As AI agents become more capable, does the interface/orchestration layer become more or less important to human usability?

Guillermo Rauch · Oct 6, 2023 · hedged

UIs will change rather than diminish in importance, because information still has to be surfaced to the user even when the interface is natural language

A chatbot can compress a complex dashboard of menus into natural language, but the underlying data still needs to be presented; AI just serves it on demand

26:45 20VC: Why Great Companies are Defined by How Many Things They Say No To, Why Being First Does Not Matter & Why Market Over Traction or Team is the Most Important Thing with Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO @ Vercel

Guillermo Rauch · Oct 6, 2023 · hedged

UI will become more valuable rather than commoditized, because having AI available as an input fundamentally changes the design space and the next generation of products will look completely different

Software built over the past decade did not have reasoning machines available as a design primitive; now that LLMs can be invoked on demand, the design of a new email client or Notion would be profoundly different

Scope: described as his hypothesis / bet

28:13 20VC: Why Great Companies are Defined by How Many Things They Say No To, Why Being First Does Not Matter & Why Market Over Traction or Team is the Most Important Thing with Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO @ Vercel

George Sivulka · Jan 22, 2025

The better and more capable agents become, the more important interface becomes, because deploying thousands of agents turns into a management and orchestration problem requiring a human-first product

If 10,000 expert AI agents are dropped into a company, the challenge is not assigning tasks but making them work together and be easily understood by humans

47:50 20VC: Why All AI Companies Are Under-Valued | The Future of Foundation Models: Scaling Laws, Generalised vs Specialised, Commoditised? | From Unable to Afford Rent to Raising $130M From Index and Peter Thiel with George Sivulka @ Hebbia

Christian Kleinerman · Sep 22, 2023

Gen AI reduces the value of UI only for some use cases; for many others richer interfaces remain valuable and AI enriches them

For simple configuration tasks you can just specify what you want, but for interacting with data or complex problem spaces you may want a richer interaction surface

34:03 Genai reduces ui value only for simple tasks richer interfaces remain valuable for complex ones

Harry Stebbings · Oct 6, 2023 · hedged

As AI becomes more prominent, UI will matter less and less, while UX remains important

AI creates a chasm between the consumer and the interface, so the visual layer becomes less load-bearing

26:24 Ui matters less as ai capability increases though ux remains important

Harry Stebbings · Oct 6, 2023

Too many options make an enemy of us all, so telling users what they need may beat an explosion of choices

Draws on the argument of The Paradox of Choice

35:27 Too many choices overwhelm users so curation beats more ui

Guillermo Rauch · Oct 6, 2023

More options are better in the creative stage of a workflow, but only if the system learns from what the user turns down

Rick Rubin's contribution is telling the artist what he likes and doesn't like, not technical expertise; the best assistant will accumulate rich context about your preferences and propose better variations over time

35:46 More options help only if system learns from rejected choices