Generative UI and Meta-Apps

For now, coding agent capabilities and reliability are improving at least exponentially, possibly super-exponentially. Maybe this will taper off and saturate at some maximum, but we still have plenty of low hanging reinforcement learning fruit to pick so I would be surprised if progress stopped next week. Software is becoming cheaper to produce and this will continue for the foreseeable future.

“The SaaSpocalypse” may well be upon us. When code is cheap, the calculus of any decision for which the cost of code is a factor changes. The standout here is build-vs-buy. The logic goes: organizations don’t like to build their own software because it’s expensive, so when software is cheap they will build it themselves, right?

But that’s not quite right. Organizations don’t buy software because it’s cheaper than building in-house (often it is not). They buy software for predictability. If you pay for Salesforce instead of building your own alternative in-house: it will be delivered on time, the characteristics (non-functional requirements) are known well in advance, it will have few bugs and the bugs it does have are known, you get some level of guarantee if it breaks, and most importantly it has been battle-tested by organizations far larger than your own so you know that the key abstractions are at least roughly right.

Coding agent advancements help some of these, but not all of them. Salesforce might have to drop their prices, but still provide value over entirely in-house solutions.

Coding agents are rapidly restructuring the tech industry, though. Things will change. The question is what and how?

Generative UI (or Ephemeral UI) is promising. Quick rundown: the idea is that you have the LLM generate “throwaway” UI code live (or maybe not-quite-live?). There’s a lot of investment in this space - A2UI, CopilotKit, assistant-ui, among many others. It’s rare to see in the wild, though. We’ve made some fumbling steps towards it with Claude Artifacts and Gemini/ChatGPT Canvas, but these are pretty basic. I even have agent-generated dashboards in FreedomRPG to present agent-generated data models. Unfortunately, the UIs produced are clunky, buggy, incomplete, insecure, and pretty slow to generate (a simple Claude artifact takes a few minutes to generate with Opus 4.6). The models aren’t there yet and neither is the tooling around them.

But there’s a huge amount of potential here, right? People with far more product & UI expertise than myself have written at length about all that’s on offer when the models and tooling improve. I can envision a world where the software we interact with on a daily basis is generated live as we need it, exactly to our needs. Replace all your apps with one meta-app - closer to an OS than a typical application.

Unfortunately it’s not going to be that easy. There are a number of ways this could derail before we reach that world.

The real bottleneck here is requirements extraction. Non-technical users don’t know what they need or even want. We can’t even one-shot software that has clear requirements right now, but more RL training in coding environments will fix that. More RL training in coding environments will not fix a lack of mind-reading. There’s a good chance that by the time we get the capability to infer what a non-technical user really wants enough to build what they didn’t even know they needed, we’re well into the AGI (u/dys)topia.

There’s also a trust (or liability) gap: warranties, compliance, and support contracts for generated software will not be easy. I expect we’ll find the first 80% pretty easy, but “trad-software” also has the final 20% (edge cases, accessibility, etc.) which is likely to be harder to replicate.

Hell, maybe chat interfaces will just get really good and we’ll decide we don’t need specialized UIs at all (unlikely but not out of the question IMO).

Something is happening. The “nothing ever happens” take is wrong here. But the naive takes don’t add up. SaaS is unlikely to go away. Generative UI has roadblocks we still need break down. Enterprise software is still enterprise software and needs to abide by enterprise software rules. Something is happening, but to be honest I’m not really sure what.

- omegastick