I'm a designer, but I admit it's really hard to predict what products and UX are going to work in the AI age.
Chatbots have been tried for a decade and were a total failure. With AI, it has become the fastest-growing way to interact with technology, ever.
GPT-5 tried to have an auto router and create abstraction for the user; people hated it. Instinct and Muse are doing the same with a different framing; it's going wild.
There are tons of these little examples where a small difference in framing, a small threshold in tech, and product assumptions completely flip on their heads.
It's amazing to follow but requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
GPT-5's auto routing was bad, you'd get off the cuff bad answers for hard questions and overthinking on the banal. Also, with a chatbot the idea is that it's a back and forth but 5 minutes of thinking kills that, whereas fire and forget is core to the idea of autonomous agents.
Agents are going to replace almost all the UI in computers. For a trivial example, things like a control panel or settings menu will cease to exist, you'll handle coarse things via conversation ("set volume to 20%"), and UIs will be presented only for things where chat is cumbersome ("the password for the printer is !-*Donkey_Loves_Shrek^^@"). The UI that remains will become heavily decoupled, like supercharged versions of the office ribbons, with the intent that the agent will compose menu fragments and capability widgets dynamically so you only ever need to see controls for the settings that are relevant and that you care about.
Sorry for being dismissive. What I mean is, volume is something people generally don’t think about in percentages, but by feel/ear. It’s also adjusted so often and impulsively that doing it via chat would be extremely slow and unergonomic. So yeah, I don’t think that should happen.
Essentially. I don't know much Linux, but I've had no problems putting together a capable, well-configured, and secure Linux box by using Claude Code as the CLI 99% of the time. Occasionally it gives me a command that needs to be pasted into a separate terminal window, but for the most part it just works on its own (and boy, does it struggle sometimes.)
A key point is that the box might as well be running BeOS or Windows or HP-UX or OS/360 or something. It doesn't matter much anymore, any more than my choice of programming language does. Requires some mental adjustment.
Adrig · · focus · HN ↗
Chatbots have been tried for a decade and were a total failure. With AI, it has become the fastest-growing way to interact with technology, ever.
GPT-5 tried to have an auto router and create abstraction for the user; people hated it. Instinct and Muse are doing the same with a different framing; it's going wild.
There are tons of these little examples where a small difference in framing, a small threshold in tech, and product assumptions completely flip on their heads.
It's amazing to follow but requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
CuriouslyC · · focus · HN ↗
Agents are going to replace almost all the UI in computers. For a trivial example, things like a control panel or settings menu will cease to exist, you'll handle coarse things via conversation ("set volume to 20%"), and UIs will be presented only for things where chat is cumbersome ("the password for the printer is !-*Donkey_Loves_Shrek^^@"). The UI that remains will become heavily decoupled, like supercharged versions of the office ribbons, with the intent that the agent will compose menu fragments and capability widgets dynamically so you only ever need to see controls for the settings that are relevant and that you care about.
ch_sm · · focus · HN ↗
haha oh god no please don’t.
EDIT:
Sorry for being dismissive. What I mean is, volume is something people generally don’t think about in percentages, but by feel/ear. It’s also adjusted so often and impulsively that doing it via chat would be extremely slow and unergonomic. So yeah, I don’t think that should happen.
CamperBob2 · · focus · HN ↗
ch_sm · · focus · HN ↗
CamperBob2 · · focus · HN ↗
A key point is that the box might as well be running BeOS or Windows or HP-UX or OS/360 or something. It doesn't matter much anymore, any more than my choice of programming language does. Requires some mental adjustment.
ch_sm · · focus · HN ↗
> don't know much Linux, but I've had no problems putting together a capable, well-configured, and secure Linux box by using Claude Code
How can you be sure of it being well configured and secure? Especially if you don‘t know much about Linux?
CamperBob2 · · focus · HN ↗
In practice, that means I at least stick around and watch when Claude tells me to curl | sudo bash something. :-P