Another nail in the coffin for apps that depend on AI APIs because the AI companies themselves are working on products using their own APIs (unless you can make the UX significantly better). UX now seems like the prime motivator when building apps.
UX is not going to be a prime motivator, because the product itself is the very thing that stands between user and the thing they want. UX-wise, for most software, it's better for users to have all these products to be reduced to tool calls for AI agents, accessible via a single interface.
The very concept of product itself is limiting users to interactions allowed by the product vendor[0] - meanwhile, used as tools for AI agents allows them to be combined in ways user need[1].
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[0] - Something that, thanks to move to the web and switching data exchange model from "saving files" to "sharing documents", became the way for SaaS businesses to make money by taking user data hostage - a raison d'être for many products. AI integration threatens that.
[1] - And vendors would very much like users to not be able to. There's going to be some interesting fights here, as general-purpose AI tools are an existential threat to most of the software industry itself.
Just having an LLM is not the right UX for the vast majority of apps.
> Just having an LLM is not the right UX for the vast majority of apps.
I argue it is, as most things people do in software doesn't need to be hands-on. Intuition pump: if you can imagine asking someone else - a spouse, a friend, an assistant - to use some app to do something for you, instead of using the app yourself, then turning that app into a set of tools for LLM would almost certainly improve UX.
But I agree it's not fully universal. If e.g. you want to browse the history of your meals, then having to ask an LLM for it is inferior to tapping a button and seeing some charts. My perspective is that tool for LLM > app when you have some specific goal you can express in words, and thus could delegate; conversely, directly operating an app is better when your goal is unclear or hard to put in words, and you just need to "interact with the medium" to achieve it.
A solution could be, can the AI generate the UI then on the fly? That's the premise of generative UI, which has been floating around even on HN. Of course the issue with it is every user will get different UIs, maybe even in the same session. Imagine the placement of a button changing every time you use an app. And thus we are back to the original concept, a UX driven app that uses AI and LLMs as informational tools that can access other resources.