Never happening. The brand may "keep ownership of how it tells its story," but it loses its users. You have turned your tool into a series of widget in someone else's application, with no control whatsoever over how users interact with you. Want to show your user a notification? (Sure you do—I can't get away from the things.) Too bad. ChatGPT owns your users, and they only see what OpenAI wants them to see, which likely will not include ads for your premium features.
Don't mistake this for user freedom, either. Users still won't own their own tools. We're just moving from a model where each vendor separately leases you their tool to a model where every tool is leased via OpenAI, which curates them based on its own monopolistic whims.
Tech companies will not surrender control of their users so easily. They may integrate chatbot components into their apps, but they will not permit an inversion of control where their product becomes a component in a chatbot.
> You likely won’t expect users 5 years from today to navigate 5 pages deep
Of course I do. There's this fallacy that, because chatbots are useful for some things, chatbot interfaces must be the best at everything, and that's just not true. I don't go to ChatGPT to ask it for relevant tech news. I go here and browse the HN frontpage. Chatbots offer zero discoverability; search bars didn't replace page navigation, and chat bots won't either.
You may not have a choice. The chatbot can navigate the same UI your users can. People will use chatbots to use your product, whether you want them to or not.
This not only kills pages, but it kills the concept of a browser where the user agent is a human, rather than making your pages be designed where the user agent is an AI agent.
That doesn't make me happy to experience because I'm guessing that after a generation or so, web designers will not only do mobile first designs with stupid amounts of white space and not taking advantage of the desktops greater screen real estate and precise mouse movements, but AI first websites will get so popular that browsing sites manually will look like trying to use a text only browser in the JavaScript world.
Easy for me to do a depressing take, but hopefully the bitter lesson of AI will help this particular projected future not come to pass because the AI will get smart enough that it will embed a browser right there in line and just render the window for the user, or it will otherwise gets good enough at screen scraping and UI automation that it can just use an existing browser, just like a human, the sites won't be dumbed down even further for AI consumption.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969751 remark that they're taking down their self-hosted projects citing costs associated with AI scraping.
at best we have walled garden content; and when those are scraped (either by the host or by more sophisticated bots) those walled gardens will hopefully rot under an inability to drive advertisement revenue.
I agree, I think we're at the edge of a paradigmatic shift away from humans navigating TCP-IP itself. What that looks like, I don't know, but given trends (like dynamic pricing, human-futures marketing, surveillance, and consolidation of computing under mega-companies) I can imagine: local beacons screaming AI advertisement components across a geospatial sneakernet. Auditorium-based ticketed podcasting and AR/VR/meatspace events. Thoughtful hackers reminiscing of better times simulating them in web-assembly driven first-person POV "sites" and a rolling set of encryption keys for read-access (just send them BTC)
without an ecosystem for humans to contribute meaningfully to a feedback loop that allows for free group assembly around like interests, monetary growth for hosts and other participants, and some degree of presence / searchability / permanence, the current text-only web page paradigm is doomed.
That might be great for accessibility, though.
This is purely anecdotal, but the only people in my extended circle making this transition (to any extent) are the technically savvy; everyone else is slowly realizing how awful AI tools and "AI-first experiences" can be and are actively trying to avoid them.
Your tech-savvy AI early adopters are discerning between tools, the deployments and environments, and are willing and able to change things to extract the highest output from current capabilities. For instance, re-architecting a codebase to make it easier for agents to contribute to it.
The rest are having AI hypeware shoved upon them, often as a cost cutting measure, and lack the agency to influence outcomes. When agents misbehave, they only have the option to "Press 0 to speak with a Human" and hope that works.
I suspect this is a big factor in the divide we're seeing, and might result in your median adult being ambushed by recent gains in capabilities.
AI agents using frontier models, configured nicely, that interact with programs that have APIs are pure gold.
The read the second line and erm.... maybe not. The whole Agents thing has been pushed for almost a year now and it hasn't disrupted the profession of engineers on a noticeable scale.
If you have a valid point to make, you don't need to force FOMO on the reader.
- My neighbor is a non tech guy. I want you to create this magic chat interface and make him use it
- He has to sit and think what to type first and he always has this fear what if I dont get an answer back
- Vast majority of the people in the world fall in this category
- Your AI replaces UI stuff aint happening for 20 yrs at the minimum. You ll need 2 to 3 full generations of people to adapt before making statements like these
The "AI renders your components inside chat" idea feels very similar to Facebook’s old canvas apps. That model disappeared for good reasons: abuse, security, and loss of platform control.
It seems far more likely that AI platforms will provide their own interaction primitives (forms, pickers, confirmations, etc.) and simply call third-party tools behind the scenes. That lets the platform retain control over UX and safety, and avoids the risks of embedding arbitrary third-party UI.
I found only two videos about it on YouTube. This is the better of the two, and illustrates the output: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vndn2vmSIbw
I don't know whether that video uses Kumo (UI library also from Vercel).
Today most websites offer interfaces for accessing the data that they hold hostage. However they are holding our data. We would prefer to have it back if we could, and AI will enable that. Our paradigm will shift this way eventually I hope.
Though it's true companies dont have an incentive to hand over data custody anytime soon, AI companies have already found a way around this in little ways and its a matter of time until it goes to where all the data we could ever want is within the AI cloud and our next task is simply taking back ownership of that (where local inference takes us).
The joke for decades has been that we are all competing with Excel...nothing has changed.
Instead of progressive enhancement it can be progressive evolution.
But without visits many websites will disappear. So where will AI get its information from in the future?
AI will create new websites! Don't you see?!?
Even so, ask, what's the end goal of the user? Does it even make sense to worry about UI if we're think autonomous agents that sole goal is to accomplish something defined by the user?
Yes, I do, because outside of tech circles, AI adoption is not as pervasive/ universal as the loudest voices keep suggesting. I’m not dismissing its value, but gentle reminder to spend more time around nontechnical people, listen to how they feel about the tech, and pay attention to how they engage with it when offered.
This place is hyper-concentrated on the tech in a particular context and has no resemblance of whats going out there in the big wide-world outside of high-tech software production.
This is the year that revenue has to start showing up materially across a wide range of contexts or else fear will over-take the market and investors will start pressuring the big tech firms to pull back on capex. It is their money after all, not the management.
I like that MCP Apps just offer tools, and AI doesn't have to deal with JSON and generative UI. Basically, you can cache UI as an MCP App by generating it up-front, to constantly save on tokens and time, and let AI use tool calls which it is getting constantly better at.
Excuse me while I go vomit. If the future of the web is vibe-coded slop, I want no part of it.
MCP Apps are perfect for vibe coding. They solve simple, specific problems. So yeah, vibe code them all day long.
This might be an extended web search, but it's still a web search. The documents need to exist. Maybe a lot of the surrounding boilerplate disappears, though?
As if. It's corporations that want to own _your eyeballs_.
It also kills any incentive to publish anything.
It completely removes the user from having any agency over the sources of information they are presented with.
> My hope is that you will embrace the change
Some people get so caught up with the technology they seem to forget they're charging straight into the most boring dystopia imaginable.
People seem to forget...they got to train on the openness of the internet, but know the incentive to protect your domain expertise.
How do the models look in a couple years once we all remove our expertise from public view.
Don’t count out on device, that’s where most of our focus is. If we can convert the voice / text to programatic commands on device, then we control the experience and don’t let the wolves through the gate.
Conversational commerce will let you shop on any website, with any UI you like, and without paying marketplaces a cut of every sale.
Outside of discovery and trust, what are they really bringing to the table anymore? Most sellers have their own websites with cart, product catalog, and payments already so AI that can tap into that API directly will render these marketplaces and middle-men obsolete given enough time.
I'm kind of building this already[1].
Eventually, after killing several websites by depriving them of revenue, ChatGPT will enshittify like everything else and starting adding ads.
There isn't even a question about that. Just think of Google for example.
Why Google's SERP has ads but Gemini does not? There isn't even a "they are making money with the data" argument here, because Google already has all the query data it could ever want. They just haven't added ads yet.
Eventually, Gemini will look like a SERP with 5 ad results, if it doesn't go to the Google graveyard like everything else.
Yes, yes. We will all be left behind unless we [PLACEHOLDER]. Sounds very convincing.
> but in today’s world but in today’s world where the world changes every month, it’s best to be ahead.
Could I be the one getting ahead of him if I skip next month and plan for <next month>+1 world changes?
I would want to use the anxious low ranking pioneers as scouts that face all the risks while I have more freedom to change course once the winds are more favorable.
The idea of representing UI as state goes back forever, I’m not that old but at least in the advent of the web, plenty of JSON -> UI specs or libraries have came into existence. If the specification is solid and a large portion of people agree upon it, I don’t doubt it will take over what we think of UI. (current contenders are json_render, a2ui etc)
The first benefit being that if I can describe my entire UI and the actions each component wants as json, theoretically, I can pass that file to any client to render be it mobile, react, a java swing app etc The responsibility of rendering becomes of anyone who wants to do it.
UI JSON -> UI Framework <- Design Tokens
Above is a simple way of describing how it would generally work. Where the UI framework can be whatever it wants to be as long as it knows how to connect up the UI JSON in a meaningful way.
Now for existing apps and their respective UI’s it’s never made all that much sense to describe how your components behavior in state, useful for some, and many have done it, but a hard pitch for others.
In the agentic era, the pitch is a lot more appealing.
- LLM’s are great-enough at writing JSON
- A lot of people are sharing the sentiment that they can just vibe code small apps for themselves. Hinting at they love the actual ability for full personalization.
Though having the user generate HTML and the rest all the time by LLM’s is more error prone, slow and costly.
The user can just ask an LLM to compose a composition of components in JSON laid out how they want and connected to the API’s they care about. (that can be rendered anywhere)
Personally, if I had a catalogue of 100 distinct services/API's, and I could ask an LLM to generate a UI in JSON that I can copy and paste anywhere to render it, I would be in heaven.
If I had subscriptions to services that; (fake services)
- EMAILR: Sent Emails
- BOOKLAND: Explore books
- DEEP_RESEARCHER: Researches Topic
I could ask an LLM to "With my services, EMAILR, BOOKLAND and DEEP_RESEARCHER and their attached tools.
Can you generate me a dashboard that lists out the top 20 BOOKLAND books, below each one added a button that posts the book title to DEEP_RESEARCHER when I click it. Also add a button below each book that uses EMAILR to email me them"
It would then return something like;
{
"view": "dashboard",
"title": "Book Research Hub",
"children": [
{
"type": "grid",
"columns": 4,
"source": { "service": "BOOKLAND", "action": "list", "params": { "limit": 20, "sort": "top" } },
"each": {
"type": "card",
"children": [
{ "type": "text", "bind": "$.title", "variant": "heading" },
{ "type": "text", "bind": "$.author", "variant": "muted" },
{ "type": "image", "bind": "$.cover_url" },
{
"type": "button",
"label": "Deep Research",
"variant": "primary",
"action": { "service": "DEEP_RESEARCHER", "method": "research", "params": { "topic": "$.title" } }
},
{
"type": "button",
"label": "Email me this",
"variant": "secondary",
"action": { "service": "EMAILR", "method": "send", "params": { "to": "$user.email", "subject": "Book: $.title", "body": "Check out $.title by $.author" } }
}
]
}
}
]Users could share their layouts and what they like and you could end up with a market place or sane defaults for those who don't want to bother with describing what they want. No longer do you have to rely on the UX team of the service for it to be laid out how you want.
There is a metric tonne of work that has to be done to make a specification that can handle more complex things. But I'd bet a lot of users will learn to love and appreciate that the 5% of features they care about they can finally just actually place how they want it to across all their disparate apps.