1015: Browsers and UIs are dead. Everything is chat

Is the web dead, or just evolving? Wes Bos breaks down his JS Nation Amsterdam talk on agentic interfaces, why chat won’t replace everything, how Web MCP lets agents interact with your existing sites, and what “Clicks and Clankers” really means for the future of UI. Show Notes 00:00 Intro 00:33 Welcome to Syntax! 00:46 Wes’s Talk: Agentic Interfaces at JS Nation 01:37 Is the Web Dead? Chat vs. Traditional UI 03:13 No UI, Voice UI, and the Smart Home Vision 04:00 What Is Web MCP and How It Works 05:10 Clicks and Clankers: When to Click vs. Prompt 06:57 The Future of Shopping and the Open Web Problem 08:46 Delegating the Boring Stuff: Groceries and Expense Categorization 11:55 MCP Apps and the Happy Path Problem 12:55 Brought to you by Sentry.io 13:23 Generative UI: Can the LLM Make a Better UI Than You? 14:54 Smart Home Dashboards and the Jarvis Dream 17:24 Is the Web Dead? Final Thoughts Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  I'm in like a weird spot because I so heavily agree and disagree at the same same point.

• 0:07Scott Tolinski?

  Can't imagine that everything being a chat interface is the right call.

• 0:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah, like nobody wants a chat bar added to every website ever. I feel like the people that are saying like there's going to be no more browser. They're just like life maxing to the fullest.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Who is ordering Starbucks with chat GPT? And will an agent just make the perfect UI for you? That's what we're talking about today. We're live at JS Nation, shout out JS Nation in Amsterdam. Some beautiful scenery here, here with Wes, here with Scott. And Wes is going to be giving the talk agentic interfaces, tools, skills, generative UI and web MCP. So we thought we'd pick his brain, see what he's going to be talking about today.

• 0:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I'm I'm stoked about it. This this is really fun. We have like this nice setup. I'm I'm happy to talk here and I'm doing my talk on, like you said, agentic interfaces and like generative interfaces. Because there's there's a lot of talk going on right now saying that like either like the web is dead or the web is going to be headless or chat is the final interface. Or these little components that are inlined inside of your your chat interface are like going to replace websites. And I'm in like a weird spot because I I so heavily agree and disagree at the same same point.

• 1:37Wes Bos?

  And that's kind of be what what my talk is going to be about as well as as web MCP, which is we had a whole episode on web MCP. And I don't know if this is necessarily about the tech. Anytime you use the word MCP, everybody's like, skills are better. I'll give me a CLI and that's all I need. And then everyone's like, no, MCP is better. And like, I don't give a shit about the like actual specification. Because whatever ends up being the spec, I don't think we're there yet.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04Wes Bos?

  I'll just prompt it to convert it to that end spec. I don't necessarily care about the specs here. I more care about. Like, what does user interface look like? From a standpoint of both agents using it as well as us and the people using it?

• 2:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm really interested to see your talk because I've done so very little research on any of this stuff. But I did just see yesterday, Hyundai announced that they were having a new future style interface that they're developing. That included things like telling your car to turn my heated seats on and stuff. And it was all very LLM-based UI inside of a car. And I like my Hyundai a lot.

• 2:49Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 2:50Scott Tolinski?

  I love my, my UI for all that thing. And I'm not necessarily one of these people that's like, you've got to have tactile buttons for everything. I know that's a really strong opinion, but I can't imagine that everything being a chat interface is the right call.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, especially in a car where like you have to pay attention to the road.

• 3:09Scott Tolinski?

  Turn my turn signal on, car.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, like in a thread of chats, yeah.

• 3:13Wes Bos?

  So that's what my talk is about is like, sometimes you want no UI at all. Like some, like I think about my smart home. I, in a lot of cases, I shouldn't even have to tell it when to turn on the lights. It should just be learning from context.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:30Wes Bos?

  Sometimes you want like a, like a voice UI as well. Um, and then, and then when you get to the actual UI, like you want to like view a shopping list of what you have. Sometimes you want to be able to just like type into a chat and like, like sort of batch process that. But then sometimes you want to be able to, to click the buttons and, and that's what MCP UI is. And like right now, they're just like inlining these like little components inside of your chat. And it's kind of slow, but like not knocking it for that. But I, I kind of feel like, like the web MCP, which is what this is, is it allows you to expose the tooling.

• 4:10Wes Bos?

  Of your website as MCP tools. So like you visit a website like I have my example is like I have a grocery app. And you can like add an item, mark as as whatever reorder at a store, you know, all the all those typical things. So you expose all of those tools via web MCP.

• 4:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Wes Bos?

  And then like an agent, like I have Claude hooked up to the web MCP browser. Then I'm able to just use the website normally. And then I am also able to just like prompt it from my Claude or chat G P T or whatever it is that I want. And it and and then it can also be hooked up to other things as well because like. You you might be looking at being like, that's just like a chat bar you added to your website and like, nobody wants a chat bar added to every website ever. That's not a good experience. I want to use my agents. And hook it up to to that website. I want to hook it up to my Google Calendar and my groceries and my like fridge camera or all that whatever it is.

• 5:11Wes Bos?

  So I think that that's that's the moves because I'm calling it clicks and clankers. Because like sometimes I want to click. And sometimes I just want to like prompt. And then sometimes I want it to just like. Figure out what the UI should should be for me, right?

• 5:26Scott Tolinski?

  And sometimes just having a visual. Even if you are prompting can change things. I mean, we saw this in our our calendar challenge. Where even though my calendar did win the calendar challenge, there was no UI for it in terms of a calendar.

• 5:43Wes Bos?

  There was no UI and then like.

• 5:44Scott Tolinski?

  And a lot of people said. They needed that.

• 5:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, I mean. I think in an ideal world, this it's cool that, okay, let's say everything does happen in chat, but I I think that's too idealistic thinking. I think. There's a time and a place for the MCP apps and a time and a place for a full full on UI. I think think like power users think. Um, just like maybe you don't want to have individual MCP MCP apps. But with web MCP, you expose all of the the actions that you can perform and then an agent does it on your behalf.

• 6:16Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Um, so.

• 6:18Scott Tolinski?

  Sometimes people just don't want to read that much text too.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:20Scott Tolinski?

  You know, I as someone with dyslexia, I don't want to read.

• 6:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 6:23Scott Tolinski?

  A bunch of texts back and forth.

• 6:25Wes Bos?

  But like it's not just text though, like the web, the MCP apps is like they'll inline the components. Into it. So you can click in things, but. Like I have a hard time believing that like just these little contextual components in your chat. Many cases, that's great. You know, like I'm customer support. I need some stats on a specific thing. I want like a couple of buttons to like refund somebody. Uh, but then like other cases, like I'm trying to think like I'm going through my life and using all the websites. You know, like social media, I, I'm not going to sit there and type, show me X, Y, and Z.

• 7:00Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 7:01Wes Bos?

  Like it's all algorithm based and I just want to like sit there and consume or like if I'm shopping, like a lot of people are saying like the future of shopping, say, I need shoes and then boom, the shoes are shipped to your door. And like, that just reminds me of like the Soylent. Were you around for when Soylent happened?

• 7:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:18Wes Bos?

  All these tech bros were like, you just drink this goo and you don't have to think about eating anymore. I'm like, no, I enjoy looking at like what's on the website. I like going to filtering for what's on sale. And I like that. Oh, if you like this thing, then there's recommended items and like, I don't know that you can like replicate that interface. It's, it will eventually break outside the chat into like full screen sidebar and whatever. Like it's not going to be this little block inside chat forever.

• 7:47Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. What if, what if this is all the precursor to something like in the matrix, you say?

• 7:52Wes Bos?

  I never seen a matrix.

• 7:53Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. Well, I, I, I realized that. So let me describe it here. There's a, you're, you're, you have full vision taken over.

• 7:58Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:58Scott Tolinski?

  You're in a big white room and you say, give me all the blue shirts and all the blue shirts fly in and you can physically paw through the blue shirts.

• 8:07Wes Bos?

  I don't know that I want a blue shirt.

• 8:08Scott Tolinski?

  Well, then you say, I don't know if I want a blue shirt. Surprise me. More shoots come in. You can paw through them.

• 8:14Wes Bos?

  But I don't want to have to say that. I want it to just surface to me.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  I think what's gonna happen is you're gonna say, I want all the blue shirts and then it's gonna be like brought to you by Old Navy and it's like then they're gonna.

• 8:23Wes Bos?

  Well, that's another thing. It's like, are we, oh yeah. Now the, the open web is now guarded by these like four companies that you have to pay for.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  And if you don't have an app, then like your, your shopping might not surface in the chat interface.

• 8:35Wes Bos?

  Or you get the free version, but they're gonna screw with your results.

• 8:38Scott Tolinski?

  Those companies are salivating over doing exactly that.

• 8:42Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Scott Tolinski?

  And what are you gonna do to stop it? I don't think you're gonna like.

• 8:45Wes Bos?

  Here, here's another, another example that's not AI is ordering online groceries. Do you guys order groceries online?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  We started doing like order for pickup instead of order for delivery, but yes.

• 8:56Scott Tolinski?

  You did too. Yes.

• 8:57Wes Bos?

  So a lot of people love it because they just, they know what they want. I want the chicken. And I don't care what the price is and just add it to my cart. And I, we do the online shopping quite a bit as well. When we're busy and we just need X, Y, and Z. But I primarily love just going to the grocery store.

• 9:17Scott Tolinski?

  Oh no, thank you.

• 9:18Wes Bos?

  Cruising around, looking at the samples, looking at stuff, getting ideas, what's on sale. That whole experience is so much more enjoyable versus the like half an hour I'm sitting clicking through all the frigging carrots and shit. And you see the tiny little photo that's not actually. I don't like the experience of ordering groceries online.

• 9:40Scott Tolinski?

  Let me tell you, for me, farmer's market all day. I'll go, I got time for the farmer's market. You there, we got a bag, you can, you can pay five dollars and get a big old bag of vegetables at the Denver one. That's great. I'll do that all day.

• 9:52Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Scott Tolinski?

  But if, if you're gonna send me to walk through the aisles of a grocery store.

• 9:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Scott Tolinski?

  I, I would, there's infinite things I would rather do. Uh, just because of the chaos of it all.

• 10:03Wes Bos?

  I think that that's where it comes down to is, is the task you are trying to do to replace? Is it annoying? Is it something you would like hire out to an assistant to do?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:13Wes Bos?

  Because it is just busy work and it's frustrating. Like my, uh, the example I give is categorizing my expenses in Freshbooks.

• 10:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 10:21Wes Bos?

  Freshbooks has not integrated any AI stuff at all. And I'm just begging them like, how do you not know what category this is? It like I, I had to build my own thing that pulled my expenses out. Pulled the categories, categorize them and push them back into Freshbooks. And, or like if it was a Canadian vendor, then it had to check a box for adding HST, Canadian tax, right? That's such busy work that I hate doing.

• 10:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 10:50Wes Bos?

  I I wanna just prompt that away cuz it's not something I want to enjoy.

• 10:55Scott Tolinski?

  To make room for the things in life that you enjoy.

• 10:56Wes Bos?

  Exactly.

• 10:57Scott Tolinski?

  And not be like AI, experience this art piece for me and tell me what people feel with it, you know?

• 11:02Wes Bos?

  I feel like the people that are saying like there's gonna be no more browser. They're just like life maxing to the fullest.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  I think there's a time and a place, right?

• 11:10Wes Bos?

  Exactly. I think this will just be something that, yes, I like to use it via the chat app. Like my calendar is another one. I don't make me click and find everything. I just wanna type. What I did here, I took the email from JS Nation Flights, copy pasted it into Gemini and said, just add these to my calendar.

• 11:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Wes Bos?

  You know, I don't wanna fuss with it anymore. That's exactly what I want for that type of thing.

• 11:35Scott Tolinski?

  What I want is to be able to chat and just say, "Hey, where is the pre-party at?" And that way it can just tell me instead of the rest of the syntax team making fun of me for asking it in the group chat.

• 11:48Wes Bos?

  Dump all the info that you know.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:50Wes Bos?

  And you can just chat that info or like hook it up to the the website or whatever.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  And that's that's the ideal world. So there was a talk today on MCP apps.

• 12:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  And the the scenario they gave was someone that's planning a wedding. And so when you're planning a wedding, you need to know like what date it is. So you you would wanna see an embedded calendar. You need to order flowers. So you're using Amazon and you get to see an embedded product card.

• 12:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  You need to book a venue.

• 12:15Wes Bos?

  The thing is that they always show you, oh, here's three flowers.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and that's.

• 12:19Wes Bos?

  Life is more complicated than that.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I think like that's the happy path, but we're talking about the non-happy path, which is probably the majority of what we do on the web.

• 12:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  So.

• 12:29Scott Tolinski?

  I mean, I think the strength is connecting data that is difficult to connect otherwise, you know?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  But I think just I think you're on the right track here where it's like everything's being hyped to saying it's gonna replace everything. There's gonna be a fine line.

• 12:43Wes Bos?

  Here's here's the other point of it is some of these companies will not want their whole brand and and everything exposed as simply just an API.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:54Wes Bos?

  To a chat app. Something like Sentry, yeah, they they love that. You can surface all the data. They can help you fix it. Great. But like I think about booking my airline ticket. All of the like dark pattern upsells that they have. Is the airline going to simply just want to become like a utility where you can just book a flight?

• 13:13Scott Tolinski?

  They'll just make a deal with the providers to be able to insert those dark patterns into the responses.

• 13:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah, they certainly will.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:22Wes Bos?

  So I don't know, it's a weird world. I've never been like so excited about something and like also like, I think it's just gonna be just like when the iPhone came out, just like when voice came out. These are just more surface areas for our applications. And this like agentic UI, generative UI, and the one thing we didn't even talk about is just like, generated UI is like, do you want to choose what the UI is? Or do you want the LLM to just make a whole bunch of HTML for you? And the answer is probably somewhere in between. You want to give it a couple of components that you've made, but then it can figure out how to piece them together. There's a whole bunch of like specs, open UI is one of them right now.

• 14:04Wes Bos?

  Probably somewhere in between there, but like the question is like, can the user or the LLM make a better UI than the company that knows their product really well? So far the answer is, well, maybe. Like some of the vibe coded stuff is like, yeah, that's a better UI for what I want it for.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:24Wes Bos?

  But then some of these like vibe quoted ones are just, the LLM just cannot make like a very good UX.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  It's more personalized apps, I think. So each user might have a specific use case. Like I want to do one specific thing and if the AI can generate the UI, great. But the user has to know what they want. Yeah, but I think to your point, I don't think it'll ever replace like really good UX. Or like, because the company knows their product best, they know their data best. So they're gonna be able to do that, but.

• 14:53Wes Bos?

  So another example I have in my talk is Smart Home where.

• 15:00Wes Bos?

  Like you just said, the user has to tell them what they want. And as a user, I don't know what I want my smart home dashboard to be. I want, I want you to tell me because you have all the information. You know, what cameras have triggered alerts, you know, the humidity in my house, you know, when I turn lights on and off. And if, if I want either automations or like a dashboard for my smart home, I want the, we have so much context about my house in my home assistant.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:30Wes Bos?

  I want the, the AI to just programmatically make a dashboard for me, given what it knows about what has happened recently and, and whatnot, you know, like, oh, hey, we figured, oh, you always turn on your lights at nine AM? We'll do it for you, or maybe we'll pop a button up here so you can just tap it while you're walking by. And I think that's going to be the killer, killer use cases, just like,

• 15:54Wes Bos?

  like adding on UI or, or generating what, what you see in a, like a smart, like we've had this with algorithms, but like even a step further.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Right. I think if it gets it right, that's amazing.

• 16:05Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Can it get it right? We'll see.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's the future from Iron Man. That's, um, uh, Jarvis. Are you, well, he has this AI that he can literally talk to normally and like it knows his vitals, it knows everything and, to, to what you're saying is it has all the data and is making the right choices.

• 16:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  If, that's, that's the big if is will it be able to make those choices and can we reliably depend on it?

• 16:30Wes Bos?

  And, or can it learn, you know, like, I don't mind using it for like a year.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:34Wes Bos?

  But can it learn my patterns? Like even like, I get in my Tesla and it like, is like, do you want to go to this like random place you went to a year ago?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:43Wes Bos?

  No, I went there once. Why would you think that I'm going there right now? Like obviously the algorithm for figuring that out is, is, is off.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  I'm actually surprised sometimes Google, so I use Google Maps in Android Auto.

• 16:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Sometimes it's like a Wednesday and it's like, oh, you go to the gym on Wednesdays at this time. So it pops up.

• 16:58Wes Bos?

  Yeah, the Google one's very good.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  So.

• 17:01Wes Bos?

  But the, yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  That has surprised me before. It's like the one useful thing. I was like, oh yeah, yes, I do want to go there.

• 17:04Wes Bos?

  I, I, I do go here every Thursday at four o'clock, you know?

• 17:09Scott Tolinski?

  That feels a little grim to me for some reason.

• 17:11Wes Bos?

  Really?

• 17:11Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know what it is about it.

• 17:12Wes Bos?

  It's like your routine, your repetitive.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Humans are...

• 17:15Scott Tolinski?

  You are very predictable and yes, I know what you will be doing.

• 17:18Wes Bos?

  Life is all about patterns.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:20Scott Tolinski?

  Would you like me to have a snack ready for you while you're there? You know?

• 17:24Wes Bos?

  Other than that, I think that's it. Anything else to add? Uh, let us know down below what you think. Is the web dead? Is it all gonna be through chat apps and these little boxes inside? Or is it just another interface that's added? We're curious to see what you think.

• 17:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:38Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, I'm gonna give you a really hard question on stage. I can't wait to hear your tongue. Hope you're ready.

• 17:42Wes Bos?

  Love hard questions.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Shout out JS Nation, thanks for letting us do this. We love it. Cool. Peace.