Why the future of AI interfaces looks like the past of computing. A comparison of the command line era to today's prompt engineering challenges & the return of the GUI.

Most strikingly, we’re back to single-threaded computing : one conversation, one task, one at a time.

Also, sometimes we prefer to see things […]

Standard UIs persist for good reasons. They enable the training of thousands of people & manage parallel tasks. They guide users toward the next action, bridging the divide between the prompt-fluent & everyone else. They manage costs by balancing deterministic & non-deterministic processes. AI & standard code both have a role to play.

So would Apple have succeeded if DOS had spoken English? Yes. The need for user interfaces on top of powerful platforms doesn’t disappear when the underlying system gets smarter; it intensifies.

I wholly agree.

The text box is powerful. The desktop built on top of it will be more powerful still.

I’ve said for a long time that text based chat is a poor user interface for most tasks. There’s a reason people use slides in lectures and whiteboards in meetings. Because just speaking or typing alone is often a rubbish mechanism for conveying information.

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