Post by @fribbledom@mastodon.social

2026-07-24 17:28 UTC

We keep saying we&#39;re &quot;adding AI to our app&quot;. I fear that&#39;ll age about as well as &quot;adding internet support&quot;. We still think in terms of applications because that&#39;s the paradigm we grew up with. But perhaps an app was always just a temporary interface between human intent and, uhm, computation? In suspect in the future, apps become capabilities. The AI becomes the interface layer: dynamically rendering a UI, starting a voice chat, or silently getting things done. The app was never the product.

Replies (3)

@toddsundsted@epiktistes.com 2026-07-24 18:36

@fribbledom@mastodon.social ideally the "solution" is the product! in which case, yes, we may be looking at a shift.

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@halyihev@esperanto.masto.host 2026-07-24 19:12

@happyborg@fosstodon.org @fribbledom@mastodon.social You might want to read "Raisinbread" by Dennis Paul Himes, actually. Not the exact scenario you're talking about, but certainly a similar one.

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@RockyC@fosstodon.org 2026-07-28 11:23

@fribbledom@mastodon.social This has been my thinking as well. Apps and operating systems as we know them will cease to exist. Instead, we just tell the agent what we need and it just does it. It will use what we today call apps as plugins to enhance the agent's functionality. We are moving into an era where computers can think like us instead of us having to think like a computer, and the ramifications of that are both profound and terrifying.

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