Andy Singleton

Headless apps for personal AI users. Mountain bike crash tester. All of these words are written by a human.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

Read this article to learn about the long and colorful history of AI doom. Look for doomer jargon in bold font. Find out where we are in the doom loop. Understand ways that AI can hurt you now. https://t.co/r4tLViX54z

[Liad Yosef @liadyosef]

Thoughts about the future of UI that excite me:

1. Complex web interfaces are dead in the long term. They are solving human perception limitations that will no longer be relevant. No one will want to learn how to use complex UIs in the future. If this is your app's differentiator, move fast.

2. Personal agents will win over dedicated app agents. People are getting used to agentic experiences, so building a dedicated agent for your app may *seem* like a good idea, but this is just a "faster horses" solution. No one will browse to 4 different websites to use 4 different agents. They'll use their own single agent and won't care how your websites even look.

3. The new frontend will be UI snippets that will be returned from MCP servers to be rendered in your personal agent. The agent will control the experience, and will display only the specific visualization or interactivity piece that you need from every app. There are fascinating questions there around how the apps will keep their brand in this new world, but without clashing with the agent's own experience. I'm most excited to work on that part.

4. If you're reading this and thinking "there is no way I'm giving up on dashboards" - you're still thinking like a project manager and not like the US president. The president doesn't look at dashboards, he has helpers who look at them and extract only what he needs to know. All visualization is a way of answering questions and make sure you're not missing anything. Eventually it's either "this is going well" or "this requires attention". Once we'll establish trust with the agents capabilities, we'll rely on them like on personal assitants, they'll extract this data, act on it and will defer to us *only* when a human decision or attention is specifically needed.

This will happen faster than we think. Try to use Jira's Claude integration for few days, and its "regular" web UI will start to seem unnecessary bloated.
In few years the idea of navigating to dozens of websites to manually use dozens of different interfaces will seem very primitive.

Personally I'm very bullish on this direction, and have been for the past months. I come from a long career in web development, so naturally there are mixed emotions for me seeing a decade of web UI development concepts evolving into something new. But I'm very excited about it, and very lucky to be at the forefront of it.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

My demo of OAuth for AI Clients, was featured in the @AITinkerers Community Spotlights newsletter.

Lot's of great stuff here for AI implementers: https://t.co/jBZO07BNy7

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

@RobertRamspcxi This can't be real. Except for Hawaii. Roosters are a real problem in Hawaii

[Erik Brynjolfsson @erikbryn]

Evidence is growing that we��re turning the corner on productivity.

US productivity grew at a 3.6% annual rate this past quarter.

That’s more than double the 1.5% average from 2007-2019.

The new numbers put me further ahead for my bet with Bob Gordon about productivity growth in the 2020s. 💪

Here’s how far the US is now ahead of the CBO estimate at the start of the decade (before they knew about the pandemic or LLMs) courtesy of @jasonfurman’s
Econvitals.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

This is clearly wrong on current evidence. Big companies are getting bigger. An alternative view is that big companies benefit from an increased ability to coordinate resources. A CEO doesn't know when each of 100K people is going for lunch, but an AI does know, and can coordinate around it. The bigger the network under it's control, the bigger the gains from coordination.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

@adamamcbride The right Bostrom paperclip reference at the right time. Time to go back and read the rest of the prophesy.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

@leonabboud Slop overload is bad for society. I am trying to find something positive in this recommendation. The positive part is signaling that if you put work into generating slop, it shows that you will work hard for your customers.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

@BalazsTibor555 Great points. You can sell to people through ChatGPT. and AI can educate users before you show up so they are ready to go.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

An adventure in plumbing shows how AI can be a force for cost savings and skill improvement. I needed some repairs in my house which I now know how to describe as "replace a corroded p-trap" and "replace a broken frost-free hose valve". I asked asked a plumber to look at these jobs. He glanced around at my fancy neighborhood, went to his truck, talked to his boss, and came back with a quote: $975 for the trap, and $675 for the hose valve. He looked embarrassed, and now I know why. He had the parts in his truck, and with $60 worth of those parts, both jobs would take less than an hour. I suspected that this might be an opportunity for me to make $1000/hour. However, I had none of the necessary skills. I was looking at four different types of pipe - iron sink and trap fixtures, a copper outlet pipe, PVC, and a tubing called "pex". I didn't know how to cut and join them, and I didn't know what parts to order. Enter ChatGPT. I posted some pictures, and interviewed it about parts and tools that would match the situation, and got specific and accurate recommendations. It took more than an hour to figure out what parts to order, so my hourly comp on this job was brought down by inexperience, and now ChatGPT profiles me as being obsessed with measurement. However, when the parts arrived, the job was simple. The hose valve replacement took eight minutes. The p-trap replacement required 20 minutes of clumsy metal sawing, but I got through the job in 30 minutes. In a future version of this workflow, I imagine helping the AI with tools to look up inventory and place orders (Poppy will soon do this for any major vendor), and keep track of the maintainable infrastructure that is in a house.

In the past I would have gone to a YouTube video for this sort of thing. YouTube has videos that cover a vast range of weird repairs. Did you know that you can install a wheelbarrow tire by spraying a flammable substance inside, and igniting it, so the tire explodes onto the rim? Awesome! AI chats are not as fun but more customized and straightforward.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

https://t.co/kJPBNTaHDw is great at reading SEC filings. You can ask it for details from the Anthropic S1

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

AI must work. Anthropic is bringing in $6.6M revenue per employee. Net revenue retention is 900%, meaning that the more people use the product, the more they want to use it, to the point where they buy 10X as much. "From September 30, 2025 to September 30, 2026, we have grown customers with $100,000 or more of revenue on a TTM basis from more than 950 to more than 11,900." These numbers are so unusual in the history of S1 filings that they might justify saying "this time it's different". Also the S1 is 400 pages so you probably want AI to help you read it.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Anthropic has filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC related to its proposed IPO.

Read more: https://t.co/ofhv0DK3Zp

Legal disclaimer: A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This post does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

S1 document at https://t.co/U1DWDbDZOM

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

Personal agents use these services differently from humans. Botconx builds the connectors that make them like you - https://t.co/gkow24JdZI

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

Good list of practical guidelines for personal agent that interact with banks and commerce platforms.

[Alexander Grieve @AlexanderGrieve]

Personal agents are everywhere (Muse! Instinct! Hermes! GrokBot! Dots! Duet!).

And, increasingly, they're running into walls – similar walls to the ones banks threw up during the Open Banking fights of the past decade, as fintech users struggled to connect their apps to their bank-held financial data.

It's time for Open Agentic Commerce.

In Dodd-Frank Section 1033, the backbone of Open Banking, the definition of “consumer” reads: “an individual or an agent, trustee, or representative acting on behalf of an individual.” Congress obviously wasn’t contemplating AI agents when it wrote Dodd-Frank — but technology changing doesn’t obviate the underlying principle: consumers should be able to choose who, or what, transacts on their behalf.

Banks and companies like Amazon have real, legitimate concerns about agents becoming vectors for fraud or unauthorized transactions. But those are arguments for building portals for secure access, not for prohibiting agents altogether. Open Banking offers a useful lesson here, in that secure, standardized interfaces are preferable to forcing third parties into credential sharing or screen scraping.

We propose some basic guidance that relevant regulators (FTC, OCC, CFPB) could consider to help the market to coalesce around open norms before incumbents obtain sufficient lock-in, freezing the current landscape to their advantage.

With standards like these established, agents can make decisions that better serve the consumer, and will index on things like quality or price, rather than being funneled into a constrained set of options.

The push for Open Banking resulted in better experiences and lower prices for consumers. As agents become principal commercial actors, it is imperative that we lay the groundwork now so that an agent acting on your behalf is equally capable – if not more so – of delivering value and cost savings to you as you would be acting on your own.

Read our proposal below:

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

Speaking at @AITinkerers Boston! Presenting "OAuth for AI Clients" https://t.co/3zwaKJtQaQ

AI Tinkerers made this heroic image and I deserve it because this topic is important.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

Also, The tech sector is big. If it gets a payoff from AI, that is significant. It might be diluted in the larger economy so that it doesn't show up strongly in aggregate numbers. However, it is clearly having an effect on relative share of expenditure and investment moving to tech. It's actually NOT true that “the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7” if the Mag 7 take over the economy with the weirdy amplified power laws we are seeing.

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

@consultingcmdy They promised us flying cars

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

On Monday in Cambridge I will show how your users can login and connect from any AI.

Register now to secure your spot:
https://t.co/xtlB82ZPdi

Join us for a demo-first evening focused on practical AI applications in security. We'll hear from William Haver on runtime governance for AI agents, Connor Whelan on building decision models for cybersecurity with Copley, Craig Chamberlain on developing a patent-backed security AI portfolio, and Andy Singleton on using OAuth as a universal gateway for AI tools. This is a fantastic opportunity to see live builds and learn from builders tackling critical security challenges.

ABOUT AI TINKERERS
@AITinkerers is a global community for hands-on AI builders. I thank and @natea for organizing an insightful and engaged meetup in Boston.

ABOUT BOTCONX
Botconx is a studio that connects you to personal AI users. Call us when you want to simplify and accelerate adoption of your services. This is our first showing of the Botconx platform. Learn more at https://t.co/JOXagSzpAs

[Andy Singleton @andysingleton]

@lex_node @MetaLeX_Labs I would like to make this even easier by packaging it as a connector for a user’s favorite AI assistant