It is interesting that most of our modes of interaction with AI is still just textboxes. The only big UX change in that the last three years has been the introduction of the Claude Code / OpenAI Codex tools. They feel amazing to use, like you're working with another independent mind.

I am curious what the user interfaces of AI in the future will be, I think whoever can crack that will create immense value.

Text is very information-dense. I'd much rather skim a transcript in a few seconds than watch a video.

There's a reason keyboards haven't changed much since the 1860s when typewriters were invented. We keep coming up with other fun UI like touchscreens and VR, but pretty much all real work happens on boring old keyboards.

I’ve been using ChatGPT Atlas since release on my personal laptop. I very often have it generate a comprehensive summary for YouTube videos, so I don’t have to sit there and watch/scrub a half hour video when a couple of pages of text contains the same content.

Here's an old blog post that explores that topic at least with one specific example: https://www.loper-os.org/?p=861

The gist is that keyboards are optimized for ease of use but that there could be other designs which would be harder to learn but might be more efficient.

>> There's a reason keyboards haven't changed much since the 1860s when typewriters were invented.

> The gist is that keyboards are optimized for ease of use but that there could be other designs which would be harder to learn but might be more efficient.

Here's a relevant trivia question; assuming a person has two hands with five digits each, what is the largest number they can count to using only same?

Answer: (2 ** 10) - 1 = 1023

Ignoring keyboard layout options (such as QWERTY vs DVORAK), IMHO keyboards have the potential for capturing thought faster and with a higher degree of accuracy than other forms of input. For example, it is common for touch-typists to be able to produce 60 - 70 words per minute, for any definition of word.

Modern keyboard input efficiency can be correlated to the ability to choose between dozens of glyphs with one or two finger combinations, typically requiring less than 2cm of movement to produce each.

Only if individual digits can be articulated separately from each other. Human anatomy limits what is actually possible. Also synchronization is a big problem in chorded typing; good typists can type more than 10 strokes per second, but no one can type 10 chords (synchronous sets of strokes) per seconds I think.

And anyone that has ever tried to talk to Siri or Alexa would prefer a keyboard for anything but the most simple questions. I don't think that will change for a long time if ever. The lack of errors and being able to say exactly what you want is so valuable.

No matter how good a keyboard we might be able to invent it'll always be slower than a direct brain interface, and we have those, in a highly experimental way, now.

One day we will look back at improvements to keyboards and touchscreens as the 'faster horse' of the physical interface era.

I'm not convinced, because all a keyboard really costs you is latency, while almost every human-machine interaction is actually bandwidth limited (by human output).

Even getting zero latency from a perfect brain-machine interface would not make you meaningfully faster at most things I'd assume.

Yeah I noticed this as I became a faster typer. I very often find myself 'buffering' on choosing the right words / code more than I do on my typing speed.

Unix CLI utilities have been all text for 50 years. Arguably that is why they are still relevant. Attempts to impose structured data on the paradigm like those in PowerShell have their adherents and can be powerful, but fail when the data doesn't fit the structure.

We see similar tendency toward the most general interfaces in "operator mode" and similar the-AI-uses-the-mouse-and-keyboard schemes. It's entirely possible for every application to provide a dedicated interface for AI use, but it turns out to be more powerful to teach the AI to understand the interfaces humans already use.

PowerShell is completely suitable. People are just used to bash and don’t feel the incentive to switch, especially with Windows becoming less relevant outside of desktop development.

Powershell feels like it's not built to be used in a practical way, unlike Unix tools that have been built and used by and for developers, which then feels nice because they are actually used a lot, and feel good to use.

Like, to set an env variable permanently, you either have to go through 5 GUI interfaces, or use this PS command:

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable ("INCLUDE", $env:INCLUDE, [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

Which is honeslty horrendous. Why the brackets ? Why the double columns ? Why the uppercases everywhere ? I get that it's trying to look more "OOP-ish" and look like C#, but nobody wants to work with that kind of shell script tbh. It's just one example, but all the powershell commands look like this, unless they have been aliased to trick you to think windows go more unixish

First, that expression is overly complicated, shorten to:

    [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable($name, $value, "User")

You have un-necessarily used a full constant to falsely present it more complex. Please also note that you have COMPLETION. You are not forced to type that out. Second, you can use an alternative

    Set-Item HKCU:\Environment\MY_VAR "some value"

Third, if you still find it too long, wrap it in a function:

    function setenv($name, $value) {
       [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable($name, $value, "User")
    }

    setenv MY_VAR "some value"

Also, can you please tell the incantation for setting an env variable permanently in bash ? You cannot since it doesn't exist.

Powershell's model is far superior to Bash. It is not even a contest.

No, they don't all look like that, the brackets are an indication you're reaching into .NET and calling .NET stuff instead of "native" PowerShell commands which take the form Verb-Noun. Which can be a legitimate thing to do, but isn't the first choice and seems like an example deliberately chosen to make PS look more awkward than it is. I question whether, for this particular example, `echo 'export MY_VAR="my_value"\n' >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc` is really all that intuitive either (and hopefully you didn't accidentally write `>` instead of `>>` and nuke the rest of the file).

What feels good to use is very, very dependent on personal preference. I think Powershell is much more pleasant to use than bash. You obviously disagree, but bear in mind that not everyone shares your preferences.

It took a long time for Powershell to write files with the same encoding it reads them by default. Very confusing until then.

Yet the most popular platforms on the planet have people pointing a finger (or several) at a picture.

And the most popular media format on the planet is and will be (for the foreseeable future), video. Video is only limited by our capacity to produce enough of it at a decent quality, otherwise humanity is definitely not looking back fondly at BBSes and internet forums (and I say this as someone who loves forums).

GenAI will definitely need better UIs for the kind of universal adoption (think smartphone - 8/9 billion people).

> Video is only limited by our capacity to produce enough of it at a decent quality, otherwise humanity is definitely not looking back fondly at BBSes and internet forums

Video is limited by playback speed. It is a time-dependent format. Efforts can be made to enable video to be viewable at a range of speeds, but they are always somewhat constrained. Controlling video playback to slow down and rewatch certain parts is just not as nice as dealing with the same thing in text (or static images), where it’s much easier to linger and closely inspect parts that you care more about or are struggling to understand. Likewise, it’s easier to skim text than video.

This is why many people prefer transcripts, or articles, or books over videos.

I seriously doubt that people would want to switch text-based forums to video if only video were easier to make. People enjoy writing for the way it inspires a different kind of communication and thought. People like text so much that they write in journals that nobody will ever see, just because it helps them organize their thoughts.

You (and I) live in entirely different world from that of regular people, who read at most 1 book per year and definitely do not write journals that nobody will ever see.

You're talking about 10-20% of the population, at most.

WhatsApp is primarily a text-based chat interface and it has pretty much universal adoption in the countries where it's popular.

I guess you haven't been in enough group chats. There's a reason it has dedicated emoji button with GIFs, avatars, stickers.

Which is, of course, not how people primarily communicate on WhatsApp (or any communication based app). People don't send streams of videos to each other in group chats. They write text and add gif memes.

I would send a semi funny emoji riddled message but HN won't let me, for obvious reasons.

When we have really fast and good models it will be able to generate a GUI on the fly. It could probably be done now with a fine-tune on some kind of XML-based UI schema or something. I gave it a try but couldn't figure it out entirely, consistency would be an issue too.

Google is already doing this with Gemini:

https://research.google/blog/generative-ui-a-rich-custom-vis...

I don't know if/when it will actually be in consumers hands, but the tech is there.

I agree i think specifically the world is multi modal. Getting a chat to be truly multi modal .i.e interacting with different data types and text in an unified way is going to be the next big thing. Mainly given how robotics is taking off 3d might be another important aspect to it. At vlm.run we are trying to make this possible how to combine VLM's and LLM's in a seem less way to get the best UI. https://chat.vlm.run/c/3fcd6b33-266f-4796-9d10-cfc152e945b7

Personally I find the information density of text to be the "killer feature". I've tried voice interaction (even built some AI Voice Agents) and while they are very powerful, easy to use and just plain cool, they are also slow. Nothing beats skimming over a generated text response and just picking out chunks of text, going back and forth, rereading, etc. Text is also universal, I can't copy-paste a voice response to another application/interface or iterate over it.

My personal view is that the search for a better AI User Interface is just the further dumbing down of the humans who use these interface. Another comment mentioned that the most popular platforms are people pointing fingers at pictures and without a similar UI/UX AI would never reach such adoption rates, but is that what we want? Monkeys pointing at colorful picture blobs?

People get a little too hung up on finding the AI UI. It does not seem all necessary that the interfaces will be much different (while the underlying tech certainly will be).

Text and boxes and tables and graphs is what we can cope with. And while the AI is going to change much, we are not.

The next step (and I am not claiming it's the right one) is probably "Generative UI" where the model creates website-like interfaces on the fly.

Google seems to be making good progress [1] and it seems like only a matter of time before it reaches consumers.

1. https://research.google/blog/generative-ui-a-rich-custom-vis...

I get what you’re saying here, and you’re right that other UIs will be a big deal in the near future… but I don’t think it’s fair to say “just” textboxes.

This is HN. A lot of us work remotely. Speaking for myself, I much prefer to communicate via Slack (“just a textbox”) over jumping into a video call. This is especially true with technical topics, as text is both more dense and far more clear than speech in almost all cases.

Grok has been integrated into Tesla vehicles, and I've had several voice interactions with it recently. Initially, I thought it was just a gimmick, but the voice interactions are great and quite responsive. I've found myself using it multiple times to get updates on the news or quick questions about topics I'm interested in.

ChatGPT's voice is absolutely amazing and I prefer it to text for brainstorming.

Ooooh, it bothers me, so, so, so much. Too perky. Weirdly casual. Also, it's based on the old 4o code - sycophancy and higher hallucinations - watch out. That said, I too love the omni models, especially when they're not nerfed. (Try asking for a Boston, New York, Parisian, Haitian, Indian and Japanese accent from 4o to explore one of the many nerfs they've done since launch)

I think the commenter you're replying to was talking about dictating to ChatGPT, which I also find extremely useful.

I wonder if they're using reasoning? It usually eliminates these types of errors

> OpenAI researcher Noam Brown on hallucination with the new IMO reasoning model:

> Mathematicians used to comb through model solutions because earlier systems would quietly flip an inequality or tuck in a wrong step, creating hallucinated answers.

> Brown says the updated IMO reasoning model now tends to say “I’m not sure” whenever it lacks a valid proof, which sharply cuts down on those hidden errors.

> TLDR, the model shows a clear shift away from hallucinations and toward reliable, self‑aware reasoning.

Source: https://x.com/chatgpt21/status/1950606890758476264

Local models you can get just the pretrained versions of, no RLHF. IIRC both Llama and Gemma make them available.

I can see both sides of it. There’s a fancy bread bakery by where I live. I go infrequently, the bread is great. But it’s expensive, most of the I just want a cheap loaf from Target, as do most people.

Instead of broad employment of artisan breadsmiths, we have people doing email work, because it’s more economically valuable. If the government mandated a higher quality of bread, we’d be slightly richer and bread and slightly poorer in everything else.

When I was near the end of high school, my family visited London, and I was thinking about being a game dev. So I sent Terry Cavanagh an email, and to my surprise he completely agreed to get lunch.

He was extremely kind, gave me a lot of interesting life advice. I remember him saying that he got most of his ideas just from playing around with mechanics and experimenting a lot, he was never really one to get grand visions.

Anyways, great fellow, glad he opened source V (as he called it).

> I remember him saying that he got most of his ideas just from playing around with mechanics and experimenting a lot

This is important. Too many people assume that novel ideas come from abstract concepts. Yes they can, but they can equaly arise from playing with the medium.

Playing retro games seems like a good way to get ideas. The VVVVVV gravity mechanic is pretty much Gravity Man from Megaman 5 (I guess Megaman is not the first time it was used either).

Mining retro game mechanics was probably easier at the time VVVVVV was developed as the explosion of indy games has probably reused the best forgotten ones of the 80s/90s. It's getting close the time mechanics from 00s games can be reused though...

I don't see why you can't reuse whatever mechanics you like.

Return of the Obra Dinn was a 2018 mystery puzzle game, where you have to figure out how everyone died in an ill-fated voyage at sea. Amazing game.

I searched Reddit for "games like Obra Dinn", and this led me to Case of the Golden Idol, a 2022 game with similar mechanics. The developers were quite open about being inspired and influenced by Obra Dinn -- and they ended up creating something in the same genre, but very much their own creation, with their own flavor. And also very enjoyable.

Originality is nice, but I'm not at all convinced it's a prerequisite for quality.

To further justify your position; Originality is just the unique composition of various unoriginal things. If you chase quality, originality will appear as a byproduct as you deal with the intricacies from your specific combination of features.

That is, everything interesting appears from the relationships between subjects, not the subjects themselves (the edges, not the nodes, of the graph). You could change any one major component of the game, explore it sufficiently, and you will inevitably have something sufficiently original despite 90% of the original core being duplicated — the nature of exploring the relationships thoroughly — chasing quality — will inevitably lead to a cascading series of changes until you reach the new stable point

That's what I've found recently.

When I turned 30, I was like what the heck, I'll get a game boy color and play some games I played as a kid. That's since spiralled into gbc, gba (all models), psp, ds/3ds, ps1, ps2, xbox, 360 etc. Along with a now fairly sized collection of the requisite games.

I've been picking up all the games I missed on those platforms, because most people seem to have only played 2-6 games per platform when they were kids, same as me. I'm getting recommendations from friends of games I'd just never gotten into and coming out loving them and having many new perspectives on which game mechanics work and which don't. Especially given barely any modern games are coming out that are compelling enough for me; I barely ever gamed anymore before getting all this old stuff - new games just seem like the same old copy+paste for the most part.

Atm I'm playing through coded arms on psp, pikmin 2 on gc and timesplitters fp on xbox.

The gaming world has lost so much magic and fun stuff imo. From weird hardware like the motion sensor in kirby tilt n tumble, light sensor in boktai to game mechanics like the furious lassoing in pokemon ranger, or the unique gameplay of Archer Maclean's Mercury.

I haven't done a game jam in years but I'm so ready to smash it if I end up doing another one!

Kinda easy to imagine the opposite as well... having some idea and then implementing it and feeling unsatisfied. Especially a game. It may check all the boxes thematically and have the required features but just not feel fun.

Not to say starting with a firm idea is bad... more like it may be hard to avoid playing around and improvising with the medium in any case.

I've learned two phrases hold true:

* You can't get a no if you don't ask * "Never meet your heroes" is a sham and you need to meet a few shitbags before you can really appreciate the realest of people.

Wow, that is cool! Did it help/affect your later choices with your career, did you end up a game developer, or at least try it or so? Always fun with closure! :)

I made a very mediocre platformer in my senior year of high school, published on itch.io. I ended up becoming a software developer, which I enjoy 80% as much, but without any burnout or worrying about the superstar economics of being a game dev. Once the singularity hits, maybe I'll make more games.

https://gallerdude.itch.io/the-journey-east-full

> gave me a lot of interesting life advice.

What did he say, exactly?

classic human hallucination

He's awesome.

I listened to Lex Friedman for a long time, and there was a lot of critiques of him (Lex) as an interviewer, but since the guests were amazing, I never really cared.

But after listening to Dwarkesh, my eyes are opened (or maybe my soul). It doesn't matter I've heard of not-many of his guests, because he knows exactly the right questions to ask. He seems to have genuine curiosity for what the guest is saying, and will push back if something doesn't make sense to him. Very much recommend.

For coding, I like the Aider polyglot benchmark, since it covers multiple programming languages.

Gemini 2.5 Pro got 72.9%

o3 high gets 81.3%, o4-mini high gets 68.9%

Isn't it easy to train on the specific Exercism exercises that this benchmark uses?

where do you find those o3 high numbers? https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/ currently has gemini 2.5 pro as the leader at, as you say, 72.9%.

It's in the OpenAI article post (OP) i.e. OpenAI ran Aider themselves.

Update: the leaderboard has o3 high + 4o tops of the charts now with 82.7%. This is a) amazing b) 20x more expensive than Gemini.

It was a good benchmark until it entered the training set.

thanks

It's funny, I see myself as basically just a pretty unabashed AI believer, but when I look at your predictions, I don't really have any core disagreements.

I know you as like the #1 AI skeptic (no offense), but like when I see points like "16. Less than 10% of the work force will be replaced by AI. Probably less than 5%.", that's something that seems OPTIMISTIC about AI capabilities to me. 5% of all jobs being automated would be HUGE, and it's something that we're up in the air about.

Same with "AI “Agents” will be endlessly hyped throughout 2025 but far from reliable, except possibly in very narrow use cases." - even the very existence of agents who are reliable in very narrow use cases is crazy impressive! When I was in college 5 years ago for Computer Science, this would sound like something that would take a decade of work for one giant tech conglomerate for ONE agentic task. Now its like a year off for one less giant tech conglomerate, for many possible agentic tasks.

So I guess it's just a matter of perspective of how impressive you see or don't see these advances.

I will say, I do disagree with your comment sentiment right here where you say "Ask yourself how much has really changed in the intervening year?".

I think the o1 paradigm has been crazy impressive. There was much debate over whether scaling up models would be enough. But now we have an entirely new system which has unlocked crazy reasoning capabilities.