The piece argues that chat interfaces aren’t some grand new UX paradigm so much as the messy thing teams can ship when the rest of the product is still half-built, which feels annoyingly familiar.
Here’s the image from the article.
Chat UIs feel “shippable” because they hide the information architecture you haven’t decided yet. You can dodge hard choices like navigation, state, and error handling by turning everything into a transcript. What gets me is how bad chat is for spatial memory. In studio, I can pin drawings on a wall and remember where things live. In a chat log, yesterday’s “decision” is 200 scrolls up, and you can’t really see structure until you retrofit it. I’m not sure what the right alternative is for AI stuff, but I keep wishing more products started with a simple canvas or dashboard and used chat as a helper, not the whole front door.
