21–30 of 98 posts
Why are you assuming that the human is in charge? Needing a human to drive the AI is probably a transitional phase.
It does feel novel. However, I believe the GUI for AI agents that will win is a plain text editor with a file tree, a terminal pane for coding (or preview pane for other kinds of tasks) and a chat sidebar. Even if the code editor is not used to type, it's there for psychological safety. It lets you inspect and navigate what is being created. Has tremendous value. Plain text has survived countless software revolutions…
Plain text is great for transmitting information that's already specified, but human intent doesn't come out fully formed. Plaintext alone won't be the main way for humans to express intent and interact with an agent.
I don't know the exact reason for that, but it's undeniable that it happened.
Lots of people try completely new novel GUI stuff all the time, always from basic principles. Looks clean and neat but doesn't survive the real world. Meanwhile, plain text tools have been improving and spreading roots consistently for decades.
Could be that a GUI gets some showtime, but wouldn't bet against plain text at any time. It's like betting against spoons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plain text is great for transmitting information that's already specified, but human intent doesn't come out fully formed. Plaintext alone won't be the main way for humans to express intent and interact with an agent.
That makes a lot of sense when reading, but in reality a lot of things have snapped back to plain text over and over again. I don't know the exact reason for that, but it's undeniable that it happened. Lots of people try completely new novel GUI stuff all the time, always from basic principles. Looks clean and neat but doesn't survive the real world. Meanwhile, plain text tools have been improving and spreading roots…
I completely agree with you that the chat interface is very undercooked and there's a big untapped space for agent-first interfaces, perhaps even replacing traditional desktop metaphors. You're spot on with your premise. With that said, from the material you show in your homepage, it still seems like you're doing something very similar to OpenAI and Anthropic's first party apps? I think it would help your pitch if yo…
I think a better example is how Marble makes tools visible and easy to select for each task instead of requiring you to remember what exists or describing everything through the prompt. Marble keeps the tools you use most close at hand and will surface other useful ones for the job. Combined with a birds eye view of multiple tasks running, it makes agent work easier to set up and manage. The goal is to minimize cogni…
Isn't that what current agents already do? e.g. codex: https://ibb.co/Y71qJJZb
This is definitely an iterative improvement on what we have today. However, I think from a fundamental approach, you've just highlighted the pain of working with AI that I hadn't quite been able to verbalise until seeing this. Go and have a look at the history of Microsoft OLE and OpenDoc and you'll see some of these ideas have been around for a while. When these ideas were first being shared in the industry (and yes…
For a lot of tasks, I don’t think you will need to stay inside the document or app the whole time. But I can also imagine starting from an asset you already have open ie a PDF, spreadsheet, etc and bringing agents and tools into that context, rather than creating a separate task and attaching the asset again.
With that in mind, I agree that fanning out into disconnected task outputs is not enough. Sometimes the asset itself should become the center of the workspace, with the delegated work happening around it.
Why are you assuming that the human is in charge? Needing a human to drive the AI is probably a transitional phase.
If the human isn't ultimately in charge, don't be surprised when AI decides to eliminate humanity "for the greater good" or something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes a lot of sense when reading, but in reality a lot of things have snapped back to plain text over and over again. I don't know the exact reason for that, but it's undeniable that it happened. Lots of people try completely new novel GUI stuff all the time, always from basic principles. Looks clean and neat but doesn't survive the real world. Meanwhile, plain text tools have been improving and spreading roots…
Yeah, we speak in words, so I'm not saying text would go away entirely . Even in our Marble interface, you can still type follow-up prompts to a task. But plaintext won't be an interface by itself.
I miss this in some existing agentic interfaces. I'm not typing into the text editor, I'm inspecting the work it does. Not exactly "reading every line", but definitely inspecting.
I understand not all kinds of works can be like this, and having to understand how "a bunch of text files" become something else (a program, or a page, or etc) is really taxing on cognition (that's why GUIs exist), but also really beneficial for verification (you can see the guts of the thing).
So, it's not prose text. I'm talking about the artifact produced by the agent having a plain text representation.
Lacking that produces back-and-forth interactions that feel exhausting. I can make Claude design a spreasheet for me, and it will present it beautifully for me, with export to Google Sheets and so on. But then, changes to it don't let me dig up into it interactively. I need to open the spreadsheet externally, then translate my attempt at debugging the issue to the chat back, which is super slow.
Designing one inspectable interface for each kind of produced artifact/outcome sounds like a lot of work. And plain text solves this beautifully (it is an interface) by introducing formats (like Markdown for documents).
I'm not suggesting every single AI user will eventually migrate to IDEs with sidebars, but I think something closer to it will be prominent for a foreseeable future in major important work done with AI assistance (the kinds of things that really matter, big work).
Some of your demos are not opening, so I don't know what is the MarbleOS solution for things like spreadsheets or more elaborate artifacts that, today, in tools like Claude, produce this exhausting back-and-forth I mentioned.
Also, I must say the exhausting part is really only exhausting for power users (the guy that does a lot of spreadsheets needs the speed, not the ease of use). For beginners, a more guided approach might be best. For something that carries the OS terminology, I would expect both approaches to be present at some capacity (other harnesses fail at this too, so don't worry).
A quick FYI: at marbles.com/learn, starting from „Turn Messy Notes into Today’s Task List“ the demo videos don’t work for me. I tried Safari and Chrome.
Why are you assuming that the human is in charge? Needing a human to drive the AI is probably a transitional phase.