Newsletter - How to future proof your UI for agents

[ivanagas]

Summary

Article on how we are thinking about UI with agents doing more of the work based on future of UI RFC

Headline options

• How to future proof your UI for agents
  • What is the job of UI when agents are doing more of the work?
• UI is dying but your app can survive. Here's how.
• Your app might be going headless, but you don't need to.
• Your app is losing its head. Here's how to get ready.

Outline (optional)

• A large number of people are using agents via MCP and CLI tools to interact with apps now. An increasing number.
  • Already for some of our products/features, a majority of usage is via agents.
  • This is the same with lots of companies including Salesforce.
• This means if you are building UIs for people, you might be missing out on a significant portion of your user base. This UI will be increasingly less relevant. You may even miss the wave, you'll be busy writing 2025 software when you should be writing 2030 software.
• We've already written about building agent-first products, but how does UI evolve? Here's how we're thinking about it.
• We're having a sort of existential crisis about UI. What's it even good for if agents are doing all the work?
  • Is UI dead? Although some are advocating for it, no.
  • Text is the default for all of this as you can see by chatbots, Claude Code, etc. Build a UI when text is not sufficient.
  • Chat doesn't have affordances, it's not a good interface for learning what's possible (or what's not possible).
  • Text is not going to be the end state.
  • Signals is our solution to this, but other companies will have something else.
• Right now, UIs are built primarily for doing, but agents will be doing more of that doing, so what are UIs going to be good for? "The four new jobs of UI"
  1. Understanding and trusting what agents are doing. A healthcheck. Code review. Monitoring, analytics. Prius dashboard.
  2. Give humans a way to store and share content. Don't regenerate a UI every time. Artifacts, dashboards, creations. Karpathy's custom GUI.
  3. Give context or ask for things from agents. Ephermeral. A conversation that does. A live channel where agents get back to work. Karpathy's autonomy sliders. Era of clicking buttons is over - Sierra guy.
  4. Focus humans where their input is actually needed. Ikea effect at the very least. Support tickets that need a response, inbox items that need decision, agents that need direction. Langchain agent inbox.
• 3 + 4 are the new doing for people.
• AI isn't killing UI, it's changing it. UI will let humans trust, steer, store, and direct the work agents are doing.
  • We're working towards self-driving software, but we're not there yet.
  • Ask yourself if it a screen does this.