Lee Schneider Books

(SIX HOURS is my category for brief thoughts at the end of the day.)

Matt Webb writes in his Interconnected blog about headless apps. It had me thinking on my run this morning.

An app can be headless if it doesn’t need to communicate with a human. That would mean that we’d only have to visit a website once, to get a sense of what it was about, and if we liked what it had to offer, we’d hook it up to our chatbot/assistant and communicate with the site using the assistant.

Visiting a website once.

It may mean that a user interface or a user (human) experience might almost not matter.

When I edit using Descript, I talk to the assistant more than I actually edit anything, so this is a reality right now. I could see using Final Cut without a keyboard, because using hardware to set type is not well suited to editing images. I imagine telling Final Cut to “take out all the flash frames,” or “tighten this up so that nobody says 'uh.'” It would be a richer connection to the machine.

But we would lose the feeling of using a tool. When we sit before screens and move our hands over keyboards to do practically everything, tools won’t matter any more. Everything we use to make everything would be the same. We would talk it through, and then things would happen on a screen, or before our eyes in AR, or in our mind.

Headless, yet all in your head. No hands on the controls.

There will always be people, however, who will want their hands on the steering wheel. You’ll want to hold a hammer to pound in a nail. You’ll whisk the egg and find it satisfying.

Even though the tools we have for computing are antiquated, and the interfaces a holdover from the last century, I don’t think we will want everything to be headless. Interacting with an agent is fine, but there are times you need the feel of working on something in the world, using a tool that fits the hand.

____ Coming soon in this space ... serialized chapters from my new novel trilogy, THE SHADOW SIDE OF LUCAS PERFECT. To warm up the motor, I'll be running short pieces that are a blend of blog and journal. I'll call those short pieces SIX HOURS, since they are often written at the end of the day.