The AI “Revolution” Is Still Stuck in a Chatbox

I’ll be honest: I’m tired of hearing about the “AI revolution.”

It’s 2025. Trillions have been spent on models. And what’s the big breakthrough in interfaces? \n Still the same old chatbox.

No branches. \n No canvases. \n No merging mindmaps. \n Just a text field with a scrollbar.

I’ve personally tried a bunch of the “next-gen” ideas: visual workspaces, graph schemes, even those fancy “AI-IDEs” with integrations.

And every time it ends the same way: you’re back in chat.

Why? Because business doesn’t care how pretty the UI looks. It cares about one thing: does it output JSON or text I can plug into my pipeline?

Those Dribbble-friendly demos of “branching canvases” are cool until you try them in practice.

• Branches collapse under complexity.
• Canvases become chaos the moment you leave the demo stage.
• Mindmaps? Fun, but impossible to keep reproducible.

Chat keeps winning because it kills friction. \n Open. Type. Answer. Done.

But here’s the irony that bugs me the most:

AI today is strong enough to write its own code, compose music, analyze markets… and yet we force it into chat bubbles that feel like the 80s.

Want flexibility? You still have to prompt. \n Want to fork? Copy everything into a new chat. \n Want alternatives? Do it by hand.

It feels like Excel in the 90s, just wrapped in an LLM.

So here’s where I’m stuck:

AI is definitely getting faster, cheaper, more accurate. \n But it’s not getting deeper.

As long as everything lives inside a chatbox, there’s no branching thought, no merging ideas, no real multidimensionality.

And I can’t shake this question: \n Are we really going to sit inside chat windows for the next five years?

Or is it finally time to build something where thoughts can branch, merge, and collide?

Because right now, what we’ve got isn’t a “thinking environment.” \n It’s just a super-browser for text.

I don’t have the solution yet. \n Maybe chat is the final form — the simplest way to interact with intelligence.

But part of me hopes someone out there is already working on the next environment for thought.

What do you think? \n Are we stuck with chat, or is the next interface revolution just waiting to break out?