“slapping a chatbot on everything is going to become the first resort of losers.”
The InfoQ Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · August 2026
Asked whether every interface is heading toward a single chat window, the longtime Apple and Google UX designer opened with "the short answer is hell no." His case is that intelligence is a social construct rather than a mathematical one, and that most real work is too full of context to survive being flattened into a prompt box. The line separates bolting a chatbot onto a product from doing the harder work of building the model into the problem.
Transcript
…think that mark has been hit. They all have ethical issues right now. But the point is, if we get an open source model that we can run locally, that provides, I think, a fantastically interesting opportunity to switch power away from these big guys, too. So there's lots moving that's interesting.
…everything a web page with Chrome OS. Well, that didn't take off. Now, the guys from OpenAI want to make a small box with just one button, and that's it. Is the discussion that we just had useful in the context that everything will be a A chat window and everything else would be just typing in.
…intelligent. And so much of what we do that is work is actually part of our cultural construct. It's not a mathematical concept of intelligence. It's something that we share as a society. And the same thing applies to LLMs and work. So much of the work is more nuanced. It's got context. And so I do believe that we're going to get more LLM-based support, but it will move towards the problem. And slapping a chatbot on everything is going to become the first resort of losers. I mean, it's just, it's, yes, you can do it. And there is some value to it. But I do believe that having the LLM built into your problem is more work, but it will allow you to do far more interesting work. So I've written about, I don't want to go into the details of the specifics, but I do believe that we will get past this chatbot phase as more and more apps are written. But to be clear, it's…
Okay. In my evil moment when I was working for a company where Dollar was king or, well, Euro was king, I was trying to frame the offer of the company during the takeoff of the LLM. And what I was pushing for was augmented user experience, augmented interfaces. So at points, as you mentioned in our…
the next
day to another one and he doesn't know what to do, but he knows exactly what he should ask. So that, from my perspective, is a good way of looking at it. And it can be voice, it can be a couple of buttons, it can be a chat window. And that's a good way of interacting with an LLM that will provide…
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