I think that the inverse thesis is true, you make websites more accessible (a11y, wgac, aria labels etc) for humans, then the interaction heuristics are clearer for agents functioning off browser-use or similar. If a screen reader can understand your site, then an agent can. Reinventing the wheel to facilitate the current state of agents makes the web worse for everyone, it's not a preemptive move, it's actually a decline in almost objective and measurable quality, and potentially one which removes access to the internet by people who just want to.. use the internet.
This. The accessibility tree is a superpower for agents when it's good. Screenshots are "robust" but low performance. Like so many other things, making stuff better for humans indirectly makes it better for agents.
Theres probably a middle ground where we allow an app to augment / enhance itself using deterministic behaviour but a user based soft request. If I as a user can ask for a feature, and have it work just for me, thats pretty cool.
Instead of progressive enhancement it can be progressive evolution.
AI component libraries in your site make your web app even more easily consumed and subsumed by AI chat clients.
This not only kills pages, but it kills the concept of a browser where the user agent is a human, rather than making your pages be designed where the user agent is an AI agent.
That doesn't make me happy to experience because I'm guessing that after a generation or so, web designers will not only do mobile first designs with stupid amounts of white space and not taking advantage of the desktops greater screen real estate and precise mouse movements, but AI first websites will get so popular that browsing sites manually will look like trying to use a text only browser in the JavaScript world.
Easy for me to do a depressing take, but hopefully the bitter lesson of AI will help this particular projected future not come to pass because the AI will get smart enough that it will embed a browser right there in line and just render the window for the user, or it will otherwise gets good enough at screen scraping and UI automation that it can just use an existing browser, just like a human, the sites won't be dumbed down even further for AI consumption.
to add to that, it kills the concept of whether the host is human (and not just another soulless megacorp harvesting your data in their walled garden)
at best we have walled garden content; and when those are scraped (either by the host or by more sophisticated bots) those walled gardens will hopefully rot under an inability to drive advertisement revenue.
I agree, I think we're at the edge of a paradigmatic shift away from humans navigating TCP-IP itself. What that looks like, I don't know, but given trends (like dynamic pricing, human-futures marketing, surveillance, and consolidation of computing under mega-companies) I can imagine: local beacons screaming AI advertisement components across a geospatial sneakernet. Auditorium-based ticketed podcasting and AR/VR/meatspace events. Thoughtful hackers reminiscing of better times simulating them in web-assembly driven first-person POV "sites" and a rolling set of encryption keys for read-access (just send them BTC)
without an ecosystem for humans to contribute meaningfully to a feedback loop that allows for free group assembly around like interests, monetary growth for hosts and other participants, and some degree of presence / searchability / permanence, the current text-only web page paradigm is doomed.
> AI first websites will get so popular that browsing sites manually will look like trying to use a text only browser in the JavaScript world.
That might be great for accessibility, though.
> In a world where we can type anything into a text box and get the information back instantly we are circumventing the need to visit websites altogether.
This is purely anecdotal, but the only people in my extended circle making this transition (to any extent) are the technically savvy; everyone else is slowly realizing how awful AI tools and "AI-first experiences" can be and are actively trying to avoid them.
AI in apps is garbage. Cheap, low quality models and inflexible interaction patterns.
AI agents using frontier models, configured nicely, that interact with programs that have APIs are pure gold.
I've noticed this bimodal distribution of perception too, and my hypothesis is that's it's hugely driven by the difference of "who is in the driver's seat".
Your tech-savvy AI early adopters are discerning between tools, the deployments and environments, and are willing and able to change things to extract the highest output from current capabilities. For instance, re-architecting a codebase to make it easier for agents to contribute to it.
The rest are having AI hypeware shoved upon them, often as a cost cutting measure, and lack the agency to influence outcomes. When agents misbehave, they only have the option to "Press 0 to speak with a Human" and hope that works.
I suspect this is a big factor in the divide we're seeing, and might result in your median adult being ambushed by recent gains in capabilities.
I've noticed a change in technical blog articles in the past 2 years.
Why do most contain phrases like "everything changes", "not behind (yet)" etc.?
If you have a valid point to make, you don't need to force FOMO on the reader.
I was a bit confused when I went to the json-render github repo, because there were no screenshots of what it looked like.
I don't know whether that video uses Kumo (UI library also from Vercel).
I do like that idea of allowing flexible component rendering, especially if you're building a your own app with chat UI. The one problem would be like always standardisation, will chatUIs need to be like browser and follow standards? Or do they need to render JS, CSS, HTML as a component? What freedom do chatUIs allow the components?
Even so, ask, what's the end goal of the user? Does it even make sense to worry about UI if we're think autonomous agents that sole goal is to accomplish something defined by the user?
[deleted]
> You’re not behind (yet) but in today’s world
Yes, yes. We will all be left behind unless we [PLACEHOLDER]. Sounds very convincing.
Would you rather visit a website full of ads that doesn't answer your question and is written for SEO or get the answer instantly without any ads?
Eventually, after killing several websites by depriving them of revenue, ChatGPT will enshittify like everything else and starting adding ads.
There isn't even a question about that. Just think of Google for example.
Why Google's SERP has ads but Gemini does not? There isn't even a "they are making money with the data" argument here, because Google already has all the query data it could ever want. They just haven't added ads yet.
Eventually, Gemini will look like a SERP with 5 ad results, if it doesn't go to the Google graveyard like everything else.
I think that the inverse thesis is true, you make websites more accessible (a11y, wgac, aria labels etc) for humans, then the interaction heuristics are clearer for agents functioning off browser-use or similar. If a screen reader can understand your site, then an agent can. Reinventing the wheel to facilitate the current state of agents makes the web worse for everyone, it's not a preemptive move, it's actually a decline in almost objective and measurable quality, and potentially one which removes access to the internet by people who just want to.. use the internet.
This. The accessibility tree is a superpower for agents when it's good. Screenshots are "robust" but low performance. Like so many other things, making stuff better for humans indirectly makes it better for agents.
Theres probably a middle ground where we allow an app to augment / enhance itself using deterministic behaviour but a user based soft request. If I as a user can ask for a feature, and have it work just for me, thats pretty cool.
Instead of progressive enhancement it can be progressive evolution.
AI component libraries in your site make your web app even more easily consumed and subsumed by AI chat clients.
This not only kills pages, but it kills the concept of a browser where the user agent is a human, rather than making your pages be designed where the user agent is an AI agent.
That doesn't make me happy to experience because I'm guessing that after a generation or so, web designers will not only do mobile first designs with stupid amounts of white space and not taking advantage of the desktops greater screen real estate and precise mouse movements, but AI first websites will get so popular that browsing sites manually will look like trying to use a text only browser in the JavaScript world.
Easy for me to do a depressing take, but hopefully the bitter lesson of AI will help this particular projected future not come to pass because the AI will get smart enough that it will embed a browser right there in line and just render the window for the user, or it will otherwise gets good enough at screen scraping and UI automation that it can just use an existing browser, just like a human, the sites won't be dumbed down even further for AI consumption.
to add to that, it kills the concept of whether the host is human (and not just another soulless megacorp harvesting your data in their walled garden)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969751 remark that they're taking down their self-hosted projects citing costs associated with AI scraping.
at best we have walled garden content; and when those are scraped (either by the host or by more sophisticated bots) those walled gardens will hopefully rot under an inability to drive advertisement revenue.
I agree, I think we're at the edge of a paradigmatic shift away from humans navigating TCP-IP itself. What that looks like, I don't know, but given trends (like dynamic pricing, human-futures marketing, surveillance, and consolidation of computing under mega-companies) I can imagine: local beacons screaming AI advertisement components across a geospatial sneakernet. Auditorium-based ticketed podcasting and AR/VR/meatspace events. Thoughtful hackers reminiscing of better times simulating them in web-assembly driven first-person POV "sites" and a rolling set of encryption keys for read-access (just send them BTC)
without an ecosystem for humans to contribute meaningfully to a feedback loop that allows for free group assembly around like interests, monetary growth for hosts and other participants, and some degree of presence / searchability / permanence, the current text-only web page paradigm is doomed.
> AI first websites will get so popular that browsing sites manually will look like trying to use a text only browser in the JavaScript world.
That might be great for accessibility, though.
> In a world where we can type anything into a text box and get the information back instantly we are circumventing the need to visit websites altogether.
This is purely anecdotal, but the only people in my extended circle making this transition (to any extent) are the technically savvy; everyone else is slowly realizing how awful AI tools and "AI-first experiences" can be and are actively trying to avoid them.
AI in apps is garbage. Cheap, low quality models and inflexible interaction patterns.
AI agents using frontier models, configured nicely, that interact with programs that have APIs are pure gold.
I've noticed this bimodal distribution of perception too, and my hypothesis is that's it's hugely driven by the difference of "who is in the driver's seat".
Your tech-savvy AI early adopters are discerning between tools, the deployments and environments, and are willing and able to change things to extract the highest output from current capabilities. For instance, re-architecting a codebase to make it easier for agents to contribute to it.
The rest are having AI hypeware shoved upon them, often as a cost cutting measure, and lack the agency to influence outcomes. When agents misbehave, they only have the option to "Press 0 to speak with a Human" and hope that works.
I suspect this is a big factor in the divide we're seeing, and might result in your median adult being ambushed by recent gains in capabilities.
I've noticed a change in technical blog articles in the past 2 years. Why do most contain phrases like "everything changes", "not behind (yet)" etc.?
If you have a valid point to make, you don't need to force FOMO on the reader.
I was a bit confused when I went to the json-render github repo, because there were no screenshots of what it looked like.
I found only two videos about it on YouTube. This is the better of the two, and illustrates the output: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vndn2vmSIbw
I don't know whether that video uses Kumo (UI library also from Vercel).
I do like that idea of allowing flexible component rendering, especially if you're building a your own app with chat UI. The one problem would be like always standardisation, will chatUIs need to be like browser and follow standards? Or do they need to render JS, CSS, HTML as a component? What freedom do chatUIs allow the components?
Even so, ask, what's the end goal of the user? Does it even make sense to worry about UI if we're think autonomous agents that sole goal is to accomplish something defined by the user?
> You’re not behind (yet) but in today’s world
Yes, yes. We will all be left behind unless we [PLACEHOLDER]. Sounds very convincing.
Would you rather visit a website full of ads that doesn't answer your question and is written for SEO or get the answer instantly without any ads?
Eventually, after killing several websites by depriving them of revenue, ChatGPT will enshittify like everything else and starting adding ads.
There isn't even a question about that. Just think of Google for example.
Why Google's SERP has ads but Gemini does not? There isn't even a "they are making money with the data" argument here, because Google already has all the query data it could ever want. They just haven't added ads yet.
Eventually, Gemini will look like a SERP with 5 ad results, if it doesn't go to the Google graveyard like everything else.