I think this depends on the individual you're asking, I mean if you can prompt you can build right. Though the way I see it is a developer is someone who can leverage AI to help them complete tasks more efficiently then if they were doing those tasks manually like system design and architecture or finding bugs much faster than a professional developer could.
Thanks. I needed to hear this. So many things in life can turn out differently if we can overcome our “lack of self-confidence and a desire to be loved”. It’s never too late!
I'm excited about generating UIs (and apps) on demand, because it's one step closer to devices just morphing to the interface you need. I want to talk to my phone and have it generate the app or interface I need. I could see Android adapting to this reality well before Apple.
I find this view fascinating. After decades of observing users getting lost by minor changes to UI or sometimes just different "paint" I am now to believe that we will all enjoy using completely custom UI customised not only to what I would want but what the app will think I need at particular moment and get on with it just fine.
I actually do think generating UI has some future, but I remain sceptical it can realistically go as far as promoters claim. It is especially bizarre to me when this is done by ostensibly UX people.
I am with you. For example - this post has a comparison of a recipe app from 5.6 and 6 for comparison. They look different. Now if every time I ask for a recipe, it decides to render a new UI because of either the model changing or the recipe goes from stove to oven or something, it’s going to become annoying very quickly. It just seems like he current generation of models have been tuned to create better UIs than previous one and people interested in the UI are getting hit with excitement.
I really do think we are headed toward a world where stuff is hyper customized like that.
As a developer, it already feels like this with internal company tooling. Anything I have the source code to and a build pipeline setup for, I can just pop open a new tab and tell it what I want changed, and it just gets done for me.
Even my home assistant setup at home now, i hooked up codex to it via an MCP, and when we put out the blow up haloween lawn ornaments I was able to just pop open codex on my phone and tell it to throw together an automation to run them for me, and 5 minutes later it was done, with an override button on my dashboard. It's a shockingly nice workflow!
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just tell your app to reconfigure/rewrite itself to remove those "what the app will think I need at particular moment" features that you dislike? Maybe have it remove a bunch of the whitespace, getting rid of the lazy loading infinite scroll, whatever you want. It's the GPL dream, except you don't need any coding ability, just a subscription to a megacorp.
I do the same with Home Assistant and my many EspHome devices. HA works well, and it has a lot of nice features and extensive community-built integrations, but configuring and laying out the UI is a disaster. You can choose between WYSIWYG UI tools that are limited and cumbersome, or you can deal with raw YAML that stretches far beyond what YAML should be used for with deep nesting, and it's poorly documented to boot. It feels like a proprietary workflow engine, where you'd rather just write it in a real programming language.
Agents cut through all that crap and allow me to make changes without learning a new overwrought configuration language that thrashes syntax every few months. The fact that it is open and fully modifiable redeems it, because I can ignore all the annoying parts while achieving what all that was envisioned to allow.
Based on current capabilities, I'm skeptical as well. However, over time, I do think they will get better at understanding our intent. Also, I would be more forgiving of an app I vibe coded in this manner, that's only meant to be used by me. Of course that assumes appropriate security guardrails are in place.
What emerged for me as of late, at least with Opus 5.5, is creating web interfaces as aids during development. I recently had to dial in some audio mixes using ElevenLabs audio and do some complex audio cropping and concatenation. As a interim step Opus built a website that allowed me to compare versions based on different rule sets and then really dial in the version that we decided to ship. That then led to 'us' landing on the right algorithm to build out the audio files.
I finally connected my home assistant server up to Codex the other week, and it's been pretty incredible. I can just send a message to codex and in a few minutes my dashboard is updated, an integration added, an automation setup, and sometimes all of them together at once.
And I don't need to build or debug complex automations any more! I can just tell some AI to make it so it auto-locks the house door when my phone isn't tracked at home, but also to check the wifi and if there are people using the guest wifi then to instead send me a notification asking if I want to lock the house because guests might be there.
How about build whatever interface makes sense for the user? Doesn't matter if it's a TUI, GUI, speech interface, or some physically actuated / haptic feedback based system. Do what makes intuitive sense to the user and provides enough expressive power to get their job done without overwhelming them.
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