I hope the future of AI isn't this sort, where companies provide the user/customer with an interface to an AI that can do things for the user... I would much prefer that companies instead provide an interface FOR an AI, and the user brings their own AI which connects to that interface.

In other words, provide my AI with tools, instead of providing me an AI that uses your tools.

That way, my AI can bring all the context it needs, and I can bring all of the settings and knowledge about what I want with me. I don't want a fractured world of tons of AIs i interact with where I have to explain all the fundamental information about what I want and how I work every time.

This also has the benefit of sidestepping the issue the essay is talking about. You provide a consistent tool, and the AI weirdness is not your issue anymore. You don't have to worry about solving for all the weird ways people prompt the AI, or the ways they break.

A better internet is one in which LLMs enable everyone to ride their own custom Chromium (or whatever) flavor and the "frontend" of > 90% of sites - especially e-commerce - is generated specific to the user given their configuration of their personal LLM intermediary.

Companies will increasingly not ship frontends anymore, maybe just themed components that most users will ignore. "Pages" naturally become synthetic amalgamations of the various things you are interested in from various sources. Your preferred UI/UX comes for free courtesy of your LLM intermediary.

Everything is an API. Regulation will probably be needed to enforce this on the data access side given the incentives for companies to resist despite the benefit to the consumer. A relatively easy solution is to make it part of the requirements to take payments online, which is already highly regulated. The goal would be that essentially to operate anything approaching e-commerce online you must allow consumer AI intermediaries sufficient access that they could independently construct whatever your current frontend is from the publicly available API/MCP endpoints.

The tricky part of engineering around privacy/personas, account creation, etc. will be relatively easy following such state intervention. Take payments - virtual credit cards are already a useful way to protect data and mitigate risks when dealing with multiple vendors. This sort of API is a natural fit for a world in which companies are not allowed to box you into their horrible UIs, most of which are simply lazy attempts at copying the most profitable anti patterns of their competitors. Let your personal agent generate a unique card for each vendor behind the scenes. Why should you have to care?

How much better the internet would be if every UI/UX was in a meaningful sense, your own.

There's no interop between video conferences services, no BYO-video-conferencing app, why would this be any different? It took government regulation to allow telephones other than those provided by the phone company to be plugged into the phone network. Can't control you or usage if they just provide dumb pipes/interfaces that anyone's tool and interact with.

I think this is basically the motivation behind MCP servers, so you're in good company.

But I've spoken with many people at companies who've decided to add an in-UI agent to their apps, and I don't think this trend will persist. Absolutely AI/agents will increasingly become a major component of interfaces, but the current common incarnation of "Clippy for X" feels like a kludged bridge between an app that was not designed from first principles for agents (and often was poorly designed for humans) and the impulse to be "AI native".

From my experience, some of the most successful niches for this sort of UI so far have been in apps that were already well suited to it. I'm thinking specifically about analytics/dashboarding/"this is a portal for you to query things easily" software. They already started with a lot of the elements you want: visible provenance of the agents actions via the queries it writes, a malleable interface that you already expect to be customizable and ephemeral, and most importantly, "navigation" that is genuinely difficult for many users (in the sense that "navigating" can mean "querying specific data"). The agent provides a ton of value to users and its actions are intuitive and legible.

But the agents you see right now in a lot of apps that do things like navigate you to the right page by... sending you a link, which you could have clicked from the navbar? Or worse, which hijack your navigation and throw you on a page you're unfamiliar with, and where you have no sense of place or how to make your way to/from? I don't think they're particularly long for this world.

If the interface is documented and can also be used without AI, and you can write your own software instead if wanted, then that will be more helpful, I think. (Someone who does want to use it with the AI can still do so, without forcing everyone else to also do.)

This is like asking LG to make TVs where you can bring your own video input. It just doesn't make economic sense when they can extract so much money by owning the glass.

> provide the user/customer with an interface to an AI that can do things for the user

This is exactly what MCP is. But the reality is it will likely be about as popular as browser extensions and most normies will avoid.

Simplifying UX at the cost of personal control is inevitable because not everyone wants to think about tool selection and coordination. But maybe we can angle the future toward "tool bundles" that interoperate well or (if we are dreaming) mandate models remain accessible by any harness, which none of the players want but would be best for users and ecosystem development.

I don’t think that will happen. It sounds good, and I would like it if things operated that way - but from the company perspective how do they, for example, have a tool call that gives the customer a discount, without it getting used when it shouldn’t?

Companies want ai to replace human customer service decision making, which means it can’t just be an api that an external agent can interact with, because it needs private knowledge of company processes and access to capabilities that are abusable.

But we’re already at the point where if you manage to talk to a human, mostly you end up speaking to someone with no actual power to resolve your issue - so i think basically the future is just going to suck

100% agree, and I predict this is where the actual nearest big battle in our industry will occur.

AI subsumes products. Users want that. Vendors, do not. AI does not work well when shackled within confines of a product - it works better from outside, where it can treat slices of products as tools, and mash them together into ad-hoc solutions. Alas, products is how our industry makes money. Take arbitrary slice of problem space, slap a trademark on it, and shill to people (or VCs for funding). This disconnect makes AI an existential threat to a good chunk of software industry, and you can bet that companies (possibly including your own employers) won't go gently into the night.

MCPs are an aberration, the early stage of "AI adoption" where no one knew what they're doing but they knew they "have to do something with AI!". This age is now ending, and I expect the tensions will go high, as most vendors will get desperate to avoid their products getting obsoleted overnight.

Imagine if companies exposed access to their services via a discoverable uniform interface.

Each company would determine the range of actions a customer could perform in response to their request and current circumstances. A representation of state could be transferred between the company's server and whatever client the customer chooses to use. The customer would be free to interact with any of these services in a way that suited them via their chosen client.

Either that or we could kludge something together with MCP.

Companies will do whatever creates the most lock-in for the user and generates the most profit for themselves.

Ask yourself what's in their best interest as a business? That's probably what they'll do.

So I actually struggled with this recently (2 months ago). My "vision" was to have customers BYO agent and provide a secure MCP with an in-app (forced) approval gate for sensitive operations. But everytime I described to one of my clients, how they could bring their own ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, w/e, I got blank stares.

So now I'm building (already have done so mostly) cheap ZDR models into the application. I'm trying to build them in a way that I would want to use them, so a less "I'll be your AI today!" help bubble, but who's kidding... At least they aren't just customer pacifiers that use the help system, but actually can act on behalf of the user.

After which I'll end up building the MCP, but for power users, hopefully leveraging much of the same work. It's worth noting that MCPs have way too much friction still. It's gotten a lot easier recently (very recently) to bring your own custom MCP with Claude, but ChatGPT is more work, and restrictive (specific account types or submitted MCP apps) for the end user and I don't even know what Google wants at this point... It's a bit messy. IMO they are all dropping the ball (except Claude, which has taken the best approach).

I think we might be in this interim state that requires us to build ALL of the UIs, to address ALL of the users (Human responsively and Clankers), and it's a bit painful. If I was "the user" myself, then I would just want a CLI w/ OAUTH with clear documentation, that an agent could use (how is this worse than MCP?). But I'm not my own customer. That being said... I probably WILL build this version to scratch my own itch and bet on the future.