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.
> requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
This is what happens if you try to read the data like gospel without having a mental model to interpret it... in other words, critical thinking.
Chatbots are a failure because chat capabilities have sucked for most of the past decade and chatbots weren't really capable enough to do anything meaningful. Not because chat is fundamentally bad. Similarly with auto-router.
Also, if you want to "cross the chasm" you cannot measure reactions from current AI users (early adopters) and extrapolate to the rest of the populace. Early adopters are paying you for tokens and try to wieid them like a surgical tool; across the chasm the rest really don't want to know anything about "tokens" or models tiers or "thinking level".
Chatbots also had huge drawbacks that are still present with AI:
- Inability to see what outcomes are possible
- Very constrained environment with only lightly formatted text
- Sequential flow
You can see how the modern AI chat interface tries to overcome these issues. But even then, just the power of LLMs made users adopt this approach massively despite these drawbacks
Hindsight is 20/20, maybe you can accurately predict the inflection point of every modality, but the fact that most AI patterns currently used started as a quick experiment shows that most people can't, and probably shouldn't.
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.
ssivark · · focus · HN ↗
This is what happens if you try to read the data like gospel without having a mental model to interpret it... in other words, critical thinking.
Chatbots are a failure because chat capabilities have sucked for most of the past decade and chatbots weren't really capable enough to do anything meaningful. Not because chat is fundamentally bad. Similarly with auto-router.
Also, if you want to "cross the chasm" you cannot measure reactions from current AI users (early adopters) and extrapolate to the rest of the populace. Early adopters are paying you for tokens and try to wieid them like a surgical tool; across the chasm the rest really don't want to know anything about "tokens" or models tiers or "thinking level".
Adrig · · focus · HN ↗
Chatbots also had huge drawbacks that are still present with AI: - Inability to see what outcomes are possible - Very constrained environment with only lightly formatted text - Sequential flow
You can see how the modern AI chat interface tries to overcome these issues. But even then, just the power of LLMs made users adopt this approach massively despite these drawbacks
Hindsight is 20/20, maybe you can accurately predict the inflection point of every modality, but the fact that most AI patterns currently used started as a quick experiment shows that most people can't, and probably shouldn't.