i keep coming back to this idea that the real interface of the future is not going to be buttons or keyboards or even voice. its going to be intent. and i think most people are still designing products around the old layer.
you see right now if i want something done i still have to translate whats in my head into a sequence of actions that a system can understand. click here, type this, select that. the system never actually sees what i meant. it only sees what i did. thats a huge information loss and i think its the main reason most software still feels like work.
when you start capturing intent properly through signals, through context, through patterns of how someone has behaved before, the whole interface starts to collapse. you dont need as many screens. you dont need as many options. the system can just start moving in the direction you were already headed.
ive been thinking about this a lot while building. the hard part is not the model. the hard part is deciding what counts as intent and what is just noise. because if you get that wrong the system starts acting on things you never actually wanted and then trust dies very quickly. ive seen this happen already with a few tools i tried. they were so eager to be helpful that they started doing things i had only half thought about. and once that happens you stop trusting the system completely.
i think the companies that will win are the ones that treat intent as the primary object. not the prompt, not the chat history, not the dashboard. just the intent. everything else becomes secondary infrastructure.
theres also a deeper layer here that i havent fully figured out yet. once systems can reliably capture intent they also start capturing preference, mood, even a kind of soft prediction of what you will want next week. that data is extremely valuable and also extremely dangerous. i dont think weve really sat with what it means for a company to own a high resolution map of how you think.
most of the current agentic tools are still just very good at following explicit instructions. theyre not yet good at reading the room. and reading the room is the whole game. the moment a system can notice that youre frustrated with a process and quietly fix the process without you having to ask, thats when the interface actually disappears.
i dont know how long it will take. right now the incentives are still pointing toward more chat windows and more control panels. but i think the users will force the correction eventually because nobody actually wants more work. they want the thing done.
anyway. i think whoever figures out how to make intent the primary interface is going to own a very large part of the next decade of software. everything else will start feeling like legacy.