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​Back to Text: How AI Might Reverse Web Design​

AI saved me from cookie banners, travel insurance popups, car rental quotes, & the special frustration of comparing flight options across tabs.

I downloaded an open-source agent, tweaked it & watched it find the cheapest flights for my trip from San Francisco to Newark.

One-Way Trip (12 Jan 2025)

Return Trip (18 Jan 2025)

In the video, the robot “sees” the page, determines the next step, errs by clicking on an SEO optimized link, backtracks, & then ultimately extracts the answer from the chaff.

If I received a quick chat with this & a button that asked me which to book, I’m certain I’d never return to the travel agency’s website. And I’d ask it to do the same for me elsewhere.

• Email: Please suggest replies.
• News: Show me the top 10 news stories about the topics I care about.
• Social Media: Suggest replies & summarize the trending & spicy.
• Grocery Shopping: Same as last week.
• Sports & Stock Updates: Niners & the Nasdaq.
• Book Recommendations: Any new spy novels and notable macroeconomics books?

Here’s the twist. During the last 20 years, we’ve focused on improving websites for humans with complex design, single page apps, & complex Javascript. We’ve achieved the newspaper from Harry Potter.

But AI thrives on simplicity : pure text. Microsoft recently released a library to convert all kinds of documents to AI-friendly text : PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, images & audio.

The better the AI performs, the fewer websites I’ll visit.

What if the future of the web is exactly how it started : pure text websites? But text for robots, not text for humans.

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