Everything Talks to Everything
Many, many years ago I bought the single least useful piece of technology I’ve ever encountered. Or rather, a piece of technology that had an incredibly short lifespan. It was a special adapter to allow you to pipe MP3 files straight to your portable MiniDisc recorder.
Not my best purchase.
Anyway, this was brought to mind last week when I signed up for Runna, the running coaching app. I’m training for another half marathon later this year with the goal of improving on my time. Friends and family had recommended Runna to me, and when it came in with an offer of an extended free trial, I succumbed. And I like it.
What I don’t like is the fact that it doesn’t talk to my preferred brand of running watch.
Incompatibility
This is not a new problem. Lots of consumer technology domains are plagued by incompatibility. Music still has issues: not everything will stream to or play on everything. Likewise smart home technology. Lots of incompatible standards.
Business software is the same. Importing one file type into another app can be a right pain.
But the beginning of the end of this issue might be visible.
Enter AI
Unwilling to change watch brands, I opened up Claude Code and tasked it with solving the problem. If Runna exports to something and my Wahoo watch will import from somethingelse, then surely there must be a way to make them talk to each other?
Claude needed a little help. It failed to find the right technical documentation to solve the problem at first. And it took a few iterations with me finding and feeding back issues before we made it work. But in probably less than 90 minutes total work, we had a fully featured sync running on my home server that collects my latest programmed workouts from Runna and syncs them to my watch app overnight, ready for my run the next morning.
Babelfish
Take this idea and zoom out. Imagine a few more iterations of AI advancement to produce models that need less steering to solve such technical problems. That do it with little prompting. Imagine how utterly seamless our technological world could be with AI bridging the gaps.
Yes, this is a lot of computing overhead to solve what are really design, user experience, market, and regulatory problems. But it takes a very long time for those issues to get solved, if they ever get solved at all. AI might mean we notice nothing - except our monthly compute bill.
Image credit: BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Original design: Rob Lord.