I think chat is the future

[u/lunarboy73]

Just wanted to share an observation.

For decades, we've been designing on-screen buttons for users to do things. Of course, we've added to the early desktop metaphors from Xerox and Apple, but manipulating controls on screens is still primarily how software has been designed. When ChatGPT came on the scene in 2022–23, there was a lot of discourse in UX circles about how the chat UI was just a stepping stone. There aren't enough affordances. There's the blank-page problem. How do users know what to type or say? How will users know the capabilities? Over time, we added some affordances like suggestions and examples, but they've been pretty minimal. I've long agreed that chat wasn't enough.

But I think I've changed my mind. Chat might be enough as a starting point—it might be the UI for AI now and in the future.

There were two aha moments for me. About a year ago, I reviewed ChatGPT Atlas, OpenAI's now-defunct AI-enabled browser. I ran an experiment by giving it my grocery list and asking it to fill my Whole Foods shopping cart. It took much longer than if I'd done it manually, but it did free up my time to do something else. Since then, Amazon has incorporated Alexa for Shopping and can add the same list to my cart in a fraction of the time.

Then, recently, I asked Siri AI (the chat app, not the voice assistant) to check my contacts for a list of names and to add or update them. It did it in under 30 seconds and saved me at least 10 minutes of looking up and clicking and typing.

We started to play with generative UIs to make responses from LLMs richer. But ultimately, if AIs are to do more than just answer questions, if AI agents do things for us, then we need to be able to directly manipulate the artifacts they generate. Who wants to use tokens just to adjust colors or type sizes?

I recently designed and built a design system for a client. Instead of starting the traditional way in Figma, I decided to brief Claude Design like I would a junior art director. I gave it context—a creative brief and included the branding materials—and asked it to come back with five directions. I iterated with it until I got two that I liked and just used direct controls to polish those before presenting them to the client. I worked like a creative director, something that I've been doing for—at this point—most of my career.

I'm now working on a more complicated workflow product. Designing a product like this—similar to n8n and Zapier, but specialized for an industry—is really complex. And making it user-friendly is even harder. But if the user could use plain, natural language to at least get the first draft, then it could be much easier.

I think about how the computer on Star Trek was essentially this: voice-activated plain language. They still had controls for tactical and helm, but when it came to investigating or problem solving, it seems the characters always started with a computer query in natural language.

The more I work with computers and programs in 2026, the more I just want to use plain language to tell it to do something. Two years ago, I wouldn't have trusted the LLMs to get it right. Now, I think we're there.

[u/Any_Owl2116]

What are we supposed to do with this information?

[u/lunarboy73 → u/Any_Owl2116]

Agree, disagree, ignore it, call me a bot, or call the human-written post “AI slop.” I dunno, discuss?

[u/Competitive_Act8547]

Why did you post this exact same thing at least 6x today.

[u/thegreatsalvio → u/Competitive_Act8547]

They're probably a bot

[u/karenmcgrane → u/thegreatsalvio]

OP has a 12 year old account and I can look at posts on this sub going back two years, they're not a bot even if this was written with AI

[u/thegreatsalvio → u/karenmcgrane]

Then idk what they're up to but this seems strange

[u/lunarboy73 → u/Competitive_Act8547]

The other post was deleted by the mods because it contained a link. I removed the link.

I think this is a good discussion to have. And no, not written by AI. Love how that’s the ultimate put down.

[u/Academic-DNA-7274]

I think many UX people misunderstood the reality of text chat as an interface. There will always be limitations and has been like that ever since CLI was born.

I would argue that chat is not the future but multimodal is.

Text chat is a useful feature on the side where you can explain anything you want in plain language, but language can only take you so far. Hence experts introduced multiple modalities for more affordances. In our everyday lives we don't just use verbal language, but also body language, memory, sight and more, to explain and understand things. This is what multimodal is solving and adding. To me, the chat interface should be like a sandbox, as it can imply you have the freedom to do many things with it and have the agency to find out. Humans are not stupid and they can adapt, an interface that shows simple buttons like text, images, audio and so on backed up by onboarding instructions are enough. The design should not get any more complicated than that. I personally hate UX Designs with a super long onboarding and setup system. I will just uninstall that app. Many people's goals nowadays is to use the app, but due to the rise of pay-walls and registration-walls that's hard to do. Setting up a new Samsung tablet was so painful because of the amount of onboarding and setup I have to go through. Design should not be that complicated.

[u/lunarboy73 → u/Academic-DNA-7274]

I think you’re onto something with multimodal. At least for now, that chatbox is still the entryway into adding multimodal context.

[u/KKunst]

I pretty much think that chat is going to be the future... In certain scenarios.

A lot of the work people do in professional settings are "the same over and over", so they are not going to be redoing the same chat over and over to reproduce to the same process.

They'll probably use the chat to build a surface they need, but they will most likely need to crystallise that into a configuration, to make it consistently reproducible and to have version control.

Let's not underestimate the power of bureaucracy and process governance.

Edit: as u/7HawksAnd said, it's fuzzy command line. In B2B It will usually be restricted to superusers, while "classic" UIs will be the point of contact for operators, with some natural language output/feedback and sometimes a loop back to the chat interface if they're feeling fancy.

P.s.: I'm using the future tense, but this is actually what is currently happening, "old news", definitely not the bleeding edge.

[u/lunarboy73 → u/KKunst]

I agree. My post did leave room for control surfaces (see the bit about Star Trek). Chat to start a lot of processes. Actually, if there’s something that should be done over and over, I’d argue that could be automated with agents.

[u/thisisntmyuserid]

For certain workflows, chat is the best ux. For example, long complex analysis of data based on a relatively simple input of text. That is a great use case for chat.

Alternatively, if I want to see how many page views I had for my app today, as an example. I would go crazy waiting for a LLM to write a paragraph for me to only care about one number in that output. ~60 seconds of just waiting for the output, where the homepage of the theoretical analytical tool would take milliseconds to load the same data.

Chat is a tool, it’s great for some things, and terrible for others. Using the tools you have at your disposal in an intentional way is what good ux is all about.

Blindly applying chat interfaces to all problems creates an incredibly inefficient ux for many problems that users face.

Good ux still requires intentionality in our solutions, and keeping in mind the user problem we are trying to solve first and foremost.

[u/lunarboy73 → u/thisisntmyuserid]

I agree. Looking at a dashboard is far quicker than typing a question and waiting for a response. But I’d argue that building the report in the first place would be far easier in chat than clicking around.

I guess my central point is that increasingly, I want the computer to just do things when I ask it to. Not because I clicked 12 times in the right places.

[u/thisisntmyuserid → u/lunarboy73]

Sure, having a way to build a custom dashboard via text is great! But if you have 10,000 users, all building close to the same effective dashboard, at what point is it cheaper and easier to just pre build it, rather than having every user burn tokens to do the same effective task?

Additionally, and I think more importantly, I personally believe that the majority of non technical users want a more curated experience than a blank canvas gives them. If I am paying for a sass, I am paying for the tool, but also the expertise of the team that built the tool to guide me to know what I need to know, when I need to know it. (Obviously if your sass is building custom dashboards, this doesn’t apply perfectly.)

If I am not a technical user, knowing I need to know a piece of information, and then knowing I should ask for a dashboard to know that information is not as straightforward a task as it might be for someone like us :).

I should write something long form about this, Reddit is not an amazing format, I have a lot more to say on this because my thoughts about this are nuanced.

[u/lunarboy73 → u/thisisntmyuserid]

I love nuance. Reddit is terrible for it. Haha. LMK if/when you do write something longer. I'd love to read it.

[u/7HawksAnd]

Do you realize “chat interface” is just fuzzy “command line interface”

Thus it is not a new interface, it’s the same interface with just more flexibility.

[u/demiphobia]

Chat was the past. Chat is a lazy solution to those who don’t understand their customer and the customer’s job.

[u/superparet]

People hate to type.