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If You Need a Mouse, Build a UI

I am starting to question whether most software needs a UI at all. The rule of thumb I keep coming back to is simple - if I need a mouse and cannot avoid it, build a UI. If not, it is probably not worth building one.
Petko D. Petkovon a break from CISO duties, building cbk.ai

For years I assumed every piece of software needed a UI. I am starting to think most of them don't, especially the boring ones. The rule of thumb I keep coming back to is simple. If I need a mouse and I cannot avoid it, build a UI. If I don't, it is probably not worth building one at all.

Three recent experiences pushed me here.

We use Zendesk for support. I used to log into the portal all the time. Now we have a dedicated agent that manages the support process for us. It does not sit there answering customer questions. It manages the process, and we feed it what needs to be said to the customer through our interaction with it. It feels like working with someone we hired for the job. I stopped visiting the dashboard so completely that I locked myself out. We had made some system changes, and the problem only surfaced when I tried to log in to fix a payment issue. The Zendesk UI stopped working for us.

We never had a CRM that stuck. Every option we tried wanted a seat-based subscription and none of them earned it. So we rolled out crmkit.ai, an agent-first headless CRM that does everything a CRM does and shows you no screen. We run an agent called Market Bot on top of it that tracks the AI ecosystem, partners, clients and investors, fully and semi-autonomously. I was at a London AI Hub event recently, and while the founders presented I messaged the bot their company names. It extracted the profiles, found the investors, and populated the whole thing into the CRM before the session ended. Magic.

The best moment came earlier. I was walking Arlo (our dog) so I called our CBK telephony agent, and together we went through every open support ticket in ten minutes. I finished the walk. The work happened through the channel that fit it best, rather than the one a screen forced on me.

I do not reach for a UI much anymore. The software I want now is agentic-first, autonomous, smart, and headless. What counts is the outcome, not the fancy redressing around it.

This is good news for developers too. A lot of backend engineers will be glad to drop the drudgery of wiring up interfaces and get back to building the system underneath.

So stop building UIs by default. Build systems that AI agents can use.

AIagentsagenticheadlessproduct