When the canvas starts acting, who’s really in control?

The useful part

For most of the history of software, the interface has been the place where people tell a system what to do. A lot of interaction design has been about making those actions easier to understand and making the next step obvious. It gives you a lot of power, but most of that power is hidden behind commands.

How it works

• We click, drag, type and select, and the system responds.
• You need to know what the system can do and how to ask it to do it.
• This is one reason designers have always struggled with terminal-based tools.
• They expose the language of the machine more than the possibilities of the tool.
• The interface that gives nothing away The first generation of generative AI made this problem particularly visible.

What to take from it

We were presented with an empty field and asked to describe what we wanted.

Details worth keeping

The terminal has always been a different kind of interface. AI coding agents are bringing some of that interaction model back.