[eddythompson80]

The more and more AI projects I see both at work and online, the more convinced I'm that I should treat AI as an application interface, that's all.

It's a slightly different modality for the application. Nothing AI does wasn't possible before. You could always "create a price performance chart showing a stock's movement with key events annotated since May". You could also always buy dozens of software that will not just give you all the charts you could possible think of, but any one that you could even dream of. Check tradingview.com or koyfin.com for a taste of what a "free" offering can give you. Then imagine what the 100k software gives you.

The difference is the interface. You'll 100% need someone onboarding on their 100k custom trading platform. It might take you months to master it if you never saw one of these things before. Once you have learned it though, your productivity and velocity is expected to significantly increase.

Now with the AI interface, you don't need someone onboarding you or months to learn. You can ask the AI to "build a benchmarking analysis against Velocity's athletic footwear comps" instead of learning how to learning how to use the software to create such a thing. Maybe you never saw financial analysis software before, but you spent the last 20 years analysing financials by hand (in 2025 for some reason) and now you wanna onboard to a financial software. You don't need to "learn" anything. Just describe your thoughts to the AI and it figures the interface for you.

How transformative was that for you? I don't know. Maybe your financial analysis tool is as big of a piece of shit as Reactjs is and it's mind-numbingly tedious to generate such report. "It's just a 75 clicks that you have to do" and the AI interface saves you from doing that like it saves me from using React's shitty interface (text editor) to write garbage react components that are all just a copy of each other.

[throw234234234]

I've been thinking that for some time. Its a "looser way" to describe what you want as a different modality; a dynamic interface if you will. Even with code editors I've found its good to generate a lot of volume, but the detail still needs iteration or going back to direct instruction (i.e. code/clicking/etc). That applies to any artifact where iteration and validation is required to get it right. Instead of deterministic clicking and having to instruct every detail you can describe in "vague english" and the 80%/20% rule applies. Definitely an acceleration/leverage and a smaller learning curve.

[eddythompson80]

Maybe the problem in framing AI as an interface is that there isn't that much money in an "interface" is there?

Like there is no money in "GUI". There is a lot of work that each company wanting to build a good GUI app needs to put into their particular app. And the more specialized the app, the more custom and potentially complex and expensive that will be. But there are no "GUI companies", unless you count Microsoft and Apple as GUI companies.

[throw234234234]

I don't know. Interfaces are the part that most people non-tech generally understand. Most products to most people are "interfaces" after all whether it is a website/app/OS/etc. Interfaces to enable workflows pretty much summarises most tech products, and access to selective data from those interfaces.

My view is that AI, even if it is like a human, shares some of the weaknesses of a human in that it needs to be selective about relevant information. Frontends/UIs generally do this as well for specific use cases/workflows - there's a limit of what you can display on a screen after all. UI's aren't big data (humans can only see a couple of screens worth of summarized data to be useful).

This IMO at least in the short term affects the design of AI applications in general as well.

[andyferris]

Well… that’s not a bad analogy actually. Those companies became huge due to their GUI platforms - there was money there at the time.

OpenAI & Anthropic would like to become huge on their “AI-UI” platforms.

[eddythompson80]

Nope, Microsoft and Apple didn’t just sell GUI. They built an entire solution for a problem around GUI. And even then, they made their money elsewhere. Apple on hardware and Microsoft on enterprise licensing of a full end to end stack of almost everything a person would need. They did so much they got sued for antitrust because of how many fucking pies they were trying to shove themselves in. To call Microsoft and Apple success as “GUI companies” means that you would have no idea what an AI company is. Certainly it won’t be ones developing the basic platform then.

Companies selling GUI toolkits in the 90s are all dead. No company made money on selling “GUI” as a technology. No one called Microsoft and Apple “the GUI companies”

[srivmo]

> Nothing AI does wasn't possible before

Nothing any technology does wasn't NOT possible before that tech went mainstream. The point being tech saves time/cost and boosts productivity. For e.g. if you would have been able to find a webpage in an hour before, search made it easier to find that webpage. Similarly, AI synthesizes webpages and information for you.

That is the point of technology. If you could reach from point A to point B, using a bicycle, car, train or an aeroplane, each has its own use case at its own value and price point. Each such tech saves time/cost. To say that is is only a different modality, fails to capture the value add.

[eddythompson80]

Yes without a search engine it’s a very real possibility that I could not find a web. Without a phone I couldn’t reach a person faster than I could physically move in space. Without a space rocket, I couldn’t escape earth’s gravity. Without AI I couldn’t… I don’t know how to finish this sentence without having it be self referential. As in “without AI I couldn’t have used AI to do this”. What can it be?

[noobly]

But, unfortunately, it also runs the risk of hallucination and improper logic.

[eddythompson80]

But that's fine for an mode of interface, right? The risk is significantly mitigated the same way GUI workflows risks are mitigated.

Every RDS database with a dozen of terabytes that's at the entire value of a business that's running it still comes with a "Delete permanently, skip snapshot" button and, believe it or not, accidentally clicking it is not THAT unheard of.

If AI is thought of as an interface for an application where the "destructive" functions are all explicitly and clearly represented to the user and all the other actions are safe to experiment with is acceptable.

Bad UX (be it GUI, CLI, TUI, AIUI or even physical) can cause catastrophic bugs. Remember the Cisco switch with a reset button above an RJ45 port? https://thenextweb.com/news/this-hilarious-cisco-fail-is-a-n...