AI agents will not only change how humans get tasks done, but they could also change how products are designed and made.
Former Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy has said that the primary users of tech products will soon be LLMs, not humans. This will necessitate a rethink of how these products are created and designed.
“It’s a new era of ergonomics. The primary audience of your thing (product, service, library, …) is now an LLM, not a human,” Karpathy wrote on X. “LLMs don’t like to navigate, they like to scrape. LLMs don’t like to see, they like to read. LLMs don’t like to click, they like to curl. Etc etc,” he added.
Karpathy also gave an example of how this might play out. “Tired: elaborate docs pages for your product/service/library with fancy color palettes, branding, animations, transitions, dark mode, … Wired: one single docs .md file and a “copy to clipboard” button,” he said. “The docs also have to change in the content. Eg instead of instructing a person to go to some page and do this or that, they could show curl commands to run – actions that are a lot easier for an LLM to carry out. Products have to change to support these too. Eg adding a Supabase db to your Vervel app shouldn’t be clicks but curls,” he added.
It’s an interesting argument. Current AI agents are being built to navigate an internet that was built for human users, with visual user interfaces, large fonts, and ease of navigation. AI agents could be more comfortable navigating a world that plays into their strengths, such as the ability to ingest large amounts of text as opposed to dealing with images. But as these AI agents become more popular, humans could start using such products less and less, which could mean that future product designers will likely be built keeping AI agents in mind, and have human users as an afterthought. There could also be a separation of the internet, with each website and product having a version that’s “for AIs” and another that’s for humans, much like how webpages have a robots.txt file with instructions to SEO crawlers. These are interesting times, and apart from changing how users interact with products, the AI revolution could end up changing tech products themselves.