It's not just content/info/data, it's a performance (in the creative sense).
Brands spend a lot of time honing their appearance - not just fonts and colours but the whole composition and visual pacing - their entire "say something without saying anything at all" aspect etc. Just walk through any place with physical shops and really look at how the stores have worked on their appearance and how they present themselves to customers. They're not just selling a product, they're selling a lifestyle/feeling/etc/etc. They're not just going to give that creative control away to some LLM.
Another way to think of it is instead of people watching a movie or play when they go to the cinema or theater, they're just given the script to read. Same information but the entire artistry of both the performers and the directors is totally absent, leaving it up to each reader to imagine the delivery of lines or the scene's setting etc.
I think on HN and in tech in general people seem to forget that "the first bite is with the eye", and that is why "normal people" never liked or used RSS. The desire to leave our mark and to create (and view!) visually appealing things seems to be pretty innate in humans - we've been doing it since cave paintings. I struggle to think of a world where we just hand that over to AIs and humans have zero creative control.
But the business's incentives are in the exact opposite direction. That opposite direction is the whole point of branding. They want their service to have a vibe, a personality, something you irrationally value beyond its raw value as a service.
Sometimes that feeling is the value. Sure my plants don’t care if they live in a cheap plastic pot off Amazon or a nice pot from the overpriced gardening store selling at a 200% markup, but I care. Sitting in my balcony surrounded by cheap disposable clutter feels different than enjoying the outdoors amidst quality vibes.
Some things are commodities, some are not. The point is only that it's in the interest of commodity businesses to convince you they are not selling commodities. That sleight of hand doesn't prevent genuine quality and artistry from mattering in many cases, including, in your case, pots.
Performance may be worth a lot today but I feel it will be less and less. I mean "we" don't like the "performance" of Windows (copilot everywhere, a setup process taking ages with dozens of offers you don't want), we don't like MacOS' performance (weird corners ;), inconsistent icons, icons disappearing behinds notches, no tiling)
I like Hackernews because it's so minimal, I just changed the bar to be gray instead of orange, otherwise it's perfect for my needs. Imagine some performer making this a beautifully crafted site, I'd go for any of the alternatives we see coming by every now and then.
Movies are perhaps different, although for me they are often about the lessons, did they change my view on things? That can often be condensed a lot more (for me that usually means drop a lot of the emotional finery, ie, I like TNG and Voyager more than Discovery because there is less crying and close-ups of crying people's eyes, ok, Discovery also has a lot less moral discussions).
Maybe I'm not normal, but to me my own UIs sound good, more efficient, more (useful-) information dense, so I need to spend less time navigating. It's why I use Nix and Gnome and (to a lesser degree) FireFox. It clicks more for me, but I can think of ways to improve them (yes I will soon try Niri). It's why people like chatting with their agents that are hooked into everything (Home Assistant to email to joblisting sites). Where's your beautiful UI in that workflow? Just give me a good API. Personal assistant/agents may be toys for nerds at the moment, but they're going to be big imho.
One argument against mine is perhaps that I also get used to tools and setups at some point, even though I don't consider them optimal at first, they become optimal. Perhaps because there is a deeper vision behind them.
All in all, perhaps we're both right. But people here seem to be very much on the company side (not surprising), but I don't care about your company, I care about information. That's why I have ad blockers, throw articles and long lists into LLMs and increase the contrast on your "beautiful" gray on gray text.
> Maybe I'm not normal
You definitely are not normal, if we define normal as "the vast majority of people". If web developers took your feedback seriously it would be detrimental to the experience of almost everybody. But I think that you knew that.
I think HN reflexively shoots down any idea or prediction with a bias to the incumbent.
Generally, a technological advancement will render some previous ways of working useless or outdated. People value convenience way more than a curated experience but I'm not disagreeing that brand differentiation would still exist.
A company that offers a meaningfully better experience in the long term will outcompete a company that focuses too much on aesthetics.
If they get generative UI right, where the UI provider can also give their own flavour and have some differentiation but also allow enough personalisation to afford the user better experience, it will happen.
Some bets don't work (like RSS) but some bets have worked - like the Amazon e-commerce model. A person in 1985 could have shut Amazon's idea down the same way you have.
I partly share this opinion because most branding and UIs, products that are primarily marketed as a "lifestyle", etc., are obnoxious. Yes, appearance is a factor of anything we interact with, but when using technology my primary thought is if it solves a practical problem. Not if it's broadcasting an image, or even if it's enjoyable to use. The latter is important, but often companies prioritize it over functionality, which is backwards to me.
So starting with a mostly functional product, and giving me the choice of how to style it, is appealing to me. This is why I still use RSS, custom style sheets, the CLI and simple GUI wrappers, etc.
There is an audience for this type of product, but it's of the magnitude of a rounding error, so naturally most companies don't, and likely shouldn't, focus on this segment.
And yet, in my lived-experience at an unnamed Big Co when we did lots of UXR work in the on-call, monitoring, and incident management software/tooling, when it came to people being the primary on-caller handling a page for an incident when the company is losing millions for every minute of downtime that the 8pt font information dense UI they said they wanted actually led to increased stress, more mistakes, longer time-to-mitigation etc. Turns out that a carefully and deliberately designed UX and information architecture and - gasp - white space (that was all carefully and minutely tuned to specific CUJs over many rounds of research and prototyping) is really important.
Even if you have all the information available, just throwing stuff at the screen doesn't always help IME. Less is often more.
I don't think website design will go away, but I do expect that people will soon be ordering products and booking holidays through AI chats instead of doing it themselves, which will require the kind of manifests he's talking about, but will skip the UI layer completely.
1. Branding. Companies want to control their interfaces for all sorts of reasons. Branding is a big one. Clarity and comms are another.
2. LLMs in the hot path. LLMs are expensive, a hell of a lot more expensive than executing some Javascript locally. Hell, you'd still probably need to do that under this model anyway. We're likely to see LLM usage filter into the right places, use-cases with higher leverage, LLMs to create a UI that is shipped to all users over LLMs creating UI on the fly every time. Costs and time will dictate this just like they have dictated how every other technology is used.
1. The costs are not that high
2. They are going down constantly
3. The ease of using LLM's and the personalisation will result in more interactions which means companies don't mind subsidising
This is like saying Amazon e-commerce can't work because logistics are expensive and its hard to pay for a delivery person to come to your doorstep.
If the table stakes for using my API is a local GPU to build the interface, my competitors who used their GPUs once to create the interface for their customers will win. If the API getting started guide involves going to a user-contributed list of prompts to put together a set of things I want in the interface, the competitor who doesn't have that step and provides a default interface will win.
Default interfaces being provided is not going to change, and the universal truth of defaults is that most people stick with them.
Power users modifying their interfaces has always been a thing and is easier with LLMs, but it's going to remain niche, as in, something that power users/hobbyists do, or companies might provide their own internal UI to some external API, but again that already happens extensively.
Amazon is the wrong analogy I think, because delivery is in some ways cheaper than every individual going to the store themselves, storing in warehouses is cheaper than storing in stores. In fact in some ways the Amazon analogy better fits the other way around. Not a perfect fit.
Imagine policy compliance too? You need a cookie banner for legal reasons, how do you enforce that everyone's interfaces add the cookie banner? I hate cookie banners, but it's a clear example of where compliance dictates UI, and there are others (sales, insurance, contracts, etc).
As for costs decreasing, sure, and local LLMs improve things... but building the UI once will always win out on costs. Even with local LLMs we'll still cache UI creation, so then why not share that cache? Maybe it takes a bunch of prompting to get the exact accessibility stuff you need in the UI, so now you share prompts for generating the bit you need.... why not just share the actual output, why not just use the one the service provides?
I think there's a version of this focused on customisation that I can see happening, but otherwise all I see is a ton more code, a ton more liability, and products being on the whole worse.
And it's not just semantic information, presenting any kind of information in a way which enable the user to seamlessly interpret and use it is not an easy task.
AI, definitely lowered the bar for making some UI, but it doesn't help with the fundamentals challenges of making a UI, at least not more so then it helps with the fundamental challenges of any other job in our industry.
And so many UIs stink, so auto-generating them might, on average, not be worse.
> a good interface conveys so much more semantic information then just it's underlying API
Yes, a good UI contains institutional memory on rendering that particular information in a bigger context than the pure data. I’m not sure how to convey that best.
Just because you can superficially design a better UI doesn't mean it would work as intended. It's amazing really how much can go on behind the scenes just for a seemingly trivial button that looks like shit.
I've come to the thought that we built interfaces honed to the way we visualize and work. We simplified many things down to just clicks. A really good UI captures intent and use very well. It doesn't require constant written language input when one mouse click is enough. Also it appeals to the aesthetic experience too in some ways to enhance the brand.
Design might be subjective but that's a good thing to act as a differentiator for companies.
Too many people assume pretty or nice looking is what design is. It's a very empty statement that disguises how important design works to make our lives easy.
If it's personalized clients, that's what we already had for most web services before the iPhone and app-ification of everything. It failed because making things compatible is a hard problem and a highly political/bureaucratic tarpit.
> most SaaS products still ship hand-crafted React apps, each building its own UI, its own accessibility layer, its own theme system, its own responsive breakpoints
Contrary to popular belief on HN, building these React apps are not "bullshit jobs" in the broader corporate world, nor going to be replaced by AI. They're the backbone of all ecommerce today and the ground floor for business operations because they keep us out of the tarpit. The implementation details are irrelevant here anyway. The actual problem was always how a business retains full control of its brand and UX.
It doesn't really matter what they want. Chat interfaces are doing this from the opposite direction, pulling the data down and explaining it to you, it's not a big leap for LLMs to turn their markdown responses into a slightly richer experience you can browse natively.
The point of the OP is that the companies would willing cooperate and replace their websites with LLM consumable APIs.
It's a different question whether this will happen despite their objections, as a kind of logical conclusion of the greasemonkey plugin.
I am convinced neither client side nor backend side AI solutions will solve this.
Fully on topic: It would be naive to believe that serious web offerings would allow you to do this. Reality is moving in a different direction: Try applying custom css and js to reddit, for example: The website is a nightmarish matryoshka of shadow dom components and that‘s only the beginning of the flashification and silverlightification of the web.
A couple of notes:
- It works, technically. This ain't new. CRUD UIs can and have been totally automated. It was well within any competent programmer's grasp 20+ years ago.
- It doesn't work from a business perspective. Everything looks stock, generic. No branding. No UI clues to guide behavior. Business objects felt siloed, their relationships unclear. You might as well manage your data in a spreadsheet.
Ultimately, the UI needs turn out not to be a straight reflection of the data model. Every single project required additional judgements, joins, aesthetics, branding, custom workflows, etc. Thus every project eventually ditched the auto-UI and built a SPA-style javascript app against the REST API.
In short, generating a UI from a data model is an old idea. The reason we don't use it today is that it sucks.
Put that in a SaaS for an office and the outcome is the true representation of work being done in that office, plus clear signals about edge cases (aka “the user is not using his custom built flow, why?)
In a sense, related to https://danieldelaney.net/normal/
Stability etc can be handled post-hoc: once a customized ui proves some benefits (via user adoption, or whatever you think efficiently measures productivity gains), it can be formalized by a human coder, who gets the full picture and has all the domain knowledge baked in, as long as you don’t capture UIs only but also the reasoning that built it.
Back to article: smart to think this in terms of browser, since that crosses the boundary between SaaS
Having a traditional web page with styles and assets AND the spec allow LLM's to be a bit more guided by the original site's design and intent. More of a remix or like Arc's boosts/skills feature.
There's also the reality the a lot of the things you'd want to be promptable (sorting, functionality, enrichment) couldn't be done on just the front end. You need some mix of UI and API logic to be promptable...
Why’d you make the prototype a separate browser instead of implementing with a chrome extension? Something like greasemonkey but with an LLM generating the scripts on the fly..
Going further, AI internet browser could be an entirely new app to break from the legacy.
I feel this with coding agents, so often where it fetches web data and interprets it, html in that loop is only occasionally additive. Feels quite futuristic
Smells like default Claude voice. I like the ideas, but if someone can't be bothered to proof read their own article, then I don't know why we should trust that any of it was human generated.
