the Apple ecosystem.
This! There are so many amazing advances being made outside of the Apple ecosystem that it’s getting more and more difficult to justify using Apple supplied tools. Even with something as simple as a Terminal app, Warp has completely changed changed my expectations of what a terminal (infused with AI) can be, never mind what’s happening with IDEs (Zed, Cursor, etc) and other languages (ahem, Rust). And with the recent 2.0 release of Tauri, I suspect we’ll be seeing fewer and fewer apps relying on Electron in the not too distant future.
While I love the idea of using macOS native apps, I’m finding there are increasingly much better options available today. Even doing a simple search in Apple Music often results in an error, after a long, and disappointing wait. And this is just basic search functionality?!
As @jscotta mentioned, an Apple under Jobs would likely pull a rabbit out of a hat, but an Apple under Cook will focus on scaling hat production and miss the opportunity entirely.
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That is disappointing, I was hoping to see big improvements with Siri. Maybe as they do more integrations with OpenAI and possible other firms it will improve. Will give it a test though when it’s released.
This is interesting, I use iTerm2, and when the developer tried to add ChatGPT integration into the app on a recent update a few months ago, a vocal segment of the community dragged him for it, to the point that he had to backtrack and push out an update that moved the integration from being built-in to being an extension that had to be manually installed and enabled. They really weren’t having any part of AI being built into the app.
This seems like it would make a lot of people happy, I had the impression not many people liked Electron apps, again another popular app 1Password got a lot of critical pushback for making 1Password 8 an Electron app.
I think the difference with Warp is that the product was conceived to integrate AI from the beginning, whereas iTerm2 has been around for a while, with a very dedicated user base. I can definitely understand their reluctance as AI features in ‘legacy’ apps often feel bolted on, and don’t add much to the existing experience. Warp is a very different terminal app, much like Zed (and Cursor) are very different IDEs.
I believe 1Password has been a big supporter of Tauri (and Rust in general), but I don’t think they’ve switched from using Electron (yet). For me Electron has always been a stop-gap solution (much like PhoneGap/Apache Cordova was for mobile), and with desktop browsers (that ship with the OS) now providing a fairly consistent experience there’s no need to bundle Chromium, and having languages such as Rust that make deploying much more performant code to multiple platforms much easier provides designers and developers a much more modern, efficient, and performant alternative to Electron.
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Completely agree!
I have been a BBEdit user for longer than I care to tell. The Chat Worksheet is exactly that…bolted on. There is no benefit over using a separate GenAI chat app. In fact, you lose a lot with the new stuff like the Canvas ChatGPT or Artifacts in Claude.
BTW…thanks for the Warp introduction. I was not aware of it.
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Yeah, I’ve spent over 30 years using BBEdit, and it’s always been one of the first (if not the first) apps I install on a fresh machine. Unfortunately, as fond as I am of it, I simply don’t have much use for it anymore beyond text diffs of Pages documents (after Kaleidoscope pivoted to their insane subscription license), or when I need a text editor with AppleScript support (which is far less than I used to).
I upgraded to v15, but that’s likely the end of the line for me and BBEdit. 
According to hints from some tight-lipped BareBones representative, I think they are going to be significantly upgrading BBEdit very soon. I think that Cursor/Zed/VS Code AI integrations may have shaken them up a bit.
It would be amazing to near agentic support in BBEdit. MacOS may be causing issues with some of the support needed for this to happen natively, but it could happen. We’ll see and I’ll pray.
Warp is very useful, by the way. Now if only it had Realtime voice integration. Along that line, have you see this guys project:
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And…I just saw this from Anthropic…
The AI Engineering 2025 Plan was a bit cringy (“this is my plan for how to win in 2025…”), and felt like a typical vision piece — a solution in search of a problem.
I’m really impressed with the Claude demo, but between constantly sending screenshots of your desktop to the service, and potentially having full access to your computer it does feel like a massive potential exploit waiting to happen. 
That would be great if the folks at BBEdit were actively working on remaining relevant for the years to come.
I agree with the screenshot issue. I think of all of these as proof of concept more than usable apps. Yes, on a remote system today…tomorrow? We’ll see. That is one of the positives about Apple’s stated approach with on-device processing. However, I think we are going to need Apple AI server and Apple AI server mini boxes that we can buy and not iCloud AI for this to happen.
As to the AI Engineering 2025 Plan, I disagree with you. I can easily see an AI assistant software engineer in the near future. He was showing it doing very simple tasks that could be accomplished just as easily by typing in the commands. However, as the power of his agent grows, he can give it larger and larger tasks to do in parallel with what he is doing. That is coming sooner that people realize.
@jscotta & @bryanrieger great conversation. 