1015: Browsers and UIs are dead. Everything is chat

**Wes Bos** (0:01)
I'm in a weird spot because I so heavily agree and disagree at the same point.

**Scott Tolinski** (0:07)
I can't imagine that everything being a chat interface is the right call.

**Wes Bos** (0:15)
Nobody wants a chat bar added to every website ever. I feel like the people that are saying there's going to be no more browser, they're just life maxing to the fullest.

**Randy** (0:33)
Who is ordering Starbucks with ChatGPT? And will an agent just make the perfect UI for you? That's what we're talking about today. We're live at JS Nation, shout out JS Nation in Amsterdam. Some beautiful scenery here. Here with Wes, here with Scott. And Wes is gonna be giving the talk, agentic interfaces, tool skills, generative UI and WebMCP. So we thought we'd pick his brain, see what he's gonna be talking about today.

**Wes Bos** (0:56)
Yeah, I'm stoked about it. This is really fun. We have this nice setup.
I'm happy to talk here. And I'm doing my talk on, like you said, agentic interfaces and generative interfaces, because there's a lot of talk going on right now saying that either the web is dead or the web is going to be headless, or chat is the final interface, or these little components that are inlined inside of your chat interface are going to replace websites. And I'm in a weird spot, because I so heavily agree and disagree at the same point. And that's going to be what my talk is going to be about, as well as WebMCP, which is, we had a whole episode on WebMCP. And I don't know if this is necessarily about the tech. Anytime you use the word MCP, everybody's like, skills are better. I only give me a CLI and that's all I need. And then everyone was like, no, MCP is better. And I don't give a shit about the actual specification, because whatever ends up being the spec, I don't think we're there yet. I'll just prompt it to convert it to that end spec. I don't necessarily care about the specs here. I more care about what does user interface look like from a standpoint of both agents using it, as well as us and the people using it.

**Scott Tolinski** (2:21)
Yeah. I'm really interested to see your talk, because I've done so very little research on any of this stuff. But I did just see yesterday, Hyundai announced that they were having a new future style interface that they're developing, that included things like telling your car to turn my heated seats on and stuff. It was all very LLM based UI inside of a car.
I like my Hyundai a lot.

**Wes Bos** (2:49)
Yeah.

**Scott Tolinski** (2:50)
I love my UI for all that thing. I'm not necessarily one of these people that's like, you've got to have tactile buttons for everything. I know that's a really strong opinion. But I can't imagine that everything being a chat interface is the right car.

**Randy** (3:05)
Especially in a car where you have to pay attention to the road.

**Scott Tolinski** (3:09)
Turning my turn signal on car.

**Randy** (3:11)
Yeah. You're like in a thread of chats. Yeah.

**Wes Bos** (3:13)
That's what my talk is about is sometimes you want no UI at all.
I think about my smart home.
In a lot of cases, I shouldn't even have to tell it when to turn on the lights. It should just be learning from context. Sometimes you want like a voice UI as well. Then when you get to the actual UI, you want to view a shopping list of what you have. Sometimes you want to be able to just type into a chat and batch process that. But then sometimes you want to be able to click the buttons. That's what MCPUI is. Right now, they're just inlining these little components inside of your chat and it's slow, but not knocking it for that. But I feel like WebMCP, which is what this is, is it allows you to expose the tooling of your website as MCP tools. So you visit a website. My example is I have a grocery app and you can add an item, mark as whatever, reorder, add a store, all those typical things. So you expose all of those tools via WebMCP. Then like an agent, like I have Claude hooked up to the WebMCP browser, then I'm able to just use the website normally, and then I am also able to just prompt it from my Claude or ChatGPD or whatever it is that I want.
Then it can also be hooked up to other things as well, because you might be looking at it being like, that's just like a chat bar you added to your website. Nobody wants a chat bar added to every website ever. That's not a good experience. I want to use my agents and hook it up to that website. I want to hook it up to my Google Calendar and my groceries and my fridge camera or all that, whatever it is. So I think that that's the moves, because I'm calling it Clicks and Clankers. Sometimes I want to click, and sometimes I just want to prompt, and sometimes I want to just figure out what the UI should be for me.