Patrick
Branigan

It’s been well over a month since I last opened Figma to actually create something. I’ve handled every single piece of work at hand with Claude Code. That’s not to say everything has worked out well. Sometimes the experience has been less efficient. Sometimes the process has been bloated. Sometimes the output has been dead wrong. But one thing is true: regardless, it’s made output faster. That’s what people and businesses want. They want everything, faster. It’s the output that everyone is fixated on. But the only real reason I’ve been faster is because I have an interest and a comfort with learning and executing inside a terminal.

Output is now easy. Input is where the world will focus next.

Roughly half a billion people per day intentionally interface with AI tools. 5%-10% of those people are on the supply side (building, deploying or directly supporting AI products). There’s an immense amount of adoption and scale still to be done. However, as we’ve seen with the tumultuous history of VR for example, adoption is directly correlated with customer convenience and confidence (in the product and in the price).

The customer needs to be confident they can do (whatever it is they want to do) and comfortable doing (whatever it is they’re doing). I’m not so certain we’ve cracked this yet. AI products and services seem to be falling into two camps: pushed down your throat through your existing products and services without your permission via quiet integration, or soft and hard gated behind sign ups, paywalls, and other data collection layers up front.

The former makes customers uncomfortable. The latter makes customers lack confidence.

The next swell of AI innovation might just be how we interface with our AI, or rather how our AI begins more naturally interfacing with us. It will become less about what can AI do for me, and more about how comfortable and confident does AI make me feel in whatever I’m doing.