Comment by batshit_beaver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by batshit_beaver | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

For an article about generative AI/UI, there sure is a lot of talk about recommendations and predictions.

As another side note, the idea of a UI that changes every time you open the site/app is, frankly, ridiculous. Not sure what kind of UX researcher or even user would want that. Seems like a saner approach would be one of two worlds below:

1) Each app has a carefully designed foundation on top of which user-customizable components exist. This is already common, sans GenAI-powered component creation.

2) There is no longer a concept of an "app." Users instead interact primarily with a smorgasbord of APIs, via their highly personalized but temporally consistent, AI-assisted personal OS.

We already had a considerable subset of the required APIs exposed in Web 2.0 times. I don't see it coming back any time soon, despite the integration work it enabled being lots of fun and also genuinely useful.

"As another side note, the idea of a UI that changes every time you open the site/app is, frankly, ridiculous."

That's what we have now, already. GenUI would be the opposite, where if you wanted, the UI could never change and it would stay the same if thats what you want.

Totally agree the concept of apps will break down.

That's a great point. Imagine you had an AI-based browser that could adapt any website into a consistent UI or reading experience.

Websites have spent the last 20 years removing user customizable functionality (think RSS feeds and making API private). While the tech may be possible, I don't see this being a reality without a major reversal in app development philosophies.

Companies want to control what you see so they can control their revenue. Why would they want to expose their data and utility to UIs where they have limited ability to monetize?

Technically possible now, I suppose. If you're Google and have the analytics, you could make a standard site layout and munge every site into that format based on usage data. Neat idea.

Firefox Reader mode does a decent job of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com