The Wrapper is the Product
AI is powerful, but without good design, it’s stuck in the "command-line" era, accessible only to specialists. To achieve mass adoption, we need to focus on usability, accessibility, and trustworthiness.
- 8 minute read
- Published 2 months ago
- Updated 2 months ago
Why AI Adoption Is Stuck
“AI tools go further than ChatGPT or Gemini.” Yeah, no kidding. But for most people, that sentence might as well be lorem ipsum. The deeper issue is that while the tools have evolved, the way we present them hasn’t. They’re wrapped in complexity, built for insiders, and feel like alien artifacts to anyone outside the dev/design/ops trifecta.
You’ve got people using AI every day without realizing it: auto-tagging in photos, autocomplete in Gmail. But as soon as you hand them a “real” AI tool, they bounce. Not because they’re dumb, but because the interface demands they already speak the language. It’s like handing someone a shell script and wondering why they don’t use Linux.
Right now, most AI products are stuck in what amounts to the command-line era of AI. Powerful, yes. But the mental load required to start using them is non-trivial. You need domain knowledge to get value. Which is fine if your users are engineers or researchers. But if your goal is mass adoption?
Recent author comments
Back in 2017 when I wrote "On Telling Stories", I had Design all over my mind at the time. I was very serious about the impact good design has on modern life. I felt like many poor human experiences came from fails in Design practices. Design englobed every single decision on the production of almost anything in modern day-to-day-life. Things like traffic, crowded movie theaters, renewing your passport, retail work, etc where like that because of poor design, which itself has infinite causes like incompetence, disinterest, impatience, or greed. This huge space in my mind occupied by Design, there's a certain bias on the original idea of this article, and on retrospective, it makes it look as if storytelling was merely a device or dimension of the Design practice. But really, for me, the art of telling stories is something even more profound than that, so I had to make an update.
Commented a week ago, on On Telling Stories
I feel like the following thought process is a strange one. There has been tons of "new AI _buzzword_ startups that create the new _buzzword_ tool that _buzzwords_ this and that." and even tons more of "it's just a _something_ wrapper" responses. The problem is that most of these tools speak so little the language of the common user that they never truly enter the masses, even the ones within it's own niche. Who cares if it is a measly "wrapper"? As long as common people get to be able to understand it, worse than this is a non-wrapper product that only a few select group of people get it.
Commented 2 months ago, on The Wrapper is the Product
this version fuses two older posts into one clean arc. nothing cut, just stitched together in order. first bit sketches the why of the app: ditching doc-brain for idea-first. nods to bullet journal + zettelkasten. explains core features + motives. second bit dives into the how: MVP limits (no styling, images, collab), then tees up next steps—mobile, tags, threads, timelines. keeps the flow from theory to roadmap, so readers get the full drift start to now.
Commented 2 months ago, on On Notes