The Rise of Ephemeral Interfaces
Show me a visual for this moment: what's possible now, what's still rough, and what it means for how you build
The announcement came through the usual channel. Anthropic had shipped a new feature: Claude could now generate custom visuals inline in chat. I read the support article, skimmed the examples, and closed the tab. Then I sat with a question I hadn’t expected.
What are UIs actually for? What problem are they solving?
I know the answers. I’ve given them for most of my career. Making software usable. Giving users a way to interact with a system. Translating data into shapes humans can read. Every answer is true. Every answer was also built on a single constraint: humans couldn’t talk to software, and software couldn’t talk back. That constraint is lifting. Now they can ask something in front of them to read the database for them.
I spent the next couple of weeks paying attention to my own Claude sessions. And the thing that kept surfacing wasn’t “apps are dying.” Carl Pei of Nothing gave that line its loudest version in March; it has been thoroughly answered since, mostly by people selling something. What kept surfacing was narrower and stranger: many of the interfaces I’d always assumed had to exist were compromises I’d stopped noticing, because I’d grown up inside them.
