Something like codex desktop is slightly better but still a horrible interface for developing software in any form of serious capacity.
Sure it works because the friction of manually working is just so damn high. And there aren't good alternatives, the jump from pi to claude to codex being almost negligible for most folks is a very high signal this entire pattern just doesn't really work.
I don't yet know where we will land or will we suffer with the current bad type text in a box ux for the next few years but I am certain this is not it.
I am still trying to work out what is it though, so well we will see when we get there.
Not using tools is a good example of the issue, you give up a lot of control to do that, sometimes it's good enough often it's not, and often it's worse because you don't even realize how much control you have given up.
I don't think we will do natural language interactions with our computers, I honestly feel like we will do something more intent based. If LLMs can know from our words what we want to do, then they can certain infer from what we are doing stuff we are about to do.
Think auto complete but for user actions, without taking away user control and understanding intent almost perfectly. Maybe it would require neuralink or something to get good enough, but until that happens I don't think we are moving away entirely from our UIs/UXs entirely.
Some people will, the low skill, low requirements, but no-code has existed for a very long time for the same reason, visual scripting is a similar example.
A video made by LLMs by using Premiere Pro is always going to be worse than what a professional makes entirely on their own in Premiere Pro not in terms of quality but in terms of control hence intent.
Similar issues with software, you can not perfectly describe what you want to another person perfectly that just doesn't happen, otherwise we wouldn't have had companies with more managers than engineers it seems like.
There is a lot of loss of intent, imagine if every action was something where you lost some of your intent, then after 100 requests does any of your intent even remains in it.?
This might be too hypothetical but I don't see LLMs replacing UI in the short term, but I don't know what happens in longer term.
But I do think LLMs will change how the software the interfaces and tooling works almost entirely.
Today it's much easier to llm rather than sql. It's not even a question of whether it's 10% better or something the cognitive load of writing SQL is high enough in data analysis that LLMs are the only solution.
LLMs enable some pretty interesting ways to query data itself, you can ask the data to query itself, imagine being able to prompt inject the data.
But on a more useful case imagine being able to let data build itself, when ever an incident happens, LLMs can enable flags to collect more data automatically based on incidents add reporting apis and telemetry and so much more.
Incident analysis should have changed but it hasn't yet, a human for some random reason still needs to ask an LLM to do the work, then understand it somewhat and then reply to others.