interesting, unsolved technical problems | catherine jue

One attribute of building for the bleeding edge is that there are a lot of interesting technical problems that no one's solved before. This may sound obvious—and is obvious in fields like frontier model research—but I've increasingly noticed that it exists in less expected, adjacent areas of software as well. Here's one example we've come across at Kernel: a remote, read/write GUI for humans to access a Computer Using Agent's workspace. In the world of AI agents, it's become common practice to spin up isolated virtual machines for AI agents to do their work in, rather than allowing agents to run on your actual computer. This is reasonably straightforward, but it introduces a new challenge: in this modality, a human now needs a way to remotely access the agent's machine to debug or manually intervene—ideally with a visual interface to operate on the same machine the agent has access to. Technology for remote GUIs has existed well before LLMs but is a relatively niche corner of software.

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• Davis Brown