Metalayers with AI

The lack of interoperability of things, and lack of APIs will be a challenge for AI to become a really good general assistant.

Metalayers with AI

As I was cycling to work yesterday, I was a little bit anxious to start work. Monday I couldn’t do much because my kids were sick, and during that day I had seen messages pile up in my inboxes from everyone else who had committed to making 6 Jan the first ‘real’ day of work. So while cycling I started fantasizing about clearing my messages through a voice interface with my headphones. It struck me (again), that there is going to be a problem with this if AI’s ability to function as a true metalayer is somehow hamstrung. A metalayer is something that operates across all applications. Copy/paste is a great example of a metalayer so obvious now that we take it for granted. Apple quite recently took the layer up another level with cross-device copy/paste (awesome feature!).

Siri has long been hamstrung as a metalayer by it’s inability to do pretty much anything useful. Apple Intelligence is trying to change this, but it’s going very slowly. At least I can now reliably WhatsApp people just by talking to my earphones, but it’s all still very basic. Now back to my cycling moment. I do not use any of Apple’s built-in apps. For email, I use Superhuman, for calendar Vimcal, Reflect for notes. In Superhuman I have three email accounts, and each has several different custom ‘splits’, or buckets based on some set of filters. Will Siri get full access to Superhuman? Will it allow me to manage my email according to the rules of my email setup? I think it will be problematic. It stands to reason that Siri won’t support advanced actions in 3rd party apps. A cynical take would be that Apple might even deliberately make Siri support for 3rd party email/calendar/notes apps shitty, to boost their own versions of those tools.

Calendar is another interesting one. The interactions are more basic. But the built-in calendar apps are so bad, and it’s clear why. The calendar market is brutal because many people have a passion for building calendar tools, and while the Total Addressable Market is huge, the Serviceable Obtainable Market is very small. A lot of people hardly use a calendar app at all, and the vast majority of the ones who do uses a free app bundled with their device. There is little incentive for Apple or Google to build a really good calendar app. But maybe, they can build a good metalayer version of it.

I’m a long-time believer that calendar should ideally be a meta-layer. It should just exist in the background, wherever you are. Many elements to achieve this exist, widgets, NLP event creation, notifications. But the metalayer is not complete yet. I can’t get Siri to tell me my availability on my watch, unless I use Apple’s built-in calendar (maybe? I’m gonna try). I can’t send invites via anything other than email. I can’t move events around without either my phone or laptop (and it sucks to that on phone). With Apple Intelligence gradually getting more interesting, I’ve already decided that the time is coming for my once per 4 years retry of Apple’s native mail and calendar tools. So far it has always been so deeply and instantly disappointing that it was over in a matter of hours, but each time I have fresh hope.

But back to Metalayers. The general lack of interoperability is going to be a major impediment for AI implementation. The grocery example I wrote about last year was about the fact that I can now easily do my weekly meal planning and create the grocery list with AI, but I still have to manually input the items in an online grocery delivery app. I tried to get the Claude agent to do it but it was a total disaster. It will get there, but not yet, and it will order you a bunch of wildly wrong things 1% of the time, which is bad enough that every 1 or 2 weeks you will get a random surprise with your groceries.

A year ago, I accidentally bought a 200 packs of tissue boxes instead of a 20 pack. I ended up spreading them around over all the empty closet space in the house. Only one are we finally getting close to running out of tissues. If you get a mistake like that almost every week, that’s going to be pretty damn annoying.