From playwright to stage manager

"It looks comfortably familiar: an old-school desktop with windows, icons, menus, a mouse pointer. Google Gemini Flash-Lite "Neural OS" But start clicking, and dream logic takes over. Every click triggers the AI model to rebuild the interface in milliseconds. The OS continuously reinvents itself based on what it thinks you want next. Open a folder. You might find meeting notes, a spreadsheet, and a presentation. Close it and reopen it five seconds later. Some items remain, others have vanished, and entirely new items appear."

"It's technically brilliant. It's completely unusable. Documents vanish between clicks. Context evaporates. Getting work done is impossible. When I tried it out, I had to get up and walk away from the keyboard. To be clear: Google presented this as a demonstration of capabilities. They didn't ship it as a polished product. But it reveals something profound about designing AI products: traditional design approaches break down when the interface generates itself."

Google released a research prototype called Neural OS that rebuilds the desktop interface on every click. The interface looks familiar but remakes itself based on model predictions, causing documents to appear and disappear and destroying context. The demo is technically impressive yet unusable for productive work. Traditional deterministic design practices fail when interfaces continually reinvent themselves. Designers face a new anxiety about control and predictability. Google later pivoted to A2UI, a structured protocol that constrains generative interfaces and preserves necessary continuity and repeatability. A2UI validates stage-manager wisdom that you can't rebuild the set from scratch every night by enforcing structure and validation.

Read at Medium