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Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?

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Re: Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?

#31

Post by axod »

altmanaltman wrote: post #27
axod wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the human isn't ultimately in charge, don't be surprised when AI decides to eliminate humanity "for the greater good" or something.

That would require consiousness and intent on part of the AI but we can have highly autonomous agents with no consiousness and intent as well and most likely that's what we will get. It still cannot just magically get free will, intent, and the ability to "eliminate humanity".

Wouldn't need any of that. An AI agent setup to "Do the best for the world" or some other broad claim, and with enough power to say crash the stock market, disrupt power supply, delivery, etc etc after reasoning that it's all for the best.

If people start giving enough power to AI, with ill thought out goals, and no human in charge, don't be surprised...

Why would it need "free will" or "consciousness" whatever that means?

A concrete example might be putting an AI in charge of health policy, and telling it to "eliminate suffering" without any human to check and push back. Well, the best way to eliminate suffering is...

Re: Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?

#32

Post by mickeyp »

I think it should look like this: https://www.dreamcoder.ai/

A smart, tiling window manager with workspaces and a great tool harness. An everything app, if you may; bring the terminals, code reviews, etc. into the tool itself, and make it high fidelity: no blocky terminals for the app itself.

Re: Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?

#34

Post by contrast »

gaigalas wrote: post #16

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…

I broadly agree. Plain text formats remain consistently accessible and flexible.

That said, arguably the dominant AI artifacts are binary images, video, audio.

The "preview panes for other kinds of tasks" will be a big deal. Humans tend prefer rich text editors (I think?). Also spreadsheets, page layouts, node graphs, timelines, hex editors, ...

So maybe the preview panes are actually editors themselves? Speaking personally, I enjoy closely coupled combinations of underlying plain text representations with task-specific UI on top.

Re: Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?

#35

Post by jaapz »

visarga wrote: post #10

Best interface in my opinion is a git tracked folder, files as state, agents coming in and doing work. It's not just a chat interface because in chat mode everything flows like water under the bridge. It is files as agents, where you get the agent to write a task in a file, and then it updates the file like a blackboard as it performs work. Same task file can be seen by worker agent, multiple judge agents (for plan a…

Sure but this is a very software engineer coded answer

What about people who don't think like you

Re: Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?

#36

Post by CWhiting »

qsort wrote: post #2

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 just want a clean way to manage chats, projects, and research. I mean I know I can pin so many chats, and I can group things in projects.

But I am doing a brand design project with nearly 30 - 40 chats in one project at the moment, and the fact that you can't rename a chat from within a chat (or even see the autogenerated name for that point). You can't tag or apply any logical grouping to chats in a project i.e. Logo, Wordmark, Email Footer, Social Branding, etc.

I spent a long time going through all the chats manually and then giving them a naming convention with tags built into the titles so that I can navigate the chats in my project. Even then, I still have to scroll through the whole list to find what I want.

Re: Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?

#39

Post by alansaber »

CWhiting wrote: post #36
qsort wrote: post #2

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 just want a clean way to manage chats, projects, and research. I mean I know I can pin so many chats, and I can group things in projects. But I am doing a brand design project with nearly 30 - 40 chats in one project at the moment, and the fact that you can't rename a chat from within a chat (or even see the autogenerated name for that point). You can't tag or apply any logical grouping to chats in a project i.e. L…

Are you using codex app? In CLI you can fork/rename chats. Albeit you cant fork rename in one action which is annoying. I find naming chats, putting chats into folders, giving chat tabs unique colors according to their purpose helps me.

Re: Show HN: What should the GUI for AI agents look like?

#40

Post by tdeck »

jaapz wrote: post #35
visarga wrote: post #10

Best interface in my opinion is a git tracked folder, files as state, agents coming in and doing work. It's not just a chat interface because in chat mode everything flows like water under the bridge. It is files as agents, where you get the agent to write a task in a file, and then it updates the file like a blackboard as it performs work. Same task file can be seen by worker agent, multiple judge agents (for plan a…

Sure but this is a very software engineer coded answer What about people who don't think like you

I think this might not be the best forum to collect that research sample.
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