I love AI in the right context, but the current trend of turning every otherwise solid product into an AI tool is diluting their core value at best, and damaging them at worst.
Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window, just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.
Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to become a mix of Cursor and Slack.
And now Firefox.
Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something genuinely useful into something close to unusable.
Take Replit, for example. Today I only had my iPad with me and wanted to experiment with some programming languages I have always wanted to learn. I opened Replit and was confused to find the file browser completely hidden. All I saw was a chat window, just another agentic coding interface similar to many others.
Or Zed, a wonderful editor and IDE that now seems determined to become a mix of Cursor and Slack.
And now Firefox.
Please, product managers: build APIs and let me connect my preferred AI agent to your tool, but do not turn the entire product into an AI experience. It risks transforming something genuinely useful into something close to unusable.