From playwright to stage manager

"This summer, Google released a fascinating research prototype - a demo of a "neural" operating system that generates itself on the fly. 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. Later, we'll see how Google pivoted from this chaos to A2UI, a structured protocol that validates what stage managers know: you can't rebuild the set from scratch every night."

Google released a research prototype called Neural OS that generates its interface on the fly, presenting a familiar desktop that remakes itself with every interaction. The model rebuilds UI elements in milliseconds and continuously reinvents content based on predicted user intent. Folders show different files each time, causing documents and context to vanish and making work impossible. The demonstration shows that traditional deterministic design and fixed blueprints fail for probabilistic AI interfaces. Google shifted toward A2UI, a structured protocol to enforce stability and validation. Designers must accept improvisation while building patterns that preserve continuity and usability.

Read at Medium