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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

It's fascinating to see new UI primitives and concepts get invented in the LLM era. The sea of creativity makes it hard to even understand most of what each new app does, and nobody describes them well. When I went to the Hermes agent web page, I was left with zero clue about what it did or what it could do. It took a bit of digging to find the right part of the qm page that helped me grok what was going on.

I've become attached to Orca (yc-backed) for managing coding sessions in the past week, but some sort of postgres session db is what's really lacking. So, maybe it's time to try qm.

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It is fascinating and I love to see it. Ultimately though, why not build your own? I think that in part is what we're beginning to see-- highly customized and personalized software. I take most of these as inspiration these days and just build my own. Nothing you can't hammer out with a few good Claude sessions.

These new experiences are built atop layers and layers of bedrock libraries that we, generally, don't reinvent. Or we reinvent one or two.

What's notable to me is that ux doesn't so far generally have this behavior. That as per this post people just build a new app, a new experience.

I want to believe over time we'll have better composable & malleable ux experiences atop broader platforms for us. That over time the "go it alone" path has other worth ways to innovate that use a more substantial shared base. It's dangerous to go it alone, and doing so equipped with just our wooden sword and some courage and perhaps an LLM wisp is an amazing adventure, but I think the survival rate & impact would be much better if we had more general ux systems that supported better innovation atop them, and if less people did the pure "why not build your own" path.

People are using the UX systems though, just that it's the agent that is gluing them together now. Under the hood, it's still React plus component libraries like shadcn, lucide, tailwind, axios and so on.

The agents are so good at this, there's literally no point in not doing it that way.

These are all surface veneer but so so so much less than an app. The entire rest of the owl has to be redrawn, and all the guts inside the owl redesigned.

I understand you take. And I definitely agree that we could use a lot better ux tools than we have right now. Maybe one of these prototypes will lead to that though. I'll look at it more as creative engineering. Not everything is meant to be distributed or consumed. But that doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile to try and prototype different flows and options. I have seen hundreds of harnesses, I've only used a couple-- but they've inspired me to build something that fits me better and works for me. If somebody comes out with something that helps unify the UX experience and provides better building blocks for me to work with, I'll definitely switch to that and rebuild my experience on top of that. But for now this is what we have. Admittedly this reflects my level of experience and my expertise too. I don't have a lot of experience working with building UX frameworks, so I adapt what I can.

UX does have this, and it has for many years. You might remember Bootstrap way back in the day, and everything looking like bootstrap. These days it seems like everything is based on tailwind under the hood.

Right now shadcn/ui might be the leading candidate but there are plenty including old school bootstrap, material / MUI, a bunch of various flat-themed ui, etc. They often come in the form of a react component library or whatever but they're generally really solid. I also found one in svelte that I can't immediately pull up but it was nice looking too.

But why build your own from scratch when you can do it on top one extensible UI platform that already has all of your organizational context, not to mention coding agents already built-in that you can just tell it to build & deploy your personalized workflow softwaree from scratch? ;-)

That's an option right? When I say roll your own-- it could be extending another platform. There's definitely different levels. Customization is in reach regardless of where you want to start and stop your stack.

Because it's fun! I don't "really" use LLM for anything serious yet, but after discovering playing with a custom harness I licked blood. Like going back to edit any message to start a new conversation branch off that, or being able to go back and remove things that turned out to to be dead ends from the history. Not really "useful" [0] for now, I always wondered about that and I was dumbfounded how trivial and tiny a first MVP was. Of course, that's also because it is trivial, it's just chat, it affords none of the usefulness you'd want for any "work", but it's still very interesting.

And for some simple recurring tasks or local housekeeping stuff, having something where I 100% know what files it reads or writes will surely be useful. E.g. if I wanted to watch out for certain topics on HN, I'd rather make something myself that grabs the feed and turns that into a list of titles and topic ID, which is probably 1% of what the front page HTML would be, and then only have the LLM process that output -- rather than telling an LLM to do all that every time. Even if tokens may not be that precious, and the difference in "cognitive performance" not worth speaking of, that would feel way neater to me.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/ZL8dhYg

Why not build my own? Because my good ideas are in other areas, and I'm going to expend my energies where they have the most impact.

I've replaced most of my business software that I was paying for with custom stuff, already, for busy-LLM-work.

I am but a leaf riding on top of the sea of creativity of others when it comes to these new interaction patterns.

It's really hard to focus on the unique aspect of your tool because it runs the risk that people will think it's unfamiliar and therefore not useful to them. That's why a lot of the tool marketing pages look the same even though the tools themselves might be different or innovative

Isn't it a bigger risk for people to see the page, understand nothing, and think it's not useful to them? Having no information, after investing time to investigate, leaves me with a very sour taste and makes me unlikely to give it a fair shake a second time.

AI needs entirely new primitives in many areas.

I think we need a new area of study around UI/Agent connection. It can kinda be done with tools, but I'd we need much deeper primitives to allow the UI to inform the Agent and vice-versa. Right now we've just given up, replacing the UI with an Agent message view, but I think that's just because nobody is thinking about how the two can compliment each other

I've been playing around with using a hidden markov model informed by a UI state event stream, with the end state fed into the Agent as a hint on each message turn. Then the Agent can make a tool call to add events to the HMM. This has been really interesting, but I haven't struck the right balance to make it actually feel good for the user yet

Isn't this the direction Claude on the web is going towards? It's a mix of message view on the left and specific interactive UI on the right panel. There is also MCP Apps spec now

It's hard to say what is needed now, vs needed in a few years.

For example, many rumors say SSI has solved learning and retaining state. That would significantly change AI requirements.

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