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Comment by ngangaga | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's that deep. We are just stuck with browsers now, for better and worse. Everything else trails.

We're stuck with browsers now until the primary touch with the internet is assistants / agent UIs / chat consoles.

That could end up being Electron (VS Code), though that would be a bit sad.

I think it'd be pretty funny if to book travel in 2035 you need to use a travel agent that's objectively dumber than a human. We'd be stuck in the eighties again, but this time without each other to rely on.

Of course, that would be suicide for the industry. But I'm not sure investors see that.

I don't think we are gonna go there. Talking is cumbersome. There's a reason, besides social anxiety that people prefer to use self-checkout and electronically order fastfood. There are easier ways to do a lot of things than with words.

I'd bet on maybe ad hoc ai designed ui-s you click but have a voice search when you are confused about something.

Search is being replaced by LLM chat. Agent workflows are going to get us to a place where people can rally software to their own purposes. At that point, they don't have to interact with the web front end, they can interact with their own personal front-end that is able to navigate your backend.

Today a website is easier. But just like there's a very large percentage of people doing a great many things from their phone instead of tying themselves to a full-blown personal computer, there will be an increasing number of people who send their agents off to get things done. In that scenario, the user interface is further up the stack than a browser, if there's a browser as typically understood in the stack at all.

If you know what you want then not talking to a human is faster. However if you are not sure a human can figure out. I'm not sure I'd trust a voice assistant - the value in the human is an informed opinion which is hard to program, but it is easy to program a recommendation for whatever makes the most profit. Of course humans often don't have an informed opinion either, but at least sometimes they do, and they will also sometimes admit it when they don't.

> the value in the human is an informed opinion which is hard to program

I don't think I ever used a human for that. They are usually very uninformed about everything that's not their standard operational procedure or some current promotional materials.

20 years ago when I was at McDonalds there would be several customers per shift (so many 1 in 500?) who didn't know what they wanted and asked for a recommendation. Since I worked there I ate there often enough to know if the special was something I liked or not.

Bless your souls. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I just personally had only bad experiences so I actively avoid human interactive input in my commercial activity.

> I actively avoid human interactive input in my commercial activity

Not to mention that the "human input" can be pre-scripted to urge you to purchase more, so it's not genuinely a human interaction, it's only a human delivering some bullshit "value add" marketing verbiage.

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