The AI native browser

Attention is all you need.

In fact, attention may be all that can be perceived, the only organising force in the universe. And what we have just invented is the world’s first artificial ‘attention’.

This then indicates the correct modality for ‘AI’ apps – they should be built as tunnels for attention.

This is new. The ability to program in natural language allows us to trade off precision for a sort of blurriness of the attention.

There is a level of abstraction at which you actually do not want precision. The large problem in software ‘products’ is getting in the OODA loop. they all have too much friction. software should be flowing…

for example, all my recruiting software runs on one desktop - email, browser, terminal, AI agents, emacs, everything. All color coded.

What I want now is ephemeral UI. There are a few invariants like a main dashboard, inbox, etc….but everything else is ephemeral in the sense that an agent can reliably generate the UI.

This will be the new browser. Whoever builds this will have the world’s attention. @jack of course is ahead of the game with Goose.

I tell all my friends building for the web - you have to build a desktop app. This combination of free flowing but precise interfaces can only be delivered in ones own desktop app with ones own inference on one’s own component library.

I see this as XML all the way down - all data is XML in the future. We will not be needing human readable formats. And all interfaces are XSLT transforms. And all transform templates are html, but it will be

<candidate id="ghyr4d3">
  <photo src="candidate_photo.jpg"/>
  <skills>
    <skill>React</skill>
    <skill>JavaScript</skill>
  </skills>
  <work-experiences>
    <work-experience id="we:ghyr4d3.1">
      <company>TechCorp Inc.</company>
      <position>Senior Frontend Developer</position>
      <duration>2021-2024</duration>
      <description>Led React development team, built scalable web applications</description>
    </work-experience>
    <work-experience id="we:ghyr4d3.2">
	...
	</work-experience>
  </work-experiences>
  <education>
    <degree>Bachelor of Computer Science</degree>
    <institution>State University</institution>
    <year>2019</year>
  </education>
  <contact>
    <email>candidate@example.com</email>
    <phone>+1-555-0123</phone>
    <location>San Francisco, CA</location>
  </contact>
</candidate>

…and so on and some XSLT stylesheets plus CSS plus modern browser standards turn this into an HTML interface.

This will be the new browser.

This is also where knowledge of emacs will be invaluable. The way one can spin up ephemeral interfaces in emacs is second to none. We just have to teach an LLM to do it.

This is what the explosion in TUI apps is happening. The AIs are looking for the unsettled parts of the noosphere to make landfall on. The browser is overloaded as a place. All the memetic high ground has been captured and there is no unsullied place.

There remain two places where the new browser can be built