AI doesn't just change how we build software.
Originally published on LinkedIn
AI doesn't just change how we build software. It changes how users want to interact with it.
Yesterday I posted about replacing the WordPress site I'd been procrastinating over for three years with a custom AI-built site. Five hours later, it was live. And I actually liked it.😎
But this is about more than my dislike of WordPress. 😂There's a lot of talk about making products AI-ready, AI-enabled or AI-augmented. But its not just about bolting AI functionality onto an existing app.
The bigger change is questioning whether users need the existing interface at all.
Take my website. I know what I want, and I want to describe it and have it happen.
As a user I don't care about templates, components, S3 buckets, CSS or WordPress editors. That's implementation detail.
I want to say:
🔹 I don't like that sentence on the homepage. Make it more positive.
🔹 I've published a LinkedIn post. Put it on my site so Google can index it.
🔹 Make this layout two columns instead of one.
🔹 Change that button from red to blue.
And have it done. That's how people naturally think about changes. Products that have that interface will win.
Why should they need to learn a complex editor, navigate menus or understand the technology underneath?
WordPress gave me an interface for doing those things. A capable one, but an interface nonetheless. And that interface is changing.
I'm an engineer, and my technical knowledge helped me build this setup. But as a user, I don't want to think like an engineer. I just want to tell the system what I need. That's what I got at the end that I love.
This has bigger implications than adding AI features to products. Some products will evolve. Some will become much simpler. And some will lose use cases entirely, because the specialised interface they provided is no longer necessary.
The value was never really in the interface. It was in what the user was trying to achieve.
AI is closing the gap between those two things.
And that's a much bigger change than adding a chatbot to your product.