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Comment by samastur | Hacker News Reader

I find this view fascinating. After decades of observing users getting lost by minor changes to UI or sometimes just different "paint" I am now to believe that we will all enjoy using completely custom UI customised not only to what I would want but what the app will think I need at particular moment and get on with it just fine.

I actually do think generating UI has some future, but I remain sceptical it can realistically go as far as promoters claim. It is especially bizarre to me when this is done by ostensibly UX people.

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I am with you. For example - this post has a comparison of a recipe app from 5.6 and 6 for comparison. They look different. Now if every time I ask for a recipe, it decides to render a new UI because of either the model changing or the recipe goes from stove to oven or something, it’s going to become annoying very quickly. It just seems like he current generation of models have been tuned to create better UIs than previous one and people interested in the UI are getting hit with excitement.

I really do think we are headed toward a world where stuff is hyper customized like that.

As a developer, it already feels like this with internal company tooling. Anything I have the source code to and a build pipeline setup for, I can just pop open a new tab and tell it what I want changed, and it just gets done for me.

Even my home assistant setup at home now, i hooked up codex to it via an MCP, and when we put out the blow up haloween lawn ornaments I was able to just pop open codex on my phone and tell it to throw together an automation to run them for me, and 5 minutes later it was done, with an override button on my dashboard. It's a shockingly nice workflow!

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just tell your app to reconfigure/rewrite itself to remove those "what the app will think I need at particular moment" features that you dislike? Maybe have it remove a bunch of the whitespace, getting rid of the lazy loading infinite scroll, whatever you want. It's the GPL dream, except you don't need any coding ability, just a subscription to a megacorp.

I do the same with Home Assistant and my many EspHome devices. HA works well, and it has a lot of nice features and extensive community-built integrations, but configuring and laying out the UI is a disaster. You can choose between WYSIWYG UI tools that are limited and cumbersome, or you can deal with raw YAML that stretches far beyond what YAML should be used for with deep nesting, and it's poorly documented to boot. It feels like a proprietary workflow engine, where you'd rather just write it in a real programming language.

Agents cut through all that crap and allow me to make changes without learning a new overwrought configuration language that thrashes syntax every few months. The fact that it is open and fully modifiable redeems it, because I can ignore all the annoying parts while achieving what all that was envisioned to allow.

Based on current capabilities, I'm skeptical as well. However, over time, I do think they will get better at understanding our intent. Also, I would be more forgiving of an app I vibe coded in this manner, that's only meant to be used by me. Of course that assumes appropriate security guardrails are in place.

Just depends where you think the limits of future AIs are.

Not really because I'm sure they will be capable of a good enough design.

What I actually doubt is that people as whole are this adaptable to continuous novelty, especially when it is not directed by them.

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