For decades, interfaces have been designed so that humans can navigate them—buttons, menus, folders, navigation hierarchies. These patterns assume a person is looking at a screen, making decisions, and clicking through options. But when an agent is interacting with a product, the design challenge changes. The agent doesn't need a menu to find something. It doesn't browse. It acts, and the people around it need to understand what it did and why, often after the fact.
We need a new set of principles for how agents show up inside the tools people already use. Not principles for building agents themselves, but principles for designing ways that agents and humans interact within a shared product.
When people interact with agents, the quality of the output depends enormously on the quality of the input, which means two people asking for the same thing in slightly different ways can get drastically different results. There are few guardrails, and little structure nudging you toward a good outcome. The interface is essentially a blank page with a blinking cursor, and all the burden of getting value from it falls on the person typing.
For exploration, that's fine. For serious, repeated work inside a team, it's not enough. We need interfaces that bring more structure to AI interactions, that guide people (and agents) toward better outcomes without being so brittle they break the moment someone wants to use them in a way you hadn't anticipated.
This slippery feeling is the design problem of this era, and it almost always traces back to the interface rather than the language model—which means it belongs to designers, not researchers.
I feel confident, though, that the slippery feeling people associate with AI products is a solvable problem, and the solution looks more like thoughtful interface design than better models. The models will keep improving on their own. The harder work is building the structure around them so that their output feels reliable, legible, and trustworthy. That's the design challenge on which to focus.
