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Comment by wilg | Hacker News Reader

There’s no reason chatbots have to be the interface to an LLM. Imagine dynamically generated interfaces redesigning themselves to your needs as you work through a task.

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So to your point, I do think it would be nice to have an AI assistant suggest to make changes to the view mode of an application. For instance, if I navigate to a certain area the AI might suggest that I make that option visible in my menu. I might say no, because I prefer to use the hotkey. Aside from that, I'm going to have to absolutely side with the parent commenter on this one - When I'm doing serious work I want a familiar interface that I know how to move around efficiently in. I don't want any surprises.

Suggestions to improve workflow sound great. But nullifying hard earned knowledge of an interface... I can't see that helping me.

The shining example in my mind is audio/video/graphics applications, where there are good reasons to routinely switch between different views. Knowing your way around those views (which might be custom, but still static), and being able to navigate through them quickly is very valuable.

I think there’s room for an AI-native interface that knows the full context of the project you’re working on and can make extremely intelligent suggestions or tailor the interface for a specific task. Or you could just literally describe the interface you want for something and it redesigns it for you immediately.

There is room, absolutely. Perhaps I took too hard of a line. I do recognize that a compromise can be made between a user retaining their knowledge of a system, and that system evolving to accommodate user requirements. It's easy to be fearful of the rug being pulled right from under you, but I suppose the reality might be closer to earnestly asking to place things upon the rug. In other words, the things that are familiar will probably remain familiar and accessible, but AI will help us arrange them in a way that optimizes our workflow.

Exactly. Chat is just the first, most general purpose UI. Like a terminal was for computers.

Agreed but lets keep in mind that graphical UIs involve significantly more effort than CLIs. In the case where you shoerhorn an ai to be your primary UI I would bet this is as hard if not harder since you typically have to code around significant limitations of current llms

http://gitwit.dev shows us that LLMs can generate various GUIs just fine, when prompted.

This is not what I said. Sure you can use such tools or even just classical boilerplate scripts (like we used for a decade now) to get started with react fast. But building out a system that fails well when the underlying llm starts behaving erratically or not at all is a completely different league of engineering as executing a boilerplate script.

Sorry for misinterpreting you. So the underlying LLM starts misbehaving, and the difficulty you see, is that the system as a whole should fail gracefully. What would that look like, in your eyes? A proctor LLM/whatever that observes the output and decides that it has gone awry and decides to take over?

I would hate that. An interface is useful when you can anticipate and remember what things are available and where they are. It doesn't matter if it's a visual UI or keyboard shortcuts. If you start moving stuff around on us, we revolt. (See every UI update on an MS Office product ever.)

Well you have to make it useful obviously. Keep an open mind!

So, an interface that keeps changing randomly? That sounds like hell, no thanks.

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