Results of 3 weeks of hacking and thinking about what web will look like. Very opinionated.
- Important, neglected LLM modality: User Interfaces
- “Is this just a subset of coding, which is a subset of text modality?” eh, maybe about as much as voice is a subset of text.
- We spend like:
- ~50% of our waking hours in front of a screen
- ~50% of that is in front of content/data that we or our friends own (eg email, Facebook, Notion/Docs)
- but like… <1% of that is in front of UIs that we ourselves constructed (eg personal websites)
- (perhaps a bit more in certain lines of work, eg internal dashboards via Retool)
- Why are custom UIs so rare?
- The construction of UI today is painful, slow, inhuman
- But it won’t be, soon. LLM coding is now insanely good
- But meanwhile, UIs are the winning form factor for “Human <> Computer”
- Maybe we’ll get to BCI in like 5 years but until then…
- [TODO] diagram of existing web app ecosystem, and what we’re trying to integrate
- Code editing (Cursor)
- Code hosting (Github)
- Web deployment (Vercel, Namecheap)
- Database (Supabase)
- Why web?
- Web is widely distributed, every device you work with has a web interface, lowest common denominator
- SaaS distribution model is amazing — enables realtime updates for your service
- Bypasses app store gatekeeping (on mobile) or extra download step (on desktop)
- Possible upstarts: VR, AR, BCI
- buni vs Cursor, Devin, Replit Agent, etc:
- These are designed for code silos. Each app doesn’t talk very much to other apps
- buni is aiming for an extremely composable world, think NPM or wikipedia.
- Should derisk: maybe composability doesn’t matter, maybe archipelagoes is how code wants to be?
- Make it fast!
- On every level, make the feedback loops quick
- Build, deploy the app asap
- Make sharing instantaneous
- Get user feedback and suggestions easily?
- record all user interactions, to replay/train on?
- open > closed
- Want to experiment with a paradigm everything is public readonly; writing is reserved for keyed systems
- Helps the context flow freely, for LLMs and humans
- (better aligned with fundamental economics of information)
- Revealed preference of internet is that privacy, personal data just doesn’t matter, compared to convenience or systems/tools that do things you want. E.g. Google
- multiplayer > single player
- today “ChatGPT”, tomorrow “SlackGPT”
- But also, multiplayer like Twitter or Wikipedia are multiplayer
- new features and improvements could propagate throughout an app, bottom-up
- today, web apps are gatekept by dev teams
- down the line: marketplace for agents (or: NPM for agent infra, prompts)
- And also $/credits attached, like Github sponsors kinda
- Theory is that agent infra is bottlenecked on good UI & code deployment
- Can stick in a bunch of cool crypto mechanisms, smart contract stuff (prediction markets, perp swaps, etc)
- Can bootstrap into agents (or corporations of agents), with long-running identities
- Beyond building prototypes of web apps, I'd eventually like to figure out how to build an open and composable web; how LLM agents live and interact through this; even economic & governance mechanisms for open source development. It's a ridiculous amount to consider, which is exciting but also distracting/scary/suspicious from an outside view, and also flies in the face of standard startup advice.
Appendix
- Q: What’s hard for Austin to build buni?
- Building app vs platform
- Building a web app: you get to be dictator, monolith/monorepo, everything stays up to date
- Managing multiple versions is hell
- Building an npm-like platform or ecosystem: all kinds of weird versioning stuff, complexity of references explode. Probably need to straddle the line
- Maybe LLMs can parse all your downstream deps and tell you when things work…?
- Also: reliability matters much more
- (cf Streamlit on reliable platforms)
- Scope is ginormous — kind of encoding my entire philosophy of how code or the web “should” work
- many degrees of freedom when designing a whole ecosystem from scratch
- still hard to frame the killer MVP
- Maybe “prompting Twitter for changes” isn’t actually that compelling?
- Ideally your apps kind of figure out what you need? Coming up with good prompts or searches is expensive, hard
- A bit easier after you’ve used an app for a bit and think something is wrong — that’s product sense though, maybe not everyone has product sense.