The End of Apps as We Know Them

Everyone, including designers now, has been talking about coding with LLMs for over a year... building apps by talking to AI. Great, but I think it's just the beginning. The real shift is gonna be way bigger.

We're already seeing it. We ask ChatGPT a math question, we don't open a calculator app anymore lol. We ask Claude to make a chart, we don't open Excel. We use v0 to generate a UI, we don't install or code anything.

Specific apps to get specific results were always the middleman.

Here's my guess... for a while I've been thinking we're heading toward something like a generative operating system. With AI not being just a tool u open, but becoming the core of how we interact with everything... the electricity in the machine. Interactions that are more conversational than clicky. Less tapping through screens, more just saying what u want.

We describe what we need and AI figures out the rest. Sometimes that's an answer. Sometimes it's a little interface that shows up and goes away when not needed anymore... ephemeral. Sometimes it's a voice telling us the result while walking.

Every previous interface... buttons, menus, command lines, touch screens... that was us learning to speak computer. But it was more of a translation language... a bridge between human and machine. Now the machine has learned to speak like us. It understands what we mean. Things like MCP let the machine plug into any service. Agent frameworks let it chain tasks together. The databases and APIs all still exist. AI is just the new layer between us and all of it.

Vibecoding is us talking to computers but still thinking "build me an app." I think we'll drop that last part soon.

The best tech disappears. We don't think about TCP/IP when we browse the web. We won't think about "apps" when AI just handles things.

Now... I could be completely wrong about all of this (wouldn't be the first time lol). But it certainly feels like something like this is already happening and it's so exciting (and scary)... I'm a designer, after all... I've been designing buttons for a while.

But it's exciting to be here... in this new way of interacting with the machine by just... talking.