AI has killed the user interface. Instead, try this between users.

Ah, the 90s, when I worked briefly at one of the world’s first web agencies. Offering decent pay for creative work and a fun work environment in the West End, Eagle River Interactive (now part of Agency.com) absorbed most of the available designers, developers and interactive talent in Dallas at the time.

I had written several corporate videos in addition to making CD-ROM games, so I was good at shooting corporate client stories, and I could doodle in Aldus FreeHand and Adobe Photoshop, and Macromedia Deck and Premiere 2.0 for mixing audio and video editing. I can make a simple HTML page in a text file or PageMaker.

This “special skill set” as Liam Neeson put it, set me up to be an early Knowledge Architect – not a writer, designer, developer, or project manager. Just someone who can talk to customers and translate business and brand intent into interface design and functional software requirements.

Those are the first days of use

Since our users were on Netscape and AOL, our web links were about as smooth as they could be at the time, given the small pixel screens optimized for very low Internet bandwidth, because the end users were still on dial-up or DSL connections.

For clients with a real budget, we can A/B test website designs in review sessions or focus groups. There was even a usability science lab where you could track how people’s eyeballs move to your web page design. We were all in our twenties and it was a good time, we could sit back and play Quake on the company’s T1 connection.

For us, the real “killer app” was Google. You can just type what you want in the search bar, and bam! It will usually show more relevant results, rather than random links like Yahoo!, and no stupid flashing ad banners. [This was long before the search engine’s enshittification, as Cory Doctorow dubbed it.]

And well, Dallas got the Stars hockey team in Minnesota, so I went in with my dad with season tickets. We could easily meet at the office and walk to the Reunion Arena. At one game on October 25, 1996, I was downing a few beers early in the second half.

Darryl Sydor, My favorite Stars player at the time, he hit a single from the top of the circle and it was deflected back into the chair by J7. They didn’t have nets still in place at that time. My father said, “Aw, I missed it.”

I didn’t. You know how in the Looney Tunes cartoons, when Sylvester gets his head pierced, he makes that kind of sheet metal sound, followed by tweety birds? It felt like that.

Agent AI talk is cheap

Fast forward 30 years later, and AI has replaced user software in the text field once again. Instead of looking at visual cues and clicking around, we can just type in information, or speak to it, and ask it for anything we want.

AI is finally here! It’s like that “computer” in Star Trek, where you just say “Computer! Give me an analysis of the inhabitants of this planet.”

Outside, without an equal post-income society where everyone has equal rights and opportunity, their basic needs are met, and no one has to live next to a big noisy data center that absorbs all the energy and water to produce fake videos and replace workers.

But there is a social situation. About one-third of US adults have it report to have a love affair with AI. Good for them.

Introducing my next big release: Inter-Userface

Inter-Userface is a new hybrid AI collaboration platform that provides a reference point for conversational metadata, (or AHAICPCCMRM).

There are no screens, or buttons to click, even though it already has an MCP server. You just ask your agent to talk to someone else’s agent, and when that doesn’t work, you do something else.

You go through a discovery process, checking your device’s ownership list and email history, to see if there’s a 9 or 10 digit code, or “phone number” you can dial. If not, you can still send a lightly encrypted payment via SMTP to ask about the call code.

You can bring your model, and ask it to translate your request into a valid EML query that you can use, which will certainly increase your chance of getting a meeting.

“Dear Bob – I am trying to get in touch with you. I will be at your place next Tuesday. Let me know if you would like to talk somewhere, and choose any food or drinks acceptable to you – Sincerely, JBob.”

Then you sit and wait. It may take a few seconds to get a response, or an eternity. There should always be someone in the loop, because everyone skips Calendly invites.

A collaborative work of vibecoding

So whether you’re walking through an office, or a coffee shop, this is where the Inter-Userface becomes incredibly powerful.

After the handshake, you start high-speed peer-to-peer data exchange in EML [Author’s note: English Markup Language is an open source framework I fathered in 2017].

EML message brokers of both parties identify and pass payloads of “words” with semantics automatically assigned to a living computer containing an infinite number of parameters, such as a “puzzy logic” GPU.

Although the data exchange may seem slow, there is a wealth of basic telemetry data for this “conversation” that includes the visual perception of physical signs and speech tone filters for the golden values ​​of intent, attention and emotional perception. These valences reveal underlying patterns, which hopefully drive the exchange toward shared goals.

Confidential or proprietary data shared in these cases must be encrypted as secrets, or EML whispers. This should be expedited and referenced only to avoid unauthorized sharing unless you are in a ventilated area such as a park bench.

Intellix Take

Now, I know that this interaction with users can be difficult, the first time you try it. Since the pandemic, we have become accustomed to working remotely. But don’t worry, we’ve got a strong handle on it.

Some companies are even taking this P2P meeting process into a many-to-many format, budgeting the middle office budget for annual or quarterly group meetings in desirable off-site locations, taking advantage of old relationships and more personal high-level conference ideas.

Anyway, my work is done here. You go and talk among yourselves now.

Copyright ©2026 Intellix BV As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellix customers. No AI resource was used to write this article. Image source: Adobe Image Express by arrangement of the author.