Re: the value of good UI/UX

I think short-term, the value of good interfaces will actually increase - if anyone can easily build out the same product in 10 different ways, the best designed one that people actually want to use will likely be the choice. But that’s holding constant lots of things like distribution, type of SaaS, its place in the transaction stack, etc. So either guess would make a lot of assumptions.

It also appears (so far at least) that these models really struggle with front-end design. Something like /frontend-design skill is good but only gets you so far. It still requires a ton of steering to get it to a sensical place. So for now, whoever can steer it is still valuable. But I’m sure more and more of that will get codified and internalized by the model and the harness. So the design steering will become more and more abstract.

Long-term, we’re likely moving towards dynamically generated interfaces. Claude is already doing it with diagrams and charts in the chat. This opens up so many fascinating questions. What happens when UI doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all, where each person may get their GUI generated with their preferences and context in mind? What happens to the design process when your UI doesn’t have to scale to a ton of user types and use cases? Will we even be designing UIs or something else entirely? Will Jakob’s Law still apply or will our individual GUIs diverge so much that I won’t be able to navigate your smartphone if I pick it up?

By making the tools compostable, the valuation from this ‘keeping within’ angle will slowly disappear, but maybe it can be replaced by increase usage as a source of valuation.

We'll see if this time, things end differently.

First, mcp, like cli, like api, is a kind of (user facing) interface, just not graphical. It still needs to be designed, just by different people with differing skills.

Second, textual interface can only go so far in terms of information ingestion. Trying to describe a complex relationship between entities can be extremely difficult with text. However, a good graphical interface will make complex information easier to digest.

So in my opinion, the moat will emphasize organization which knows how to plan good a custom experience, whether graphical or textual, and less where tables and forms are the main business

The result is less that I want to go to Figma directly and more that I just want to skip it entirely. So, assuming the power of these aggregator agents keeps growing, the onus is on these tools to create useful integrations or get subsumed by a model capability or another tool with a better integration. It sounds like your experience is similar - you bypassed the tools with bad integrations instead of going to them directly.

It makes sense they very slowly transitioned from read-only to limited write. You have to carefully beta test. Both figuring out the guardrails and finding usecases where it actually works well. The only way to do that (properly) is a slow drip release cycle.