Post-Chat UI

In 2022, ChatGPT brought us back to text. Back to a world of talking to the computer via a single input field, and getting a scrolling list of responses back.

Just like the terminal, chat-based AI is powerful, flexible for power users, and easy to program. But it has many of the problems that terminals had: it’s daunting, unintuitive, and an awkward way to do many kinds of work.

Amelia Wattenberger describes the problem astutely:

We made painting feel like typing, but we should have made typing feel like painting.

While chat is powerful, for most products chatting with the underlying LLM should be more of a debug interface – a fallback mode – and not the primary UX.

So, how is AI making our software more useful, if not via chat? Let’s do a tour.

Source: Post-Chat UI – Allen Pike