alt Hacker NewsI'm a designer, but I admit it's really hard to predict what products and UX are going to work in the AI age.
Chatbots have been tried for a decade and were a total failure. With AI, it has become the fastest-growing way to interact with technology, ever.
GPT-5 tried to have an auto router and create abstraction for the user; people hated it. Instinct and Muse are doing the same with a different framing; it's going wild.
There are tons of these little examples where a small difference in framing, a small threshold in tech, and product assumptions completely flip on their heads.
It's amazing to follow but requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
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GPT-5's auto routing was bad, you'd get off the cuff bad answers for hard questions and overthinking on the banal. Also, with a chatbot the idea is that it's a back and forth but 5 minutes of thinking kills that, whereas fire and forget is core to the idea of autonomous agents.
Agents are going to replace almost all the UI in computers. For a trivial example, things like a control panel or settings menu will cease to exist, you'll handle coarse things via conversation ("set volume to 20%"), and UIs will be presented only for things where chat is cumbersome ("the password for the printer is !-*Donkey_Loves_Shrek^^@"). The UI that remains will become heavily decoupled, like supercharged versions of the office ribbons, with the intent that the agent will compose menu fragments and capability widgets dynamically so you only ever need to see controls for the settings that are relevant and that you care about.
The biggest mistake people make in this space is confusing the limitations of a specific implementation of a technology with fundamental flaws with the entire idea of said technology.
Once you recognize and overcome that thinking, and learn to distinguish between those two things, you can see where things are going.
I think devil’s in the details on all of your examples, although I very much agree with your overall point - it’s so nuanced in terms of timing, current capabilities, etc.
Re: chatbots were tried but it’s a wrong model for a deterministic system. It’s the best one for a probabilistic one.
Re: chatGPT auto-router - 1) I suspect explicit model selection matters less in agentic contexts (this thing is coordinating a bunch of other agents for me) vs QA context where you want to make sure you’re getting the best answer. 2) I suspect auto-routing matters less now that models are way better
> requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.
This is what happens if you try to read the data like gospel without having a mental model to interpret it... in other words, critical thinking.
Chatbots are a failure because chat capabilities have sucked for most of the past decade and chatbots weren't really capable enough to do anything meaningful. Not because chat is fundamentally bad. Similarly with auto-router.
Also, if you want to "cross the chasm" you cannot measure reactions from current AI users (early adopters) and extrapolate to the rest of the populace. Early adopters are paying you for tokens and try to wieid them like a surgical tool; across the chasm the rest really don't want to know anything about "tokens" or models tiers or "thinking level".