AI is not great at browser use at the moment and it's also quite inelegant to force it to. It's one thing if it reads your nicely marked down blog, it's another for it to do my groceries order by clicking around a clunky site and repeatedly taking screenshots. Not to mention how many tokens are burnt up with what could be a simple REST call.

So to answer your first question, it's less about _reading_ and more about _doing_. The interfaces for humans are not always the best interfaces for machines and vice versa in the doing, because we're no longer dealing with text but dynamic UIs. So we can cut out the middle man.

As for coding, Karpathy said it best: there will be a split between those who love to code and those who love to build. I too enjoyed writing code as a craft, and I'll miss doing it for a living and the recognition for being really fast at it, but I can do so much more than I could before now, genuinely. We'll just have to lean more into our joy of building and hand-code on the side. People still painted even after the camera was invented.

Yes, when I said Betamax I was actually referring to Swagger/OpenAPI. It's been around for a while but it didn't catch on the way MCP did.

What I'm saying is that the AI hype is making people make that business decision, and that is ultimately a good thing because it means more human accessibility. Not just for people with disabilities, but through interoperability and fewer silos like YouTube.

I suspect people will get pretty riled up in the comments. This is fine folks. More people will make their stuff machine-accessible and that's a good thing even if MCP won't last or if it's like VHS -- yes Betamax was better, but VHS pushed home video.

I came to a similar realisation about world news a few years ago and live a much less stressful life now. Especially since most of the news was about the US, and I don't even live there and there's nothing I can do about it. If something really important happens, eventually I find out from friends or family.

Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead.

One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.

I currently use Hapi (https://github.com/tiann/hapi/) for this and find it quite handy. I can easily tap into a session on my PC from my phone.

Before that I used Happy (https://happy.engineering/) which is also open source and a lot more sophisticated. It has a voice assistant that can chat with Claude Code on your behalf in the mobile app. However, it wasn't very reliable, and there are other reasons to use Hapi instead (documented in the Hapi repo).

Before that, Omnara (https://www.omnara.com/) a YC company and seemingly a proprietary Happy fork (?) but it never worked properly for me.

Long story short, there are a few of the around, and frankly I really like to use them. Unlike other commenters, I don't find that they wreck my work-life balance. Rather, I can go out and have a walk in the park, only checking in on long-running tasks every once in a while. The diff view is pretty good too. There are many tasks where I'd rather not stare at my PC all day and instead do other things, and these tools allow me to do that.