Chat is the wrong interface for AI

I noticed that I’m becoming increasingly annoyed while talking to AI agents. Not because they are not intelligent enough, but quite the opposite.

I can spend an hour discussing an idea with a model, while walking with my dogs. We’re moving between design, engineering, psychology, physics, and a real product that appeared somewhere in the middle. The LLM can follow me surprisingly well.

It can recognize that two things I said at different moments are connected, follow my return to an earlier hypothesis, challenge me if I ask it hard enough, and sometimes formulate a thought I was circling around but could not express clearly.

And all of this intelligence is trapped inside a messenger, like a chatbot from 2015 but on steroids.

But the conversation becomes longer, the scrollbar becomes smaller, and my best ideas disappear somewhere between 10 tool calls, 3 deliverables, and 100 affirmations that my question is fascinating and my idea is a goldmine.

As a designer, I see an interface problem. But as a person who studied linguistics, psychology, and communication theory before switching to design, I cannot look at it only as a usability problem.

And since we are talking about Large Language Models, and language is still the primary interface for accessing the technology, the very object of today’s…