AI isn’t just changing how software is written, but it might also change how software looks in the coming years.
Former Tesla Director of AI Andrej Karpathy has said that products with rich UI, like lots of menus, sliders and switches won’t work in the AI era. He says that this will happen because these interfaces are hard to navigate for LLMs, who’d prefer products that are text-based. Karpathy was hinting that future users of software will be AI agents, not humans.
“Products with extensive/rich UIs lots of sliders, switches, menus, with no scripting support, and built on opaque, custom, binary formats are ngmi (not going to make it) in the era of heavy human+AI collaboration,” he posted on X. “If an LLM can’t read the underlying representations and manipulate them and all of the related settings via scripting, then it also can’t co-pilot your product with existing professionals and it doesn’t allow vibe coding for the 100X more aspiring prosumers,” he added.
Karpathy also listed out products that had complex human-centric UI, versus those that could work for LLMs. He said that products like Adobe Photoshop had very complex UIs and were at high risk of being difficult to use for LLMs, while coding IDEs had the simplest UIs which LLMs could navigate. “Example high risk (binary objects/artifacts, no text DSL): every Adobe product, DAWs, CAD/3D. Example medium-high risk (already partially text scriptable): Blender, Unity. Example medium-low risk (mostly but not entirely text already, some automation/plugins ecosystem): Excel Example low risk (already just all text, lucky!): IDEs like VS Code, Figma, Jupyter, Obsidian,” he said.
Karpathy said that it would be better for human designers to begin designing products keeping AIs in mind, even though they’d soon get better at navigating products built for humans. “AIs will get better and better at human UIUX (Operator and friends), but I suspect the products that attempt to exclusively wait for this future without trying to meet the technology halfway where it is today are not going to have a good time,” he predicted.
It’s an interesting argument. It seems increasingly likely that most white collar work in a few years, if not done by AI, will be heavily augmented by AI. As such, products which are text-based and easier for current AI systems to navigate could do well, and products that have their UX geared towards humans with lots of visual elements like sliders, buttons, and menus could be replaced by products which perform the same function but are easier for AI systems to use. It remains to be seen how this plays out, but keeping LLM use in mind could be something product managers and product designers could do as they being developing products in the AI era.