There are lots of good answers in this thread but I think it's because they are AI companies and not UI companies. When you look at tools like AnythingLLM, OpenCode, pi, etc. you see all kinds of different interfaces, and while they might make disagreeable choices at least they do it with intentionality and direction.

They're some of the only new UIs to be made in the last decade. Almost everyone else stays in the browser (or something close like electron- claude code is actually mostly written in React, they couldn't get far from web dev). The problem is they need to interact with the local filesystem, and not many people have built apps for such a wide range of devices in a long time, and of that small talent pool I bet most are corpo coders- moving too slow and to focused on "the right way" to actually ship more than detailed Jira tickets. They also don't have time for stable releases because competition is so fierce.

But I almost always think of things from a talent-pool-first perspective. Perhaps there are actual technical issues like what Boris was referring to.

They are dogfooding their products like you wouldnt believe

They are releasing at breakneck pace, it's pretty funny how vibed their products feel sometimes

Many people will say it’s because of the slop. I think it’s because they have no product vision. The roadmap is pretty much a random walk, which combined with the velocity of agentic coding is like digging a moat with atomic bombs.

> Why are the UIs of the AI companies all broken in multiple ways?

Because they're vibe-coded ultra sloppy code. And it really shows.

Dogfood

No one left who could fix anything here by hand. Being able to handcraft compelling desktop apps and their plumbing is not a marketable skill anymore.

Mythos, Fable, please do the thing with the VM. Make no mistakes.

They are moving at breakneck speed deploying on scales most of us can't even imagine. They are working in a space that's completely unexplored where getting information as quickly as possible is preferred above iterating on some feature until it's "done" while your competitor has released fifteen other features, all sucky, but one of which turns out to be a killer and makes a billion bucks overnight.