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Climbing the Ladder of Abstraction: Amelia Wattenberger
Takeaway
The future of AI interfaces isn't chatbots — it's structured UIs that automate small steps and let users zoom up and down a ladder of abstraction.
Summary
- Amelia Wattenberger reframes augmentation as stacked automations — spreadsheets succeeded by hiding cell-level calculations behind a structured interface, not by being a chatbot.
- Demos zooming out on a book of Peter Pan: per-paragraph summaries, then per-10-paragraphs, then per-chapter — using LLMs as a 'ladder of abstraction' analogous to Google Maps zoom levels.
- Story-arc visualizations let writers edit at the semantic/mood level and zoom back to raw text, hinting at new writing tools.
- At Adept, applies the same idea to knowledge-work UI: zoom out on Airbnb listings, documents, or any information surface.
product-uxinterface-designaugmentation
Original description
How might we use AI to build products focused not just on working faster, but on transforming how we work? Let's talk about ways we can design using AI to help us “zoom out” and work better. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer Summit 2023. See the full schedule of talks at https://ai.engineer/summit/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2024! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/worlds-fair About Amelia Wattenberger Amelia is a designer and builder of novel, interactive interfaces. She spent the last few years exploring the future of developer tools on the GitHub Next team and is now designing an AI teammate at Adept.ai.