This is a new format, exploring how we might get ideas out with LLMs, without losing the author’s voice. Claude subagents run the interview based on notes they are given and write a piece heavily focused on direct quotes. You know, like journalists have done forever.
ChatGPT is the most successful consumer app ever created. That’s the case for chat as the interface for AI, and it’s a strong one.
Max isn’t convinced. He spent 2025 building AI products—hackathons, startups, solo projects—and came out the other side betting against the dominant paradigm.
What changed in 2025
“The biggest change was starting to integrate AI models into the actual functionality of products,” he says. His earlier projects, like Tradepurple, used AI tools to build but didn’t have AI in the product itself. His current project, KNOT, is different. “It’s fundamentally an app that uses AI models to create the value.”
KNOT looks like a notepad. You write in it like you’d write anywhere else. But key entities become tags—hover over them and you learn more. After a meeting, your notes regenerate and update based on what happened. The AI works invisibly, ahead of you, without being asked.
“We’ll move away from every chat being a start from scratch,” Max argues, “more towards a constant ongoing discussion around documents. I’m making your note the interface. You can’t tell it to do anything. It’s designed to be ahead of you, creating value just from you writing down your notes as you would normally.”
The terminal surprise
There’s an irony here. The macOS Terminal—think of the “MS-DOS prompt” from 80s movies—turns out to be ahead of the web for generative UI.
“You can ask Claude Code to mock up what an interface might look like using ASCII and it will give you a little wireframe,” Max says. “It’s only doing it with text, so it’s incredibly lightweight and flexible compared to what you’d have to do on the web. But it can show anything you can imagine.”
This wasn’t obvious. At Beyond Work in 2023, the team explored generative UI early. “Much smarter designers than me immediately said it was going to be a nightmare to use HTML to generate any interface the AI can think of reliably.”
But text has no such constraints. “The ability to draw anything with text means the terminal has an unlimited and immediate flexibility that the web just doesn’t. And it’s fast and effective.”
Claude Code shows what’s possible: ASCII wireframes pop up inline with text, it offers question interfaces and loading bars and now can even use Chrome when it needs. But Max sees this as proof of concept, not destination.
“The ultimate endgame is that it can make an asset, which you’re then able to edit and tweak — and it automatically responds to those changes.”
He’s already working this way. “I’m using Obsidian where every piece of work is a document. Document-first, where I can go and make edits and make it mine, then go back to the terminal to talk about it in more depth if I want to. I can imagine some kind of application where the document is the central point and you invoke the chat only when you really need to.”
Something he might build into KNOT in time.
The pattern
He points to history. The internet existed before the web browser made it usable. Smartphones existed before multi-touch made them intuitive. Social media existed before the newsfeed revealed its true form.
“I think in 2026, I want to experiment with and pay close attention to the people who are finding what might be the final true form for this technology.”
For those who haven’t started building yet, he thinks the timing is actually ideal. “You’ve arrived at the perfect time because you’re skipping a lot of the faffing around. You could sit down and write Claude Skills that genuinely take over some of your more generic work and they would just work straight away.”
Where next?
His inspiration comes from strategy games. “I still think we should take more inspiration from gaming, which has practiced having interfaces that take agency on your behalf for decades.”
Strategy games, specifically—where you manage the big picture, tell people what to do, and easily get updates on what’s going on. “They are the most proven and potent demonstration of this.”
Chat lets you ask for anything. A strategy game gives you a map, units, and constrained choices that still feel like agency. Max thinks AI interfaces will move in that direction—less typing, more context, more invisible work happening in the background.
He could be wrong. ChatGPT’s numbers suggest he probably is. But terminal commands still work on every Mac, and almost nobody uses them.
“This is the year we find out.”