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Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
Current agent interfaces force humans to adapt to language-heavy, rigid planning instead of utilizing visual, interactive boundary objects that facilitate genuine collaboration.
What: Maggie Appleton from GitHub Next argues that we need 'thicker interfaces'—visual and interactive environments—to replace text-based command line planning when working with AI agents. She highlights the 'European navigator' fallacy of upfront planning versus the 'situated action' model of adjusting in real-time.
Why it matters: Engineering design is shifting from writing code to orchestrating agents; the current text-dominated paradigm is a bottleneck that ignores 500 million years of human visual cognition evolution.
Takeaway: When designing agent tools, build interactive visual 'boundary objects'—like state machines or live previews—rather than requiring users to read walls of text.
Deep dive
- Humans and AI operate in different worlds; interfaces must bridge this gap via 'boundary objects'.
- Planning is a 'weak resource for ad hoc activity' (Suchman, 1987).
- Humans cannot efficiently consume 4,500 words per minute of agent output.
- Current interfaces are too private, preventing social, team-based planning.
- 'Chopin' prototype explores multi-player, visual, real-time collaboration with agents.
- Agents should perform 'upfront legwork' like branching and prototyping to ground plans in reality before human approval.
Decoder
- Boundary object: An artifact that inhabits multiple intersecting social worlds (like a map or a specimen) and satisfies the informational requirements of each, allowing for collaboration.
- Situated action: Action that is essentially improvised based on context and local conditions, rather than executed according to a rigid pre-existing plan.
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