Roze | Blog

AI Will Change UI Development

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello reader,

I want to make a prediction, or rather define a possibility: UI development will change. Dramatically.

New Hardware & The App-less Ecosystem

When Humane AI delivered its eagerly anticipated and heavily publicized launch, it presented many distinctive features — most were met with criticism. But, the most intriguing aspect to me was the lack of apps. The founders argued that because of AI, you don't need apps. Initially, I found this perplexing—wouldn't it be a very limiting experience without apps? What if developers outside the company wanted to build something for the device? How would they deliver it without an app platform? A few months later, Rabbit echoed similar sentiments at CES 2024 with its R1 device. Much of the criticism it faced was summed up by a common refrain: "Why is this not just an app on my phone?" This raises an even more interesting question: why are so many AI companies venturing into new hardware?

The answer: access to richer inputs. An AI that can tap into your location, the surrounding noises, voices, visuals, and more can offer significantly better guidance. While your phone contains many of these sensors, it often lacks real-time environmental context — the ambience factor — as it usually remains in your pocket, requiring manual operation of its camera and microphone. This has spurred the development of wearable computers — be it necklaces, glasses, or even pins — designed to capture information seamlessly and effortlessly without user initiation.

The ability to capture a categorically larger variety of inputs (audio, vision, etc.) not only enhances an AI's capabilities but also allows it to display information in a more contextually specific way. Imagine you've been wearing a Humane AI pin for a few months while on a new diet and gym regimen. This device, having recorded all your meals and workouts, could let you ask for a display of your recent exercise data or even generate a graph showing your progress. What if you start struggling with motivation and need a gym buddy? Maybe the AI could generate profiles of others nearby for you to select a potential gym buddy.

This UI would not be hard-coded but dynamic, generated and rendered based on user queries — generative UI. Consider how many traditional apps could be replaced if an AI had access to more data and could dynamically generate UIs. Hence, the app-less economy.

Services vs UI-Centric Apps

There's an important distinction I'd like to draw concerning apps: there are those where the UI merely serves as a vehicle to deliver a service, and then there are those where the UI itself is the main attraction. Consider Spotify. We primarily use the app to listen to music of course, which is the service Spotify provides. Here, the UI is designed to facilitate access to this music, featuring functionalities like search, playlists, and recommendations. Now in contrast, take Instagram. The platform is highly visual; we use the app to view photos and videos, and interact with them through likes and comments. Here, the UI doesn't just support the service — it is the service, as the visual and interactive elements are central to the user experience.

As we've discussed, AI could dynamically generate UI. It's conceivable that an AI could interface with Spotify's APIs to dynamically generate a user-specific UI. Imagine you're in a mall, and you hear a song you like playing in a store. You could ask your AI assistant to identify the song using a Shazam-like feature, add it to your library, and even generate a UI on your phone to show all your library songs while you're on the subway home.

Consider dating apps like Hinge or Tinder, where the service provided is the opportunity to meet people and the UI is just a vehicle. Imagine an AI that knows your music tastes, dietary habits, health information, favorite shows, and hobbies. You tell your AI assistant you're interested in dating, and it finds compatible individuals in your area, checks for mutual time availability, and even sends out a generated profile to those you're interested in.

For companies like Spotify and Tinder/Hinge, the shift towards AI integration would likely mean focusing less on front-end development and more on enhancing their back-end capabilities to support such AI interactions. What about Instagram? To adapt, apps that currently emphasize UI as the core of their experience would likely need to restructure themselves to become more service-oriented.

What becomes of frontend

Generative UI is already available in some fashion with Vercel's v0 and PureCode AI having the ability for users to describe a piece of UI they'd like and AI can generate code. With this emerging technology, one might wonder if frontend development will become obsolete, particularly in companies like Spotify or Tinder that focus more on backend processes. However, replacing human workers with AI in this area would be a grave mistake.

While AI can generate code, it often lacks innate creativity and may merely regurgitate existing human designs rather than produce genuine innovations. The evolving role of AI should transform, not replace, frontend development practices. AI might produce generic interfaces on its own, but these limitations can be addressed with the creative input of frontend developers.

Developers could focus on creating a UI library for their apps—designing versatile, reusable components that AI systems can dynamically deploy by stitching components together. This "Lego piece development" approach allows developers to assemble UI elements, guided by AI's efficiency but enhanced by human creativity and insight.

UI could be transmitted alongside backend API calls, a concept not new in web development. Frameworks like Rails and Laravel already facilitate the sending of HTML partials from the server to the client. React Server Components introduce a similar paradigm, but with a focus on modern, interactive web applications. This architecture allows for UI components to be dynamically adjusted in real-time. By integrating machine learning frameworks directly on the web server, the system can adapt the UI based on ongoing analysis of user data and interactions.

Frontend development might increasingly focus on the infrastructure that enables AI agents to generate UIs for end users. An example of this today is explorer.globe.engineer, a platform allowing users to query information and receive a dynamically generated, wiki-like UI. While its UI structure is consistent, with only the content changing, we can envision an AI capable of manipulating more elements to tailor the user experience further.

Frontend developers might need to specialize in UX design principles, understand user behavior, and master interactive design to create templates that AI can dynamically populate. Skills in data visualization could become increasingly important, as presenting information in an instantly comprehensible and engaging way is crucial.

Backend developers might shift their focus toward developing sophisticated APIs that handle data transactions and include rich metadata providing contextual descriptions of the data. For example, a music streaming service's API might describe the mood, tempo, and suitable activities (like workout or relaxation) for each track, enabling AI to create intuitive situational playlists. This extends to app-to-app communication, such as how Tinder displays a user's Spotify listening activity or Instagram posts. As AI begins to generate UIs, developers must ensure their APIs and data are well-documented contextually, allowing AI to appropriately integrate and display information from different apps.

Conclusion

The landscape of UI development is poised for profound transformation, though that's common in the frontend world as expectations from users only grow. But the advent of AI-driven interfaces promises not only a shift from traditional apps to more dynamic, context-aware systems but also redefines the roles of frontend and backend developers. I'm personally looking forward to ways we can leverage richer inputs and more personalized interactions, leading to an app-less economy where the boundary between service and interface blurs. Of course, only time will tell whether this possibility becomes a reality.

Coding as Gardening — A Journey into SaaS Productivity

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I've always been inclined towards finding the best productivity tools that fit my workflows while also spending countless hours watching productivity gurus on YouTube like Thomas Frank, Ali Abdaal, etc. to learn what the best workflows even are. Somedays, I even consider going back to bullet journaling when I miss the creative tactile pleasure of pen to paper. Of course, there are a lot of benefits you miss out on going analog over digital. But, with time I couldn't resonate with the ideas of these productivity YouTubers and didn't love my productivity tools. So, I decided I could build my own digital task manager.

Planting the Seeds: Building Modal

Wanting to build my own task manager also came at a time of wanting to build my own startup. So, I thought, why not make this my first SaaS startup? Enter Modal, a SaaS productivity app designed to follow the Priority Matrix method while incorporating features from other beloved task apps like Things and Notion.

Inspired by Herman's words in My Product is my Garden, Modal — my newly named task manager app — would be my garden. I would tend to it routinely with care, nurturing it with precision, waiting to bear witness to the fruits it could produce.

Tending to Modal was a chore. Initially, embracing the indie hacker spirit, I envisioned a swift release within a month. However, transitioning from a structured software engineering background at a large tech company, where tasks are distributed among specialized teams, posed a steep learning curve when building a product entirely on my own. Despite this, four months later, I launched a private beta. The reception was less than stellar; feedback at best was lukewarm. I decided I could do a re-write, make it sleeker, and feature-rich.

I poured nearly a year into Modal before launching it on Product Hunt. The satisfaction of seeing it featured on Product Hunt was a moment of pride. The joy, however, was short-lived as the hopeful surge in sales never came to materialize. I found myself at a crossroads, grappling with technical barriers and dwindling motivation in the absence of monetary validation.

Tending to a Wilted Garden

Post-Product Hunt, I continued to toil on Modal, but the struggle became increasingly daunting. The realization hit hard—it wasn't working. The garden I envisioned, filled with thriving users, seemed more like a desolate field. Faced with this harsh truth, I made a difficult decision—I listed Modal's assets for acquisition and closed up shop.

The decision to part ways with Modal wasn't easy. It was my creation, my digital haven, but the reality was that its roots weren't nourished by the commercial soil I planted it in. To clarify, I am not saying Modal shouldn't be a product for others, but its essence resonated more personally with me than it did as a commercial entity.

A New Seed: Open Sourcing the Future

I came across Linus' compelling blog post on why you should build your own productivity tools. The author asserts that we shouldn't cater our workflows to tools that exist when we can instead code the tools that cater to our specific workflows. In a way, this was what I was doing with Modal — I had a very specific way of doing things, so I built an app around that. But, I tried selling it as a commercial farm rather than tending to it as my personal garden.

I think I'd like to make Modal open source. I'll build it for myself catered to my workflows, but others can use use it or copy it as they like. I can see a future in which, like Linus, I'll build more of my own tools and replace the services that I currently settle for. It would feel like a light touch of the gilded age of tech, where coders were mere tinkerers, learning from the code of others, directly copying it and modifying (a time before the young Bill Gates would issue copyright triggering the creation of copyleft).

While there are many problems worth solving that could make a person a pretty penny, I've recognized a distinction that some of those solutions are best kept...as a garden.

What is a Tech Cooperative - A Short Introduction

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.

— <cite>Ernest Bloch, The Principle of Hope</cite>

What's a Cooperative?

You might be familiar with corporations that are owned by shareholders. Workers of that company may possibly own some shares but not nearly enough compared to the CEO and other executives even if they work just as much. They do not have voting shares to actually participate in executive decisions for the company they work for. In this context, it is not truly worker-owned.

A cooperative (co-op) deviates from the traditional model in two ways:

Owned by workers of the business
Controlled democratically by the workers

The degree to which these conditions are met do vary and there isn't a single correct way to make a co-op.

Generally though, in a worker co-op, the workers own the business equally. This often means everyone has a say in how the business is run and profit is shared in an equitable way. This does not mean that voting rights are always uniform nor does it mean everyone gets the same amount of money — salaries could be different and the number of hours worked could be different so there may be a collective agreement as to how profit is distributed.

If Apple were organized as a cooperative, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/12/18/if-apple-was-a-worker-cooperative-each-employee-would-earn-at-least-403k/?sh=7b194ba22dee" alt="Forbes article citation" target="_blank">all workers would earn $400K yearly <em>on top of their salary</em></a>.

Essentially, while traditional businesses scale vertically and form stricter hierarchies, cooperative businesses typically scale horizontally and remain democratic. Leaders work for the workers rather than the reverse.

How Do Cooperatives Make Decisions?

If every worker owns the business, how then are decisions made? It would certainly be cumbersome to vote on every company decision especially as it grows larger.

Co-ops are flexible though and each one may practice different types of methods. Smaller co-ops may have workers making decisions together through frameworks like <a href="https://youtu.be/DYKwn9jzjXs" alt="Dean Spade: Basic Steps in Consensus Decision Making" target="_blank">consensus-decision making</a>. Other co-ops may see benefit in electing leaders including electing the CEO with term limits and veto power.

The Mondragon Corporation in Spain is the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-mondragon-became-the-worlds-largest-co-op" alt="How Mondragon Became the World’s Largest Co-Op" target="_blank">world's largest co-op</a>. It is a federation of worker-owned cooperatives with over 80,000 workers across multiple industries. Workers elect a governing council who then elect the CEO. It's been around since 1956.

Why Don't More Cooperatives Exist in the US?

Cooperatives are a popular business model in many other countries, with some famous examples like Mondragon in Spain, John Lewis Partnership in the UK, and Coop in Italy that have been around for a long time. However, in the United States, cooperatives are not as widespread.

Several reasons contribute to ths: First, there is limited guidance available on how to start a co-op because the US has traditionally favored investor-owned businesses over cooperatives. The cooperatives that do exist in the US are primarily in the agricultural industry. Second, the legal and regulatory environment in the US has not always been supportive of cooperative businesses. Finally, the tech industry's startup culture, which is dominant in the US, tends to prioritize fast growth and exit strategies over long-term sustainability and community-focused values that many cooperatives hold.

Despite these challenges, there are still successful cooperatives operating in the US, including some in the tech industry. Chech out this <a href="https://github.com/hng/tech-coops#coops-namerica" alt="List of tech cooperatives" target="_blank">repository</a> for a list of some tech cooperatives

Why Does Tech Need Cooperatives?

A software engineer may be content with their six-figure salary today, but consider how the software that they write (which the company uses to sell for profit) earns millions. Yet the millions of dollars are not distributed to the ones who created the software but is instead given to the executives of the company. The engineer probably is only given a "bonus" at the end of the year for their hard work. Given that the average engineer makes more than the average American, this is seen as equitable. This doesn’t change the fact that the model as it exists today is opposed to democracy.

If Facebook were a cooperative, would Cambridge Analytica have been able to use the data of 87 million users without their consent? As workers control the company, they would have a say in the ethics of the company rather than a small few executives.

While the traditional business model may seem equitable for individual engineers, it ultimately concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few executives. By contrast, cooperatives are democratic, worker-owned businesses that give employees a say in the company's decisions and distribute profits more equitably. This proven and viable alternative has already shown success in other parts of the world. With the rise of tech co-ops and their potential for forming alliances and spreading to other industries, the working class can benefit from a more horizontal and cooperative business model. By embracing cooperatives, the US tech industry can help build a more just and sustainable future.