It’s very difficult to talk to an LLM, and most of us don’t even realize we’re doing it wrong.

How good an answer is depends on how well you articulate the question. You’d have to explain your boundaries, share the data you have, ask it to research step by step, and bind its answers with a harness. Nobody does that every time. My last question to ChatGPT was “What are the best South-Asian scuba dive destinations for February?” and I got back a generic, text-heavy answer that I had to keep poking at.

That blank text box is the problem. We’ve handed users the hardest job in the product: figuring out what to ask.

In this session, I’ll walk through how to design AI interfaces that meet users halfway. We’ll break down the textbox anti-pattern, how to pick up intent from context the product already has, and how to swap long paragraphs for adaptive UI like options, filters and structured results that get users to what they need in fewer steps. Then we’ll get into A2UI, where agents respond with interface components, and what it means for frontend engineers building on top of it.