I don't think we should homage GUI for AI agent workflows. The terminal and Mac GUI are 100% deterministic when you click an icon, but I'm not sure if visualizing agent workflows is the right call.

The problem is that AI workflows are inherently different for each person.

The current approach feels like it's forcing a CLI-based model on users. I also don't think chat is a suitable fundamental unit for task delegation.

I've worked on writing a compiler using both hand-written code and AI. Once the project exceeds a certain size, the chat itself becomes a bottleneck. In those cases, I needed proof and gates like Rocq. So in essence, AI coding requires clear negative gates that should be rejected when approaching the goal.

I think something like Figma's canvas model might become the new interface.

Because no matter how meta you make it, agent workflows are ultimately optimized for the individual. My settings often don't match someone else's.

Computers also have this problem, but in that case, you can enforce defaults. With AI agents, it's different.

That's why I think we need a canvas—something like a workspace next to the user space where agent workflows can be dynamically adjusted.

I focus most of my coding effort on building gates that AI-generated code must pass through when it's being produced. That approach has allowed me to handle much larger volumes of code.

The future agent GUI will be about supervising multiple asynchronous tasks.

In a way, this might end up resembling object-oriented programming—just with task graphs instead of object graphs.

Once AI starts generating code, it flows out like water through a burst dam. It's impossible for any human to fully understand it all. At first, I tried to understand every line, but that actually turned out to be less efficient than just writing the code myself. There's a clear fundamental mismatch between the way AI thinks about code and the way I do.

This mismatch seems like an unsolvable impedance mismatch problem—similar to the one between ORM and SQL. So once you decide to use AI agent code, you have no choice but to shift your focus from reviewing the code itself to trusting the gates you've built around it.

The key question is how tightly you can build those gates. And I don't think chat-based interfaces are capable of providing that level of control.

Totally agreed that chat interfaces won’t be sufficient to enforce complicated gates. Our interface does have the concept of a workspace, where you can see all the cards at-a-glance within the workspace. But graphs, or otherwise finding a way to have the tasks interact with each other, could be an interesting direction.