The Future of UX Starts Where It All Began: Every decade or so, we circle back to the same blinking cursor. A lot has changed but we're learning many lessons again.
In the early days, the command line felt like magic. I still remember typing dir and cd, feeling like I’d just unlocked a secret hacker code. Then I landed on a Unix box in college, and a new universe opened up. The problem was that you needed to know what to ask and how to ask it. The terminal was unforgiving and often unhelpful.
Graphical interfaces fixed that: the mouse, icons, windows, and menus. You could finally see. But as software grew more capable, the UI grew more crowded. Buttons on top of buttons. Menus inside menus. Toolbars stacked on toolbars. We gained visibility of features but we lost clarity.
And now, AI has pulled us right back to the beginning. A simple box. A blinking cursor. Unlimited possibility. But once again, we don’t know what’s possible. This time, the cursor is forgiving. You don’t need the right keywords or the perfect syntax. You express intent, and the system meets you halfway. Clearly progress but too many people are throwing together agentic UI without providing visibility over what's possible.
The future of UX won’t be pure agentic - command line and it won't be a pure GUI. It will be a blend. Product leaders need to create affordances for discovery and interaction and lean into agent UX both typing and voice for fluid expression and intent without the traditional navigation structure.
1. The cursor gives freedom
2. The GUI provides discovery and structure.
Systems should reveal options using progressive disclosure rather than dumping every button on screen at once. You get what you need, when you need it.
Modern AI applications focus on tokens and words, but they forget the advantages of the visual. What’s the old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words? It holds true for 1000 data tables, 1000 dashboards, 1000 charts, and more. Direct manipulation still matters. Dragging, sorting, selecting, reshaping - these aren’t going away and they are often helpful and needed.
The cursor gives us simplicity, but simplicity isn’t the lack of features. It’s the absence of clutter. You don’t have to choose between power and usability; you can have both.
The blinking cursor is back.
