The best interface for AI agents was invented in 1971

Hot take: the best interface for AI agents was invented in 1971.

It's email.

I'm not being nostalgic. Something odd happened at our company, and it made me a believer.

My team builds sophisticated AI apps and agents for a living. We have a polished builder for that. And yet, one by one, they stopped opening it. They just email Veda instead, at [email protected], the same way they'd brief a colleague.

At first that surprised me. Then I watched what actually happens.

Someone sits with a problem. Because it's email, nobody is watching a cursor blink, so they take their time. They frame the ask properly. They attach a mockup, a spreadsheet, a screenshot of the thing that annoys them. They hit send and go back to work.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, a reply: a working app, built, deployed, with a link. Sometimes it's exactly what they asked for. Often it's a little better, because Veda also had time to think.

That's the part we got wrong as an industry. Chat interfaces optimize for speed of response. Email optimizes for quality of thought, on both sides of the conversation.

And everyone already knows how to use it. There's no prompt engineering course for email. You write to a capable colleague and say what you need.

Fifty-five years old, and it beat every interface we designed to replace it.

The future arrived in the inbox.