Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, that's one of my Roman empires these days. The natural language interface. NLX is the new UX. Here's the deal. To me, I think traditionally we've thought very consciously about GUI because the graphical interfaces are not something natural, and so they have had to be explicitly designed, but they're rigid interfaces. What we have with conversational interface and natural language is it's a much more elastic, right? That doesn't mean it's not designed. Often, I hear a product builders say, "Oh, yeah. With AI, the model leads to the product. So it's just you chat with it." You and I are having a conversation, it's a podcast. I'll have another conversation at Microsoft and that's a meeting. So conversations also have grammars, they have structures, they have UI elements, they're invisible. And so one of the things that I see and I'm really excited about is what are the new principles, new constructs in natural language as an interface? I'll give you a few examples. And actually a lot of startups as well as big companies are really experimenting with this stuff. One is if you think about it, prompt itself is a new construct and that's a new UI element just like a dropdown was or a menu was. But others that are emerging, especially for agents, I think are plans. So when you give a high level goal, what we are seeing is that when the agent comes back with a plan, preferably an editable plan, that's a new construct. The other one that I think about a lot is showing the work, progress. You see this with different products. You see with the Copilot, you see with ChatGPT, DeepSeek, this idea of thinking aloud and it's kind of showing the work, but how much do you do it? If it's too verbose, it feels like I'm running some cron job and scripts, but if it's too terse, then I don't know if it's going in the right path, and I don't have the confidence yet. So there are all these new elements. So if you are a product whittler, this is a fun new space to be digging in for product design. This is really interesting because I think people chat with all these chat bots and it just feels like this is just the way it is, but you actually are designing every element of the interaction, how much to share, but how much you're thinking, here's my plan, what do you think. So I think this will surprise a lot of people, just realizing there's so much that goes into just designing even these what seemingly are simple conversations. Yeah. Another good example is follow-ups, right? You could say, "Look, you asked me a question," and then I could ask a follow-up set of things, and that's explicitly should be designed for success. So for example, if I said, "Hey, create an image," and it created a black and white like a clip art version of something. What are the next obvious follow-ups that it should be suggesting proactively? Now, too much and you are kind of annoying me, but too little in some sense, you've lost an opportunity to direct me or guide me into a happy path here.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.