The Agentic Shift: Why Your Next App Might Not Have Buttons (2025 Outlook)

The Agentic Shift: Why Your Next App Might Not Have Buttons

TL;DR

Agent-based apps ≠ chatbots. They’re a whole shift in how we build and use software. This is a wandering rant from someone who's been building apps for 10+ years, now watching it all slowly melt into something... different. Better? Maybe. Definitely more interesting.

📚 Once Upon a Button

There was a time—maybe a few months ago, maybe a decade—when we built apps like cities: neatly paved, carefully zoned, clean UX maps with buttons and tabs and settings hidden three levels deep. You knew what to expect. You tapped a thing, it did the thing. Nothing more, nothing less.

But the magic faded. We started noticing the repetition. Filters, modals, dropdowns—UI déjà vu. And in that sameness, a question started brewing:

Why can’t I just tell my app what I want?

I mean, why not? Why does my budgeting app make me dig through three tabs to see what I spent on food last month? Why can’t I just say it? Ask it? Let it work? We’re tired of being tour guides for our own digital lives, navigating predefined paths when a direct instruction would suffice.

🌀 Then the Language Changed

First it was autocomplete. Then Copilot. Then the models.

Not just text parrots—actual listeners. Systems that can understand what I want. Learn my patterns. Remember stuff. Talk back in a smart way. The emergence of sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally altered our relationship with software. Suddenly, apps are no longer static tools that await your precise command. Suddenly, they could become co-pilots, collaborators, and active participants in your workflow.

👀 The New Cast

Now the pieces are different, evolving beyond the traditional client-server architecture. The new fundamental components for building modern, intelligent applications are:

🧠 Agent: The core intelligence. This component understands what you mean (your intent), processes it, and then plans a series of actions to achieve your goal. It's the "brain" that orchestrates the entire operation.
🛠 Executor: The doer. This is the part that actually performs the planned actions—it runs code, interacts with APIs, clicks elements in a web browser, rewrites files, or initiates other background processes. It's the "hands" of the agent.
💾 Memory: The long and short of it. This component allows the agent to recall past interactions, learn from previous attempts, and retain contextual information relevant to the current task or user session. It can be short-term (for ongoing conversations) or long-term (persisting knowledge across sessions).
🖼 UI Shell: The conversation starter. No longer just buttons and menus, this is the interface where you interact with the agent. It could be a simple chat interface, a command-line interface (CLI), a voice interface, or something completely novel and ambient, integrated into your environment.

It’s like we moved from designing static layouts to designing dynamic conversations.

🧑 UX ≠ Screens

This is the big one, fundamentally shifting how we think about user experience design.

UX used to mean making things tappable. Grouping them logically. Naming them right. Putting them in the right place on a screen. It was about visual hierarchy and discoverability within a fixed spatial layout.

Now, UX can be:

Letting someone just say what they want, in natural language, without adhering to strict commands.
Understanding vague intent and intelligently clarifying it through interactive dialogue.
Letting go of precise, pixel-perfect control from the developer's side, but ensuring the user still feels in charge and understands what the agent is doing.

A good agent-based UX isn’t about showing more information or providing more options. It’s about doing more with less interaction, or even no UI at all. Sometimes, it’s just presence—an ambient intelligence that quietly ensures things are happening as they should.

The user doesn’t care what the layout is—they care that the system understood their intent and did the right thing effectively and efficiently.

🧓 The Legacy World ≠ Ready

Here’s the truth: most existing applications are old. Messy. Full of technical debt and special cases accumulated over years of development.

But they work. They have established user bases. History. Revenue streams that keep companies afloat.

Rewriting them from scratch to embrace an agentic paradigm is a daunting, often terrifying, prospect for businesses. But plugging in an agent layer on top of existing systems? That might be the strategically sound move.

Let the agent learn the mess. Let it navigate the legacy APIs and idiosyncratic databases. Let it help people without breaking stuff, becoming a conversational facade over complex, older systems.

📦 What’s in the Wild?

While the paradigm is nascent, we're seeing compelling glimpses of this agentic future:

Cursor: This editor feels like talking to your code. Its ability to generate, fix, and refactor code through natural language prompts showcases powerful integration of an agent into a development workflow. It almost feels magical when it works.
Devin: While still very much in its early, "figuring itself out" phase, Devin aims to be an autonomous AI software engineer, planning and executing entire coding projects. It points to a future where agents can handle multi-step development tasks.
Copilot Chat: Integrated into development environments, Copilot Chat moves beyond mere autocompletion to act as a genuine assistant, providing explanations, generating code based on conversational prompts, and offering context-aware debugging tips.
Notion AI: This goes beyond a simple text box. It acts like an assistant for your documents and workflows, capable of summarizing, brainstorming, organizing, and drafting content based on your instructions within your Notion workspace.

But most of these, exciting as they are, are still closed, proprietary systems. Locked in.

🧩 What We Need

To truly democratize and accelerate this agentic wave, we need open, flexible tooling and evolving mental models:

Memory systems: Robust, scalable, and customizable frameworks for both short-term context retention and long-term knowledge management for agents.
API Runners/Tool Integrations: Standardized, secure ways for agents to interact with external tools, APIs, and legacy systems.
Logs and Debuggers for Agent Actions: It's not enough to know the AI made a mistake; we need to understand its "thought process" and decision-making steps to debug effectively.
Context Control and Management: Fine-grained control over what context is provided to the agent and when, to ensure accuracy and reduce computational load.

And beyond the tools, we need new frameworks for thought:

How do you write a good agent prompt that yields consistent and reliable results?
When should the UI lead the user, and when should the agent take the initiative?
How do you establish clear boundaries and safeguards for agent autonomy?
How do you quantitatively know if the agent helped or hindered the user's task?

Still early days, very much an experimental frontier. But people are figuring it out, one intelligent conversation at a time.

🌊 The Wave’s Coming

People like talking to things. They enjoy natural, intuitive interactions. But more than that, they love when things get it – when software understands their intent and does it effectively, without unnecessary clicks or frustrating navigation.

This shift won’t replace every traditional UI. Complex data visualization, creative design tools, and games will still require dedicated visual interfaces. But it’ll fundamentally alter, and often replace, the UIs that frustrate us the most—the ones filled with repetitive forms, convoluted settings, and obscure menu paths.

So next time you're building something, take a step back from the wireframes and components. Try this thought experiment:

What if this whole thing was just... an agent? What if users just told it what they wanted?

Welcome to the new way. The way your app listens, learns, and truly helps.

PS: Not selling anything. Just thinking out loud. If you're building in this space too—hey, let's chat.