![[images/The Weird Death Of User Interfaces.webp]] **Creator:** Enrico Tartarotti · **Published:** 2025-09-07 · **Length:** 14:33 · [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG4ONHqF1qg) > *User interfaces are dying. Discover why the buttons, menus, and screens we've used for 40 years are disappearing, replaced by something that looks exactly like what came before them.* (from the video description) Enrico argues that the shiny new glass interfaces hide a bigger shift: the graphical user interface has reached the top of its S-curve, and a new curve built on AI input and generated output is starting, in much the same way the GUI itself started at Xerox PARC 40 years ago. Sponsored by **Bolt.new**. (The auto-captions mishear several names: "Lauren Brricter" and "Tweety" for Loren Brichter and Tweetie, "Appalisa" for the Apple Lisa, "Post Hog" for PostHog, "JGPT/Chad GPT" for ChatGPT, "to-d doist" for Todoist, "Whimo" for Waymo, "cambam" for kanban and "scurve" for S-curve. The corrected names are used below.) ## 1) Detailed outline ### [0:00] Intro: the glass toggle and the black-and-white wall of text - A simple on/off toggle has become real-time physics simulations, glass refraction with chromatic aberration and animated 3D icons. Flat design is over, but Enrico says this shows the interfaces we've used for 40 years are dead. - The same companies studying physics to render a toggle are trying to get rid of UI entirely, replacing it with plain AI text that looks just like the **command line**, the thing that came before graphical interfaces. - Behind the scenes the industry is back at the drawing board. There are three levels to how the future of UI plays out, we're about to reach level two, and it's happening the same way the GUI happened 40 years ago. ### [1:00] What real UI innovation looks like - Pull-to-refresh, used billions of times a day, was invented by **Loren Brichter** in 2008 for his Twitter app **Tweetie**. - Other innovations: the **Windows 95 Start menu**, the **Mac OS X Dock** (2001), which magnifies on hover, and dragging to explore **Google Maps** instead of clicking arrows. They look normal now, but they were inventions; see the crowd's reaction when **Steve Jobs** demoed slide to unlock on the first **iPhone**. ### [1:44] User Interfaces Are Dying: the S-curve - All technological innovation follows an **S-curve**, and UI is now near the ceiling. Behind the glass it works the same as before: flat, then glassy, then flat, now glassy again. Smartphones have been in this phase for years too. - At the end of one S-curve another always begins. - **PowerPoint** and **Google Slides** have had 30 years of refinement: every feature is there and clicks are minimized. Yet Enrico's friends in consulting now ask for tools that let them avoid that "perfect" UI, and once they try AI slide generators they're hooked. - People also skip ad-filled, cookie-pop-up, SEO-driven websites and just ask **ChatGPT** or **Perplexity**. The question is whether all UI, not just bad UI, gets replaced. ### [3:30] Why the all-chatbot vision fails - Amazon's AI-powered **Alexa** demo offers to book grandma a ride when a party conflicts with her airport pickup. Enrico says no human would use it that way: which car is coming, will the Uber show up, what if the flight is late, how much did it cost, who handles an emergency? - Shopping by voice ("Alexa, I need to buy a tungsten cube") is much worse than seeing a product page. - The core point: **user interfaces are great at output and bad at input** (menus, toggles, obscure panels). **Chatbots and voice assistants are great at input and bad at output**, and don't make you feel in control. - A prank: tell a friend's Alexa to add a 16-inch **MacBook Pro M4 Max** to the cart and watch their heart sink as a $4,000+ Mac lands there ready to check out. - The omniscient-assistant dream is old: a **General Magic** demo from the 1990s ("Look up Kevin Kramer") is the same vision that was supposed to make **Siri**, **Alexa** and **Google Assistant** the future, and it never happened. - ChatGPT went from nothing to about 2.5 billion prompts a day in three years, the fastest-growing tech product ever. It solved input by making it human, but its output looks like a 1980s command line. ### [6:20] Level 1: chat next to the old UI - While Apple and Google perfect glass checkboxes and redo the quick settings panel, small companies, individual designers and engineers are building the next phase, just as happened in the 1980s. - Enrico stands outside **Xerox PARC**, a plain building near wheat fields, where the GUI was invented in the late 1970s. A young Steve Jobs, who lived 20 minutes away, visited, took the ideas and made them mainstream in the **Apple Lisa** and then the original **Macintosh**. - **PostHog**: Enrico uses it for his startup's analytics. Building dashboards is normally slow fiddling, but a sidebar let him type actions; skeptical after **Clippy**, he tried it and within two prompts got what would have taken ten minutes. Next time he went straight back to the chat icon, his "aha" moment. - **Cursor** does the same for code (chat on the right, app on the left), and browsers are doing it too, like **Comet** by Perplexity, in limited access, which takes actions on web pages via chat. - Few products do chat-plus-UI well yet, but once it clicks you use the GUI less and keep resizing the chat window bigger: old world and new world side by side, with the new one growing. It still feels like a chatbot. ### [8:42] Sponsor: Bolt.new - Enrico builds an expense tracker with user authentication and a real database in about two minutes, live on the internet, and prompts a kanban project-management tool, with options to add **Stripe** payments and stored user data. Useful for trying different UI layouts quickly. ### [9:59] Level 2: talking to the existing UI - **Todoist** is experimenting with **Ramble**: press the button and dictate natural-language commands, not to a chatbot, but to the normal Todoist UI, which shows real-time feedback, the thing GUIs do best. - Imagine this in a complex app like **Premiere Pro** or **Photoshop**: eventually you might not need most of the buttons, only the ramble button. Enrico thinks level two is where mainstream adoption happens. - His analogy: riding a **Waymo** robotaxi in San Francisco felt futuristic, but the moving steering wheel and pedals made him feel in control. Today's chatbots are more like **Zoox** (Amazon's self-driving vehicle with no wheel or pedals), which feels foreign. Keeping a familiar UI behind the AI makes it accessible to everyone. - Obstacles remain: Todoist's CEO said the feature's AI processing costs are very high right now. Enrico still expects it sooner than people think. - While building **Flask**, his video feedback and collaboration tool, he worries he's still building for the old world, so he started an experimental project that replaces his whole UI with one button: speak your feedback and the app updates its UI and places everything in real time. ### [12:10] Level 3: interfaces generated on the fly - A demo where a prompt returns an interactive user interface created fresh each time. "We will not be building interfaces anymore. We'll be building interface generators." - Instead of clicking through **Skyscanner**'s menus and pop-ups for a complex flight search, you type what you need and get a UI built for that search. - **Eric Schmidt**, former Google CEO: user interfaces will largely go away, because agents speak human languages and "the UI can be generated." - Today products are designed as flows of pixel-perfect screens; in this world there are no screens, only capturing intent and generating UI. Designers won't disappear; they'll go from drawing rectangles in **Figma** to writing rules for the AI (when to show a calendar versus a list, a map versus a form), like writing a script instead of painting every frame of a film. - Open problems: wrong generated UIs, consistency and muscle memory for where buttons live. But people had the same worries about the GUI in 1984 (how will they find files without typing the path? what if they click the wrong icon?) and figured it out fast. ### [14:00] Outro - Teaser: why products get worse as they get more popular, the **law of the marginal user**, covered in [[Why Tech Gets Terrible When It Gets Popular]]. ## 2) Things mentioned ### Interface design ideas - Glassy toggles with physics simulation, refraction and chromatic aberration (the current "liquid glass" style), and the swing between flat and glassy design - Graphical user interface (GUI) versus the **command line** - The **S-curve** of technological innovation - UIs good at output but bad at input; chatbots good at input but bad at output - Three levels of post-UI design: chat beside the UI, voice or text driving the existing UI, and UI generated on the fly ("interface generators") - Designers shifting from drawing screens to writing rules for generated interfaces - The **law of the marginal user** (teased for the next video) ### Landmark UI innovations - Pull-to-refresh (Loren Brichter, **Tweetie**, 2008) - **Windows 95** Start menu - **Mac OS X Dock** with hover magnification (2001) - Drag-to-pan in **Google Maps** - Slide to unlock on the first **iPhone** (2007) - **Xerox PARC**'s GUI (late 1970s), the **Apple Lisa** and the original **Macintosh** (1984) ### AI products and assistants - **ChatGPT** (voice mode; about 2.5 billion prompts a day) and **Perplexity** - Amazon's AI-powered **Alexa**, plus **Siri** and **Google Assistant** - **General Magic**'s 1990s assistant demo - Microsoft's **Clippy** - **PostHog** with its AI sidebar, **Cursor** (AI code editor) and **Comet** by Perplexity (agentic browser) - **Todoist**'s experimental **Ramble** voice feature - AI-generated-UI demo for flight search versus **Skyscanner** ### Apps, devices and services - **PowerPoint** and **Google Slides** - **Premiere Pro**, **Photoshop** and **Figma** - **Uber**, **Stripe**, and a 16-inch **MacBook Pro M4 Max** (over $4,000) - **Waymo** robotaxis in San Francisco and Amazon's **Zoox** vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals - A tungsten cube (the Alexa shopping example) ### Sponsor and Enrico's own products - **Bolt.new** (prompt-built web apps with authentication, databases and payments) - **Flask** (flask.do), Enrico's video feedback and collaboration tool, and his one-button experimental project ## 3) Biographies ### Enrico Tartarotti Italian-born YouTuber, designer and entrepreneur whose channel goes behind the scenes of the design, engineering and psychology of everyday tech. He's building **Flask** (flask.do), a video feedback and collaboration tool, and in this video he films at Xerox PARC and rides a Waymo in San Francisco while describing his own one-button experimental app. ### Loren Brichter Software developer and designer who created **Tweetie**, a popular Twitter client for iPhone and Mac, and invented the pull-to-refresh gesture for it in 2008. Twitter acquired Tweetie in 2010 and it became the official Twitter app. He later made the word game *Letterpress*. ### Steve Jobs Co-founder and longtime CEO of **Apple**. Enrico recounts his visit to nearby Xerox PARC, whose GUI ideas Apple brought to the mainstream in the Lisa and the Macintosh, and shows the crowd reacting to his 2007 slide-to-unlock demo of the first iPhone. ### Eric Schmidt Former CEO (2001 to 2011) and later executive chairman of **Google**. Enrico plays a clip in which he predicts user interfaces will largely go away because AI agents understand language and can generate the UI on demand. ### Todoist's CEO (unnamed in the video) Enrico cites the CEO of Todoist saying the Ramble feature currently has very high AI processing costs. Todoist's maker, **Doist**, was founded and is led by **Amir Salihefendić**; Enrico doesn't name him. ### Xerox PARC researchers (unnamed) The Palo Alto Research Center team that developed the graphical user interface in the 1970s, which Jobs saw and Apple then popularized.