Interfaces for intention
For most of history, expertise was held hostage by friction. To make a contribution, you had to navigate the toolchain: the arcane workflows of finance, the rigid protocols of healthcare, the compiling errors of engineering. The interface acted as a gatekeeper. You had to pay a tax in "machinery" before you could transact in "ideas."
AI decouples mastery from the machine. As the cost of turning intent into execution tends toward zero, the interface stops absorbing the difficulty. The bottleneck moves upstream. When procedural fluency is no longer the constraint, the scarce resource becomes structural awareness: the ability to articulate what should happen, under which constraints, and with what consequences.
Skill stops being about technique. It becomes about specification.
This creates an interface crisis. If expertise is now "intention shaped by constraints," where do we type that in?
The current consensus is "Chat." Chat was the first surface AI unlocked, and it is excellent for exploration. It lowers inhibition and widens the search space. But Chat is a low-fidelity medium for architecture.
Chat captures desire, but not boundaries.
It has breadth, but no topology.
It is stateless in a world that requires state.
You cannot build a complex system in a text box for the same reason you cannot build a skyscraper using only oral instructions. A world where intent moves in lockstep with execution requires a surface where structure is visible. An interface where constraints are explicit, flows are legible, and feedback loops are closed before execution is locked.
We need an IDE for strategy.
We have seen this shift before. In the 1980s, the spreadsheet collapsed the machinery of finance into a 2D grid. Suddenly, the structure of a business became legible and malleable. People who had never touched a mainframe could model levers, run scenarios, and debug logic. Marketers built forecasts. Operators ran capacity plans. The "Machinery Tax" vanished, and the value of pure reasoning skyrocketed. The result was cross-pollination. Reasoning developed in one corner of an organization could travel to another because the primitive (the cell) was universal.
We are standing at a similar threshold. The frontier is not "better models." The frontier is the meta-interface that allows us to compose these models.
When machinery is no longer the barrier, the transferable part of expertise becomes a person’s mental models. The penalty for stepping into adjacent fields drops.
Unlocking the next layer of value requires a medium that respects the shape of complex problems, not just their semantic content. Until we build the interface that turns 'Chat' into 'Architecture,' we remain stuck at the command line of a new era.