by mattlondon
6 subcomments
- With respect I feel like the author is missing a whole bunch here about the point of a website.
It's not just content/info/data, it's a performance (in the creative sense).
Brands spend a lot of time honing their appearance - not just fonts and colours but the whole composition and visual pacing - their entire "say something without saying anything at all" aspect etc. Just walk through any place with physical shops and really look at how the stores have worked on their appearance and how they present themselves to customers. They're not just selling a product, they're selling a lifestyle/feeling/etc/etc. They're not just going to give that creative control away to some LLM.
Another way to think of it is instead of people watching a movie or play when they go to the cinema or theater, they're just given the script to read. Same information but the entire artistry of both the performers and the directors is totally absent, leaving it up to each reader to imagine the delivery of lines or the scene's setting etc.
I think on HN and in tech in general people seem to forget that "the first bite is with the eye", and that is why "normal people" never liked or used RSS. The desire to leave our mark and to create (and view!) visually appealing things seems to be pretty innate in humans - we've been doing it since cave paintings. I struggle to think of a world where we just hand that over to AIs and humans have zero creative control.
by danpalmer
2 subcomments
- I doubt this will happen for a few reasons:
1. Branding. Companies want to control their interfaces for all sorts of reasons. Branding is a big one. Clarity and comms are another.
2. LLMs in the hot path. LLMs are expensive, a hell of a lot more expensive than executing some Javascript locally. Hell, you'd still probably need to do that under this model anyway. We're likely to see LLM usage filter into the right places, use-cases with higher leverage, LLMs to create a UI that is shipped to all users over LLMs creating UI on the fly every time. Costs and time will dictate this just like they have dictated how every other technology is used.
- What the article misses is that generating a good UI is not easy, a good interface conveys so much more semantic information then just it's underlying API, and it does that without the user needing to concisely interpret the information.
And it's not just semantic information, presenting any kind of information in a way which enable the user to seamlessly interpret and use it is not an easy task.
AI, definitely lowered the bar for making some UI, but it doesn't help with the fundamentals challenges of making a UI, at least not more so then it helps with the fundamental challenges of any other job in our industry.
- I appreciate this idea. I don’t think it fits our current mental model of the web (or mobile), which makes it thought provoking. If you squint, it’s like the optimistic Web 2.0 era of open APIs expecting a bunch of various UIs and mashups to spring up. The business model could be challenging with the client-centric focus though, unless the adaptive browser slips ads in, which is an unpleasant thought.
- Big brands spend millions establishing a particular look, style, format. They don't want you to treat their sites as merely a set of APIs to scrape and customize based on your own style preferences. They want you to have a branded experience.
by designerarvid
1 subcomments
- When the canned sentence structures of LLMs are frequent and unaltered throughout an article like this, I always wonder whether the thinking also has been done mainly by the machine.
by rufasterisco
0 subcomment
- Focusing on SaaS rather than B2C.
A clear advantage of getting users build their own UI is that processes emerge as a consequence.
Specific roles within a team don’t use every feature in an UI, and often compose a series of actions in a workflow.
Letting them build the UI to aggregate and automate leads to being able to extract business knowledge in the UI as well as the reasoning the user has with AI about what to build.
Put that in a SaaS for an office and the outcome is the true representation of work being done in that office, plus clear signals about edge cases (aka “the user is not using his custom built flow, why?)
In a sense, related to
https://danieldelaney.net/normal/
Stability etc can be handled post-hoc: once a customized ui proves some benefits (via user adoption, or whatever you think efficiently measures productivity gains), it can be formalized by a human coder, who gets the full picture and has all the domain knowledge baked in, as long as you don’t capture UIs only but also the reasoning that built it.
Back to article: smart to think this in terms of browser, since that crosses the boundary between SaaS
by hannibalekta
0 subcomment
- Why don’t we read all Blogs and newspapers via the same Browser UI? This is present for years, yet, RSS Readers are not the default. Theres more to UI than displaying data and making it actionable. One example: making it predictable, sharable, reliable.
- It could work if it makes production and distribution of content easier and cheaper. All social media sites without exception have standard layout and usability. There, brands encode their aesthetics through media, and brands are much more alive in these channels than on their own websites, which often lags behind their own platform profiles. Company websites are expensive to build, maintain and update. Even for a design company, say Pentagram, it’s much better to follow their work on the standard architecture of Instagram than on their own handcrafted and “beautiful” website. The relevance of corporate websites as a means to retrieve essential information is decaying. Economic factors ultimately drive decisions. If something like this existed in a solid form, it would be hard to justify spending thousands of dollars on a website. As a matter of personal opinion, UI should never be a place to express creativity. Media is a much better substrate to express personality than through user interface affordances. Nowadays all my corporate clients develop websites on the expectation that they will grant them legitimacy, and they don’t actually expect anyone to actually use or read them. As a user, I actually do prefer when a supplier has an Instagram page because their sites, if they even have one, are 100% going to be awful to read and navigate, not to mention they’ll almost certainly be outdated. The greatest barrier to something like this is simply tradition. The general idea is perfectly defensible and logical. We should be reminded that standard websites are never going away, so this is not to be a replacement, but could open the doors for small businesses and non-profits to spread rich structured information in a cheap and sovereign manner. The argument that businesses are averse to being scrapped is only true for elitist corporations. Most businesses stand to gain tremendously from having their data highly accessible from anywhere. And it’s damn easy to convince them of the benefits. Even more so considering that, if they want, they also could have their handcrafted website, which by the way would be simply a thematic structure over the very same API. You could argue that this is inevitable long term. But regarding the OPs prescribed timeline of couple years, I think it’s just naive. For this to become mainstream it would take at least a decade, if not more. Just writing the specs and tools for this would take years, easily.
- I do like this idea, and agree on the timelines of the world grappling with what to change and what to keep with these new capabilities.
Having a traditional web page with styles and assets AND the spec allow LLM's to be a bit more guided by the original site's design and intent. More of a remix or like Arc's boosts/skills feature.
There's also the reality the a lot of the things you'd want to be promptable (sorting, functionality, enrichment) couldn't be done on just the front end. You need some mix of UI and API logic to be promptable...
- The author emphasizes accessibility and coherence as a benefit but another interesting one is composability which does not emerge naturally in the world of UI. Create a UI for a pair of websites like a command line for grep and wc. LLMs already provide that but under the natural language interaction primitive. UI could allow for branded experiences, ad delivery and whatnot in ways that natural language doesn't.
- Cool idea and line of thought, obviously rough and early but it gets you thinking. “Software as clay” is obviously where the industry is heading, and as you say we’re approaching this from multiple angles… applying it directly in the browser is certainly an intriguing idea.
Why’d you make the prototype a separate browser instead of implementing with a chrome extension? Something like greasemonkey but with an LLM generating the scripts on the fly..
- A webui halicunated just for you? I think this must be by far the scariest and from my point of view worst idea you could ever come up with, no offense. Why would you ever want your web-experience to be non deterministic. A different ui every time you load? Even longer loading spinners then with mbs of react dependencies today? This is wrong on more levels then I could count
- I like it. I feel like this is a possible evolution of the browser.
Going further, AI internet browser could be an entirely new app to break from the legacy.
I feel this with coding agents, so often where it fetches web data and interprets it, html in that loop is only occasionally additive. Feels quite futuristic
by sabrehagen
0 subcomment
- I love this. It sparks so many ideas about how I could take control of the data in the world around me. And of course, open source apps built in this way, through shared repositories of ui prompts.
- Sounds really cool, but how do you build support documents or explain to a user how to do something if they completely customize the interface?
by psychoslave
0 subcomment
- What is the browser built the company, the country, the international exchanges and the biosphere for you? I noticed there's a lot of redundancy in these things.
by chalmovsky
0 subcomment
- So for the sake of argument let’s establish this: a vibe coded browser presents a vibe coded UI based upon vibe coded backend. Surely this will work great!
- I'm struggling to understand what's being described here.
If it's personalized clients, that's what we already had for most web services before the iPhone and app-ification of everything. It failed because making things compatible is a hard problem and a highly political/bureaucratic tarpit.
> most SaaS products still ship hand-crafted React apps, each building its own UI, its own accessibility layer, its own theme system, its own responsive breakpoints
Contrary to popular belief on HN, building these React apps are not "bullshit jobs" in the broader corporate world, nor going to be replaced by AI. They're the backbone of all ecommerce today and the ground floor for business operations because they keep us out of the tarpit. The implementation details are irrelevant here anyway. The actual problem was always how a business retains full control of its brand and UX.
- lol imagine the support burden (docs and help) once everyone generates their own ui and shit breaks. hard enough already.
- I think it's a great idea but the internet is built on ads.
- Self-describing API endpoints... is the server side for this basically just HATEOAS?
- In a way this was Tim Berner lee's web3 (not to be confused with the crypto web3)
- "and honestly, ..."
"heres the thing ..."
[em dash every paragraph]
Smells like default Claude voice. I like the ideas, but if someone can't be bothered to proof read their own article, then I don't know why we should trust that any of it was human generated.
by nesarkvechnep
0 subcomment
- Reinventing what REST should’ve been.
by Traubenfuchs
0 subcomment
- I estimate far above 90% of frontends do the same thing you could do with .jsp or .jsf 20 years ago and yet here we are still not having perfectly reusable frontend primitives and everyone doing custom development. We were closer to that with bootstrap than now with tailwind.
I am convinced neither client side nor backend side AI solutions will solve this.
Fully on topic: It would be naive to believe that serious web offerings would allow you to do this. Reality is moving in a different direction: Try applying custom css and js to reddit, for example: The website is a nightmarish matryoshka of shadow dom components and that‘s only the beginning of the flashification and silverlightification of the web.
by deafpolygon
0 subcomment
- Front end folks have this weird preoccupation with putting more on the client.
by simianwords
0 subcomment
- For anyone interested in this, log on to claude.ai and ask it to teach you something using "your generative UI elements" and watch it work. I do think this is the future in some ways although this specific feature in claude will eat up your tokens so beware.
by giantrobot
0 subcomment
- So...XForms[0] but involving AI.
[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/
- Why limit to a browser? Why not the whole system. Check out this horrible thing I'm building. https://abject.world
by weiyong1024
0 subcomment
- [flagged]