I'm a designer, but I admit it's really hard to predict what products and UX are going to work in the AI age.

Chatbots have been tried for a decade and were a total failure. With AI, it has become the fastest-growing way to interact with technology, ever.

GPT-5 tried to have an auto router and create abstraction for the user; people hated it. Instinct and Muse are doing the same with a different framing; it's going wild.

There are tons of these little examples where a small difference in framing, a small threshold in tech, and product assumptions completely flip on their heads.

It's amazing to follow but requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.

▲

CuriouslyC an hour ago | parent | next [-]

GPT-5's auto routing was bad, you'd get off the cuff bad answers for hard questions and overthinking on the banal. Also, with a chatbot the idea is that it's a back and forth but 5 minutes of thinking kills that, whereas fire and forget is core to the idea of autonomous agents.

Agents are going to replace almost all the UI in computers. For a trivial example, things like a control panel or settings menu will cease to exist, you'll handle coarse things via conversation ("set volume to 20%"), and UIs will be presented only for things where chat is cumbersome ("the password for the printer is !-*Donkey_Loves_Shrek^^@"). The UI that remains will become heavily decoupled, like supercharged versions of the office ribbons, with the intent that the agent will compose menu fragments and capability widgets dynamically so you only ever need to see controls for the settings that are relevant and that you care about.

	▲	ch_sm 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> "set volume to 20%" haha oh god no please don’t. EDIT: Sorry for being dismissive. What I mean is, volume is something people generally don’t think about in percentages, but by feel/ear. It’s also adjusted so often and impulsively that doing it via chat would be extremely slow and unergonomic. So yeah, I don’t think that should happen.

▲

heaney-555 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The biggest mistake people make in this space is confusing the limitations of a specific implementation of a technology with fundamental flaws with the entire idea of said technology.

Once you recognize and overcome that thinking, and learn to distinguish between those two things, you can see where things are going.

▲

young_mete 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think devil’s in the details on all of your examples, although I very much agree with your overall point - it’s so nuanced in terms of timing, current capabilities, etc.

Re: chatbots were tried but it’s a wrong model for a deterministic system. It’s the best one for a probabilistic one.

Re: chatGPT auto-router - 1) I suspect explicit model selection matters less in agentic contexts (this thing is coordinating a bunch of other agents for me) vs QA context where you want to make sure you’re getting the best answer. 2) I suspect auto-routing matters less now that models are way better

	▲	Adrig 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes definitely. But I have to admit that in the design field we have a strong tendency to over-rely on "proper rules" and to overgeneralize learnings. (My pet peeve is when B2C patterns are transferred as-is in B2B or prosumers) AI makes some old UX viable but can also unlock tons of value once you break your assumptions and reluctance. An example I see a lot here and on socials is how much of the code developers actually read nowadays. In the case of Instict, it is how many people actually share their credit card with an unknown startup's IA to buy stuff. I just heard on a podcast that 40% of them actually used their AI to buy something online (I didn't verify the %) I'm the kind of guy who didn't understand why people use phones so much when a desktop is way more comfortable, so I have to keep track of the crazy ones!