UI Is Dying. Can We Save It?

[00:00:00]This is the Starbucks app. Pretty standard. And this is the future. Their Starbucks plugin for CHBT where agents can finally do things for you. And oh, the old app is done. And the future of computing is still taking forever trying to get me a drink. The most advanced technology ever built just lost the race to a few buttons on an app that's been around for 15 years. Buttons, menus, and screens are getting replaced by a gray rectangle just says, "What do you want to do?" But why? Is this really the future of how we're going to interact with our tech? Well, no. There's actually something much more interesting going on here. I spent the last month deep into the rabbit hole. Talk to the people building at the cutting edge. And there's something else shaping up. A solution, a light at the end of the tunnel. And it's not the buttons and menus and UI we used for the past 40 years. But it's also not chatbots and agents that took over every single app you use. It's something different. But to understand it, we first have to understand why every single attempt at killing user interfaces has been a gigantic failure. Starting from devices, Microsoft just announced that badge looking new AI device. The Humane PIN raised $230 million to replace screens and ended up being one of the biggest tech fails of all time. Similar thing happened with a rabbit and many other gadgets. The original vision for Siri and Alexa and Google Home was that they were the future of computing. And now I have this Google Home in the back here and it's basically a glorified light switch for my smart lights and a way to set alarms when I cook pasta. Anytime I open WhatsApp, now there's this Meta AI button sitting here in the most prominent place in the app. Microsoft went a step further and now all Windows computers must ship with this copilot key. But great products spread organically. No one had to put a Gmail key in your keyboard. You just chose to use it because it's a better product.

[00:01:45]But what's interesting here is that the idea of asking your tech naturally to do things for you seems like it's the future. That's what science fiction has taught us. So why do these products fail? They had billions of dollars, the best teams, but their problem was much simpler. Listen to the demo again.

[00:02:01]>> Get me a ride from my office. Home now.

[00:02:04]>> Of course. I will book an Uber ride for you from your office to your home.

[00:02:09]>> Please confirm the ride.

[00:02:12]They are trying to push a new way of interacting with technology for something that our graphical user interface is already amazing at. Booking an Uber, ordering coffee, sending a message. These are all very simple, relatable, habitual tasks done in apps that you know like the back of your hand. Let's make a little experiment.

[00:02:29]Close your eyes and unlock your phone.

[00:02:31]Without even looking, you probably know where all the apps on your home screen are. You can probably open the right one you wanted. So, this is all happening right here. But it's also where things start to get interesting because on the other side of the spectrum, we are seeing the biggest gold rush in the last 20 years of tech that no one had predicted. Coding tools like cloud code and codecs were supposed to be used by software engineers, but they've been spreading like wildfire among regular people to edit videos, create automations, organize files, do your taxes. You can find so many tutorials and guides online. And this is not because someone put a big AI button in your face. This all happened organically. Hell, I'm writing this video in VS Code using clot code in a terminal as a writing assistant and created a system of skills that do things for me and do research and search X. I did my taxes yesterday in a coding tool connected to my Gmail accounts. I have it pull receipts, photos from Google, match everything and save everything to my notion for my accountant to review. All without clicking a single button or using a single graphical user interface. Me and many others are now at the stage where I get annoyed when a tool I use doesn't connect to my coding agent to have it do stuff for me. I even get annoyed when my clical agents do things autonomously for like an hour and now it's asking me to log into my account which takes like 5 seconds. This is a radical shift in behavior and this shift is already causing tech products to adapt. Linear, one of the most popular issue tracking tools went from looking like this to this. Post Hog, the tool I use for the analytics of my product Flask, also went from this to looking like this.

[00:04:02]Salesforce went a step further and they released a headless version of their product, meaning it doesn't even have a UI because it's meant to be used by agents, robots, not humans. Notion and Google have done the same by releasing their CLI, a set of terminal commands meant to be used not by humans, but by agents, that allow AI tools to create calendar events, read your email, or get a block from a notion page. These products spent years carefully crafting their user interface and now they're basically saying you don't want to use that anymore. So while some products and devices have been trying to kill UI and failed miserably from the other side of the spectrum we are seeing incredible organic adoption for tools that are supposed to be for techies. We're seeing normal people getting into terminals, CLIs and MCPS. They are getting their machine their agents to do boring, repetitive and timeconuming work. Even this very animation when I was editing videos myself in After Effects, something like this was so painful to manually animate. But I made this fully using cloud code. Some specialized skills and some packages like Remotion and I didn't touch a single button of a graphical user interface to make this animation. If you told me that like 2 years ago, it would have seemed like pure science fiction. For example, for as much as I love a free, super powerful 3D tool like Blender, navigating this interface to find the one feature I need in a sea of menus makes me sick. I want my agent to do it for me. And so that's it. This is the solution. Everything is going to be agentic and controlled by chat bots and with no UI. And that's the future. And well, no. Because to understand what's actually happening, we need to dive deeper. We need to understand the one thing that made the graphical user interface work in the first place. And that's also the biggest problem with all of these AI systems, direct manipulation. But before we get to that, we covered a lot of technical stuff so far. CL code, agents, terminals. But what if you want to build a real product and you've never touched any of that before? Well, that's where the friends of the channel at Lovable come in. See, I have this list of business ideas that I carry around since middle school. And one of these things is a stock market for your time where people can bid for 1 hour of your time in the future. So, if I believe my friend will be the next Elon Musk, I can book 1 hour of his time 10 years from now. And it can be bought and sold. So, let's actually build this business. I open up Lovable. I used a dictation to explain the core concept of the business. We wanted to accept payments.

[00:06:14]It should have a stock market kind of feel and a time slot picker for booking hours and time with people. And boom.

[00:06:21]After a few iterations where I could tweak things exactly how I want them, there it is. And this is not a mockup.

[00:06:26]It's a real live app with user accounts, a real database. It accepts payments and manages the entire stock market I built with real money. Lovable even lets you get a domain and host the entire thing for you. So you just share the link and you're up and running. 40 million projects have already been built on Lovable. 200,000 new ones launching every single day. If you've got that business idea in your head that you wanted to build, you can check out Lovable at the link in the description.

[00:06:50]But now, back to the video because this is where it gets really interesting.

[00:06:54]Take a photo on your phone and pinch to zoom in. What just happened? Well, what do you mean pinched? It zoomed. Of course, you didn't type zoom to 200%.

[00:07:03]You grab the photo itself and manipulate it or drag a file straight into the trash. don't describe it. You drag it and you drop it in. This is direct manipulation and it's the core idea that makes graphical user interfaces work.

[00:07:16]You have elements, whether it's an album cover, an item in a list, or an icon, and you manipulate those directly.

[00:07:22]Tapping them, scrolling them, dragging them, zooming, pinching. This all seems very obvious today, but it's the key to understand everything. See, direct manipulation has a superpower.

[00:07:31]Everything you can do is right there in front of you, ready to be manipulated.

[00:07:35]You don't have to remember all your commands. Just open up a menu and here they are, all the available ones. As long as the things you're manipulating fit on a screen, this is perfect. As long as it's the few options for your coffee in the Starbucks app, it's perfect. But watch what happens when you start to add more complexity, more things to manipulate, options and toggles and views. That's when you need to collapse things into menus. And when a menu is not enough into a submen, and when that's not enough, you need different panels. And when you have so many things you can do, you need to have customizable panels where some of them are visible and some of them are not.

[00:08:07]You have to choose which ones to show through another menu. This is how we got to the scary, daunting interfaces of how most professional tools look like today.

[00:08:15]The editor for Instagram stories feels simple. You can take things, move them around, drag them with your finger, tap to edit. This is what direct manipulation is great at. Something like Adobe After Effects, for example, feels scary and intimidating because it's way more complex than what direct manipulation can actually achieve. So, do you see what's going on here? Every single attempt at introducing revolutionary AI here failed because well, the graphical user interface and direct manipulation is just better at this stuff. And on the other side of the spectrum, you have chatbots and agentic AI because once you cross a certain threshold of complexity, graphical interfaces stop becoming an asset and they become a problem, an endless sea of menus, dashboards, sub menus, and panels. Things you have to learn. So you rather have a robot doing that for you.

[00:08:58]A chat is free form. You're not bound by some designer building a button for that specific function. You have indirect manipulation. You're asking this agent, this machine to do something for you and it goes ahead and does it. So this is it. Really simple interactions will use UI. Really complex ones will be agentic via chat. That's it. Well, I left out something really important here. See, this is not just a gradient from simple to complex. It looks more like this, a normal distribution. Most of the things we do every day with our tech are not just setting a timer and are also probably not doing analytics on huge databases. It's stuff that is in the middle. It's browsing the web, writing a presentation, booking a flight, checking your email. So, what's going on in here?

[00:09:40]In the middle is actually what's important and where our missing link is.

[00:09:44]Take a look at this. This looks like a normal browser with a normal search box.

[00:09:48]Type and the best result appears. Maybe the only thing is that it looks like the internet is a bit slow. Well, this website wasn't loaded. It got generated on the spot based on what you type. No one built this website. Or take a look at this. If you ask Claude to explain relativity to you, instead of a wall of text, it builds an interactive visualization. Now, in principle, this is nothing new. You can build websites and apps with AI. Now, we saw it. The sponsor of this video is lovable. But there's something different here. These are not apps that someone built. A machine has decided that a graphical user interface was the best interface for what the user was doing and then it went ahead and built it on the spot. And it decided the best UI would look like this. This is called generative UI.

[00:10:33]There's three levels of it. And this example in Claude is just level one because vest is direct manipulation. It is styled consistently with Claude's brand and colors, but everyone else is catching up. Google just announced that search is going to start generating little apps that help you visualize complex search or topic with generative UI. And sure, these things now are pretty slow to generate on the spot. But just like when I was a kid, a web page would take like a minute to load. And now we just assume it's instance. The same thing will happen to generative UI.

[00:11:02]In the future, it will look silly to wait a minute for your app to be ready.

[00:11:06]But level two is where things start to get interesting. Take booking a flight.

[00:11:10]The UI we have now kind of makes sense.

[00:11:12]You can pick your airports, your dates from a date picker. And this, by the way, is way faster than typing that out on your keyboard and way more accurate than using some voice assistant to do it. But last month, I had to organize a trip to San Francisco for me and my producer Bartk to shoot a video where we went behind the scenes of Figma. I'll leave a link in the description, by the way. It's a pretty cool video. So, I had to search for flights from Italy and Poland to SF, adding a stop in New York City, and we weren't even sure about the dates. This is the kind of thing that moves the complexity from here to here.

[00:11:41]Now, I use Google Flights, for example, and it already has today an AI mode. So, I was like, great. But when I typed in my query, it told me it cannot show the results because yes, this is an AI prompt box, but the resulting UI underneath is regular UI. It's just a grid of flights. So level two is keeping a base UI that is well regular UI but where some pieces of that can adapt to be generative. See this is a mockup I made that start from the familiar UI of Google flights but still gives you the flexibility to add any weird request but the resulting UI underneath is not going to be just a grid of flights but something that no designer at Google has directly designed. In this case it's a slider that lets me move around dates and shows me with colors the most expensive flight of the bunch. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky just said on X that they tried to implement chatbased interfaces of booking Airbnb, but they had to scrap them because they realized it just didn't work. It wasn't the right kind of interface. And so now he just launched a new AI lab that's building AI models made purposefully for generative UI. And something else happens when you get to this level too because the way you build technology changes completely.

[00:12:51]Designers and engineers are not going to design and build screens and decide where a button goes or a list or what's the layout. They're going to design rules. Going from designing this, what each screen is to this, basically designing the UI kit, the Lego blocks that the AI can use to generate the interface with your visual language and taste and then rules for how to use these Lego blocks. For example, when to show a map versus a list, what layouts are preferred and this is a fundamental shift in how products are built. And level three is where you don't just have a regular app with pieces of generative UI, but the entire product becomes generative UI. The rules that tell the product what to show are the product.

[00:13:30]But there's something important to understand here. The future of how we interact with technology is not generative UI. It's not old UI. It's not chat bots and agents. Is all these things. We will still have regular traditional UI with direct manipulation where that is the best interface for those jobs, usually simple ones. We will still have powerful agentic systems that do things for you where that is the best interface for that complex job and we'll have all three layers of generative UI where that is what solves the problem best and this is the biggest shift that most products will have to go through in the coming years. I'm doing it right now for my product flask. You can use it to share feedback on videos by just recording on your screen drawing. So regular UI is the best interface for that. It's familiar. You can move around the videos very visual. But when you break down the feedback that a lot of people gave, you need something specific, a specific breakdown, that's where generative UI would make the most sense. And I'll be adding that when the tech is good enough. And instead, for the boring stuff like organizing things into folders and managing your team seats, that's stuff that you shouldn't do yourself and where chat and agents would do it best. So just like the Xerox Park Spark Research Center invented the graphical user interface that shaped how we interact with technology 40 years ago, someone else right now sitting in front of a laptop in some cafe is doing that all over again. But behind every product you use every day, there's something else that's hidden. A set of decisions that are not design, not engineering, but that are probably the least talked about and most important part of the tech you use every day. And you can learn all about it in this video right here. I'm see you in the next one.