Comment by gaigalas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaigalas | Hacker News Reader

It does feel novel.

However, I believe the GUI for AI agents that will win is a plain text editor with a file tree, a terminal pane for coding (or preview pane for other kinds of tasks) and a chat sidebar.

Even if the code editor is not used to type, it's there for psychological safety. It lets you inspect and navigate what is being created. Has tremendous value.

Plain text has survived countless software revolutions, so it's likely to become the dominant format for artifacts produced by AI. Non-plain text things are likely to adapt instead of the other way around.

"Strange terminal commands" have survived, while even poweruser toolbar style have started to fade (I love them, but they're fading away). It clearly has some value (hint: speed over familiarity).

I think the poweruser toolbar style was indeed the only thing in the past couple of decades that really tried to match the terminal for speed of interaction. In my opinion, it succeeded, but it has its limits too (tends to clump with stuff over time; has a limit on the amount of abstractions it can hold). I would love to see a candidate GUI that tackles that speed angle.

I broadly agree. Plain text formats remain consistently accessible and flexible.

That said, arguably the dominant AI artifacts are binary images, video, audio.

The "preview panes for other kinds of tasks" will be a big deal. Humans tend prefer rich text editors (I think?). Also spreadsheets, page layouts, node graphs, timelines, hex editors, ...

So maybe the preview panes are actually editors themselves? Speaking personally, I enjoy closely coupled combinations of underlying plain text representations with task-specific UI on top.

> the poweruser toolbar style

These can be great for discovery. But one must-have for me is a unique keyboard shortcut assigned to each button on the toolbar. Because if I use a feature often, I would 1000x rather use the keyboard to invoke it than have to drag a mouse to click a button.

Yes, I think the good comparison here is games with keyboard shortcuts + graphical interface. The interface helps with discovery, but it's complemented by the need for speed through shortcuts.

We see this playing a role in things like tool selection, ie setting up shortcuts similar to gaming macros for quick selections.

Plain text is great for transmitting information that's already specified, but human intent doesn't come out fully formed. Plaintext alone won't be the main way for humans to express intent and interact with an agent.

That makes a lot of sense when reading, but in reality a lot of things have snapped back to plain text over and over again.

I don't know the exact reason for that, but it's undeniable that it happened.

Lots of people try completely new novel GUI stuff all the time, always from basic principles. Looks clean and neat but doesn't survive the real world. Meanwhile, plain text tools have been improving and spreading roots consistently for decades.

Could be that a GUI gets some showtime, but wouldn't bet against plain text at any time. It's like betting against spoons.

Yeah, we speak in words, so I'm not saying text would go away entirely. Even in our Marble interface, you can still type follow-up prompts to a task. But plaintext won't be an interface by itself.

One thing I mentioned before is that the representation of artifacts produced by AI being inspectable has notable value.

I miss this in some existing agentic interfaces. I'm not typing into the text editor, I'm inspecting the work it does. Not exactly "reading every line", but definitely inspecting.

I understand not all kinds of works can be like this, and having to understand how "a bunch of text files" become something else (a program, or a page, or etc) is really taxing on cognition (that's why GUIs exist), but also really beneficial for verification (you can see the guts of the thing).

So, it's not prose text. I'm talking about the artifact produced by the agent having a plain text representation.

Lacking that produces back-and-forth interactions that feel exhausting. I can make Claude design a spreasheet for me, and it will present it beautifully for me, with export to Google Sheets and so on. But then, changes to it don't let me dig up into it interactively. I need to open the spreadsheet externally, then translate my attempt at debugging the issue to the chat back, which is super slow.

Designing one inspectable interface for each kind of produced artifact/outcome sounds like a lot of work. And plain text solves this beautifully (it is an interface) by introducing formats (like Markdown for documents).

I'm not suggesting every single AI user will eventually migrate to IDEs with sidebars, but I think something closer to it will be prominent for a foreseeable future in major important work done with AI assistance (the kinds of things that really matter, big work).

Some of your demos are not opening, so I don't know what is the MarbleOS solution for things like spreadsheets or more elaborate artifacts that, today, in tools like Claude, produce this exhausting back-and-forth I mentioned.

Also, I must say the exhausting part is really only exhausting for power users (the guy that does a lot of spreadsheets needs the speed, not the ease of use). For beginners, a more guided approach might be best. For something that carries the OS terminology, I would expect both approaches to be present at some capacity (other harnesses fail at this too, so don't worry).

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