Don't give up on UI
There's a growing crowd on Twitter that thinks frontend is dying. That the future of AI is pure chat. OpenClaw runs through Telegram. Poke operates through texting. Manus is adding WhatsApp. No app, no UI, just messages.
And I'm over here so fatigued by chat that I barely read the responses anymore.
The wall of text problem
At this point, every chatbot interaction is the same. I tell it what I want, it dumps a wall of text back at me, and I have to somehow parse through it to find the part I care about. Poke and OpenClaw have done good work making their responses more conversational and readable, I'll give them that. But a text stream has a hard ceiling as an interface, and I think we've already hit it.
The funniest meme about OpenClaw is something like: "I can text it and 15 minutes later it'll tell me what emails I have." We're trying so hard to avoid UI that we've made the experience worse than the thing we're replacing.
Just show me the draft
Here's what bothers me. Say you use Poke and you need to reply to an email. You tell it to draft one. It sends you the draft... as a text message. No rich formatting. If you want to change something, you send another text. If you want to send it, another text. You can't attach images easily. You can't see what the recipient will actually see.
What I'd want instead is to say "draft this email" and have it pop up an actual composition interface. Scrollable text area. Edit it directly. Send button, cancel button, attach button. The AI fills it in, I tweak it, I hit send. We've had email compose UIs for decades. The fact that we're moving away from that in the name of "just use chat" is bizarre to me.
And this isn't just email. If my agent is managing Jira, I don't want it explaining the board state in a paragraph. Show me the filtered list. Let me drag tickets between columns. If it's showing me analytics, give me a chart, not a narrated description of numbers. Scheduling? Calendar. Comparisons? Table. We solved all these UI problems years ago. Cramming them back into a text stream is regression.
The sci-fi reference everyone gets wrong
People love citing the movie Her as the endgame for AI interaction. And sure, Theodore talks to Samantha. But he also has a little device. He has a computer. There are screens. The vision was never "just a voice."
Jarvis is even more telling. Tony Stark talks to it, yeah, but the output is almost entirely visual. 3D holograms, schematics, data pulled up on surfaces all around him. Voice in, rich interactive visuals out. Nobody watching Iron Man thought "this would be better as a group chat."
What I actually want
I'm not anti-chat. Natural language is a great way to tell a computer what you want. But the response shouldn't always be more text. Sometimes a short text reply is the right call. Other times the right response is an interactive UI the agent built for you on the fly.
I've been messing around with a version of this. The setup is straightforward: a server running something like a Next.js app. You talk to your agent normally. When the task warrants it, the agent spins up a temporary route and sends you a link. You click through, get a full interactive interface for the task at hand (email composer, dashboard, form, whatever), do your thing, and the route spins down when you're done.
That's a wildly better experience than an agent that funnels everything through text messages.
Why this is happening
I think the chat-only push is mostly a distribution play. Shipping a Telegram bot is way easier than shipping an app. I get the appeal. But the user experience is collateral damage, and I don't think enough people are admitting that.
I'll happily download another app if it actually does what I need. The problem was never too many apps. It was too many bad ones. And stripping away UI to avoid building interfaces is how you make a bad one.
As AI agents get more capable, their interfaces should get better, not disappear. Chat and UI aren't competing. They're complementary, and the interesting work is in figuring out when the agent should respond with each.