Just chat man
Chat as the ultimate interface
There is a wide belief among the tech twitter that chat is only the starting interface to use AI.
Most founders and VCs love this forecast. It promises so much money to be made. And optimism.
I couldn’t disagree more - yes even with Karpathy.
Developers are inventing new ways to interact with AI. They seem to be convinced that there needs to be a richer experience.
That is why we invented the canvas, drag and drop, and presentations.
A world on your fingertips. Dragging and dropping a box - just like in real life. Or the joy of telling a shareholder value creation story through a 56 page powerpoint that the investment banking analyst spent the Christmas building.
This is better than chat.
Can you imagine how these ideas would be communicated, say, on Whatsapp?
It sucks. Just wasteful. Frustrating.
This is the reason for the last 2-3 years, we have been putting AI into every kind of tool we have.
Cursor for presentations
AI for spreadsheets
AI for workflow builder in drag and drop
Because we could not shape the interaction pattern of AI to something different than chat, we opted to put AI into different things.
But look. Look again to the message bubbles. Do you see it?
We were never supposed to put AI into anything. Instead we should have put everything into AI.
Artifacts are just items. They are notes you play. Lyrics you sing. Moves you dance.
The music, however, is different.
It is the chat.
You see, chat is the ultimate interface. It is neither an old one nor a newly invented one.
It literally is “the” interface.
Database transactions are a chat session.
Instagram feed is inside a chat. Communicated post by post from each creator to you.
Figma is inside a chat. Not only it runs through its comments feature, it is the place where you (used to) create designs and send them over.
The overarching interface has always been a chat.
I am seeing this line of thinking come into practice with coding agents, led by Anthropic.
Even Anthropic made the same mistake by putting plugins into Excel and now seems to have refocused its efforts into Claude Cowork, the non-technical version of Claude Code.
And it runs on one premise: Just put everything into AI, in a chat session.