Incidental UI, essential UI

Agents can competently use browsers now. Lately, I’ve been telling my agent to do things on web interfaces instead of clicking around myself.

It’s tragic, in a way. Engineers put so much thought and effort into making these browser UIs nice for human use. But the visual craftsmanship is mostly just noise to an agent. My agent would be happier with a big ugly JSON blob and a nice labeled list of functions.

Not all UIs are equally supplantable by agents. You can draw a distinction between incidental UI – where the particulars of the UI are valuable only as a necessary means to enable a certain expression of intent and exchange of information – and essential UI, where the particulars of UI provide value directly, themselves.

A pure example of incidental UI is my electric company’s website. What is lost if I set up autopay via AI chat instead of clicking myself? Not much. The electric company loses the guarantee of confronting my human eyes with their energy saving tips.

Good examples of Essential UI would be

• high-bandwidth interfaces – apps like Excel, Vim, GarageBand, Photoshop – where the human builds mastery and then can express and absorb information of a certain nature much more efficiently than they could do through any chat. “Yo claude, use GarageBand, let’s do a 10-bar blues with some experimental flamenco-influenced improvisation” is a completely different value proposition than looping a bass line and then tapping on the guitar widget.
• addictive, engagement-optimized experiences – like TikTok or Duolingo
• games

So if “the agentic web” arises as predicted, what does this entail?

I do think it means that agents supplant incidental UI. Bye, utility company website, see you never. Talk to the agent.

I don’t think it means that chat supplants pointy-clicky. But perhaps on-demand pointy-clicky for you by your agent that is accustomed to your goals and preferences will supplant the one-size-fits-all pointy-clicky interfaces from the software vendor.

I do think it means the age of “essential UI”. The only UIs worth putting effort into will be the UIs that humans value using themselves.