Your Interface Is Dead

We only want a user interface for the things we actually want to do.

Everything else will disappear behind agents.

Think about the software you use in a typical week. How much of it do you actually enjoy?

Lodging an expense claim. Booking a car service. Reconciling invoices. Updating the CRM after a call. Changing a DNS record. Hunting for the right form on a government website.

Nobody opens these apps because they want to. They open them because they have to. The UI is a toll you pay to get to the outcome.

If your software helps someone do something they'd rather not do, your interface is dead. They'll hand the task to an agent.

That agent won't care how polished your onboarding is. It won't notice your carefully designed empty states or clever micro-interactions. It'll hit your API (or your MCP server, or your CLI, or click through your screens if it has to) and get the job done.

The user never sees your product, just the outcome.

I've already felt this shift. I rarely open an IDE anymore. I describe what I want to Claude Code and review the result. Same with design. Instead of pushing pixels in Photoshop or Illustrator, I describe the idea in Figma Make or Claude Design and refine from there.

Those tools still exist. I just don't spend my day in them.

Turns out I never wanted to write code. I wanted to build things.

Then there are the things we want to do.

Entertainment. Gaming. Creative pursuits. Watching videos. Hobbies. Places we want to get lost in.

These interfaces aren't going anywhere. If anything, they'll get better, because they'll be the only ones left that people choose to spend time in.

Nobody wants an agent to watch Netflix for them.

The dividing line isn't simple versus complex software. It's whether people want to be there.

This is going to be uncomfortable for a lot of SaaS companies.

A huge amount of software value has been built on owning the interface. Owning the workflow. Becoming the place people spend their day. Switching costs came from habit and muscle memory.

When the agent becomes the place people spend their day, that moat evaporates. Your product becomes something the agent calls. A set of tools. Plumbing.

Plumbing can be a great business. But it's a very different business.

Plumbing is the system of record. The data. The security. The reliability. The redundancy. The deterministic structure that makes sure an invoice is an invoice and a payment only happens once.

Agents are probabilistic. They need something deterministic to act on. Something that enforces the rules, keeps the history and never hallucinates a critical piece of data.

If anything, I think this kind of SaaS becomes more valuable. Every agent needs somewhere trustworthy to read from and write to.

So if you're building software, ask yourself one question:

Would anyone open this if they didn't have to?

If the answer is yes, invest in the interface. Make it a joy. That's where attention will go.

If the answer is no, make your product the easiest thing in the world for an agent to use. Clean APIs. Great docs. MCP. CLI. Clear permissions. Predictable outcomes.

The best interface for a chore is no interface at all.