The Worst Idea in Computer Science

I sometimes call "direct manipulation" the "worst idea in computer science". It's a brilliant idea. And precisely because it's so good, it's become so pernicious.

But hopefully, its reign of despottery is ending.

The kernel of truth inside the hype of the "AI revolution" is that we are moving to natural language as the main user interface paradigm for computers. There is now very little need for the GUI. For pointing at things with mice. For scrolling. For direct manipulation.

The main advantage that GUIs claimed over text terminals was "discovery". I didn't know what my software could do until I looked at its menu options. But now discovery is as easy as asking it "is there a way to do X?"

You can see the attraction of the natural language paradigm in both the popular enthusiasm around agents like OpenClaw. And in the enthusiasm for the TUI and tiling window managers among the geeks. People who are keen users of computers are overwhelmingly voting for natural language UX. And the future of software is "agentic" this way. Natural language UI. And at least enough knowledge and memory in it that a user can meaningfully delegate long term and batch processing work via natural language.

As an aside, it's fascinating to observe that we've been so immersed and constrained by the "direct manipulation" paradigm for end users, that batch processing, processing on a timer or cronjob, and event driven processing all seem miraculous to most users. These possibilities have been in our operating systems since the 1970s. But the direct manipulation paradigm obscured the possibility from all but the most technical. If LLMs do nothing but bring the masses the virtues of "indirect manipulation" they'll have been worth it. Over the past 40 years, the direct manipulation paradigm enshitified from helpful (here's what you can do) to manipulative (here's another thing to grab your attention, keep scrolling)

Chatbots, at least for the moment, are a reset to a self-service, user pulls what they want, model. Rather than the UI pushing more distraction at you. (Though beware! I'm sure there are people working on reversing that.) The next OS will be made of chatbots in the way current UIs are made of windows. Your software needs to fit into that paradigm.

This is something I wrote on LinkedIn in response to this