There’s an emerging concept in AI interfaces called “UI on the fly.” Basically, it’s where the AI creates a pleasing and effective user interface in the moment. You can get a taste of this yourself. Open Gemini, Claude, or any other leading-edge AI and give it a prompt like “Write me an HTML file with Tetris written in JavaScript.” Save the results to a file—say, tetris.html—then right-click on that file and open it in your browser. I bet you’ll get a working Tetris game. In a multimodal interface like Claude Desktop, it will even open it for you. This is UI on the fly.
Prompt given to Claude: “Can you create a Tetris game for me”
As software developers, let’s imagine where this is going. Say you’re writing an interface to an accounting package. Do you even need to write a user interface, or do you just need to write a detailed set of prompts and a good data tool for AI to access the data?
Let’s take another example. You’re writing a pizza ordering web app for a mom-and-pop pizza store. You write a basic static landing page with the phone number, address, map links, and so on. But for the ordering, do you write a static webpage that only works on a browser, or do you write a prompt for the AI to generate the ordering interface—with details about what data to collect and how to pass the order to the restaurant? Your prompt could include things like “when on a phone, make the interface phone-friendly” and “when on a tablet, support landscape and portrait layouts.” You can include links to pictures of the pizza types.
Now let’s say sometime in the future, the user of your app isn’t a person directly but an AI acting on the user’s behalf. You can include in your prompt: “When talking to another AI, use Markdown,” letting the user’s AI decide the interface. What if that interface is voice? What if it’s Braille? What if it’s not in English? This will be our world before we know it.
If AI can create a good Tetris game on the fly, it will soon be creating user interfaces on the fly—whether you want it to or not.