Musings edited, altered with ChatGPT.
just had a good chat with a friend, and we were musing about how AI has taken over many of the tasks we enjoyed most. For instance, I love designing buttons and cleaning up files; it's my Zen moment. However, AI can do it so much better, so I kind of delegated it and fuck me, I miss it. But today's focus is not on that.
One topic we got stuck on is a thought I've been playing around with for a while. I am calling this not fully written piece 'The Internet Is Not For Us.' The gist of it is a realization, actually taken from Web3 lessons. We often treat and consider bots as spam and a disease, but in reality, they are the actual glimpse of the future that is unfolding right now.
The future, which is already here in our Web3 fields, will be mostly populated online by bots and agents—I never really know which term I should use. They are rapidly outpacing us in getting online. It takes nine months and many years for a human to become what society deems productive. In contrast, for a bot, it's as simple as a copy and paste, or a line in a script to duplicate. It's like a cheat code in a game to get unlimited supplies. So, in all honesty, it's not that hard to envision an internet whose primary citizens are mainly bots, not us. And as I mentioned, bots are not a trigger; they are the signal for what's to come.
But this made me think. In the last couple of weeks, I have been dabbling in the world of intents. In a nutshell, the dream of the Web3 user experience is this: 'Here's what I have to offer, here's what I look for in return.' Through a headless shadow market, I receive a bunch of quotes sorted by reputation and/or price, etc. I choose the one that aligns best with me or my set preferences, and something entirely complicated online—a many-step transaction across tons of chains—becomes just a result for me, captured verifiably on-chain. Just a push here, and everything is just a trade or swap when you think about it.
Prompts in the AI world are actually really similar here. That's why the holy grail, even for us at the edges of DeFi user experience innovation, is natural language prompts. And that's why we still will have a debate about whether or not we as humans can even state the intention we have, although that's often more a discovery or knowledge issue. We don't know what we could do, so we can't say what we want.
Anyway, this all hints at some interesting futures: an internet where we are not the primary audience, where complex things are solved through a headless market of automated processes, bots, or agents. So, it left me with a question: What does this new internet look like?
It might have been Marc Andreessen—I'm just acting on memory here—who said that the new medium always consumes the old one. If AI is the new medium, it will consume the internet for its lunch, at least the human-perceivable internet. So, what's left for us? What does this new internet look like?
This led me down a rabbit hole as I am thinking, or tasked with thinking about, a new website for a client while ChatGPT processes this text simultaneously. I am a designer at heart, and sometimes I love to build those eye-catching things, those bento grid-like designs, more show than tell. But honestly, I really think an agent won't care about it all; fancy parallax scrolling for agent amusement? Will this be a thing? Plus, honestly, most of the visually stunning and creative sites with cool scroll animations are just accessibility horrors.
So, what will the future of websites actually be? Yesterday, The Verge published a great article about robots.txt, describing it as a 'gentleman's agreement' to allow bots in. Thus, we already have a mechanism to invite them. But what should we serve them? What does a website look like if its audience isn't the flesh-and-blood version of you and me, but rather our digital clones, the crawling agents acting on our behalf?
This dawned on me when I used Arc Search. It can browse the internet for you and serves up a bespoke, tailor-made website based on what it finds. The thing, though, is that it doesn’t necessarily take the information I wanted it to serve. I get how the SEO armada already gets glossy-eyed; optimization will be key. So, I wonder, what does a headless website that serves agents first look like? What does such a website enable through its structure, inserted prompts, and focus on agent accessibility versus human accessibility? What shape does it take? Does it resemble the very early days of the internet, looking more like an FTP folder list, easy for bots to crawl, digest, and format to serve back to its users?
If this is the case, it also heralds another intriguing mindset change. If our websites transform into purely headless content management systems designed for agents, this opens up a fascinating design space. We could decouple the front end from the back end even more, a concept with which we are already familiar in Web3, but which becomes particularly potent in a generative UI world.
I started by saying that the internet is not for us, and I deeply believe that. If the current internet is better suited for agents, they will dominate. However, what excites me about this is that it forces us to really reinvent the form factors, behaviors, modes, and experiences we build on top of it.
The Internet was never meant for us permanently; we are temporary visitors, and we are getting or are already outnumbered. We should accept that. If you've figured out how to design websites not for humans but for agents, I would love to talk. I assume the SEO army and Google Ads harvesters already know quite a bit about this.
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