The future beyond AI chat bots
Are text-based interfaces really the future of UI? And what can the current slate of tools do to make us better educated, not just more productive?
Simeon Griggs
Principal Educator at Sanity
Published
I first saw today's guest Maggie Appleton give a talk at React Advanced London in 2021. She discussed the importance of visuals in understanding paradigms in programming. You should watch it.
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I left that talk so motivated that the future of developer education would be visual, not just text. I watched it again recently and was floored by how the landscape has changed in the years since.
It's remarkable just how significantly the landscape has changed thanks to AI tooling and how pretty much every AI tool you use is text-based. You type (or dictate) text into a text box, send it to a black box, and get a text-based response.
So, I wanted to talk to Maggie about this current, future area that is heavily text-based. Are user interfaces going to disappear entirely? And when it comes to education, how much do we really understand about what we're able to build?
And how misleading is the discourse that we are only going to operate in a text-based future when there are so many industries outside of development that require user interfaces or are very much controlled by their environment to get work done.
These AI tools are allowing folks to build things that they would not have been able to before, or at least not in the same timeframe. Use tools they're not familiar with, languages they don't understand. Is the cost of all of this that we are less discerning developers as a result? If we let the tool do all the work and contain all the knowledge, is it important for us to understand what the machine is doing—or is it more important for us just to become better "prompt engineers?"
It is exciting to imagine a future where these AI tools are less about black boxes that depend on text input and might actually be able to educate us about the decisions that they've made and the reasons that they take the actions that they do. An AI tool that not only builds what you want but is able to teach you the benefits of building the way it did would be a great way to have your cake and eat it, too. To create new things faster than ever but also increase your own knowledge so that with each project, your ambition only grows.
This is the second episode in my post-AI cynicism era. It's time to get on board and build.