There’s a creeping notion that Claude Code (and OpenAI Codex, I guess) are very useful for things that are not code. In the Obsidian community, where you keep your decades of notes as plain text, markdown files, some people are using Claude Code to do analysis, reformatting, etc. of their notes. I can see that you could do the same thing with the pile of Dungeons & Dragons stuff I have laying around.

This makes sense, really. Source code is just plain text as well.

Doing this kind of thing from your desktop, where you control all of the integrations and data access instead of waiting for a developer to do it for you, feels like it’d be easy. I think the Goose people are figuring out this form-factor for AI apps: focus on building out a tool belt (MCP as plugins) for a general purpose chat app rather than fit-for-purpose apps that use AI in the background. A classic suite versus point-solution situation.

Here is my current theory: the GenAI we start seeing in enterprises won’t be integrated into your existing apps (like online banking), but will show up (still) in the form-factor of chat apps in those apps (those little pop-ups in the lower-right hand corner, except now they have all your context) or tool belt apps like Goose.

That is, AI will not be integrated into existing apps, it will be a new, stand-alone app (or “workload”).

Somewhat related: I’ve been consistently disappointed by Gemini’s integration into Google Suites (we have this at work). Yesterday I asked it to do some simple reformatting of a column in Sheets (convert date formats) and it flat out said “I can’t do that.” I took a screenshot of the dates column, gave it to ChatGPT, and asked it to reformat the dates and output it in a format ready to paste into Sheets. It did it perfectly, instantly. Most of the time when I use AI integrated into an app, I really just what the standard chat interface that can pull from and push back to that app.

That feels like what Claide Code is trying to do. I’ll have to try it out in Claide Not Code style.