Text as an interface | thesephist.com

- “the focus of software services has shifted from manipulating data to manipulating workflows.”

- “Workflows, not data, are the subject of product innovation now. And the subject is easier to study, to compare, to share and extend, when it’s concrete and durable, not an organic, ephemeral series of actions.”

- “Textual interfaces make automation trivial, and automation tools much easier to build.”

- “… why are we seeing a resurgence in this trend now? I think the easiest factor we can identify is that more people entering the workforce are unafraid of textual interfaces, because they’ve been typing and messaging and tagging their friends online all their life.”

- “Textual interfaces are everywhere in the modern workplace. Slash-commands in Slack and Discord and Notion, hash-tags for channels and tagging, special syntax for searching and querying data across applications, @-mentions in social media and team work environments, and so on. We’re training ourselves to be more savvy users of the textual interfa... See more

- “… workflows driven by text interfaces are easier to share, document, and iterate over time within a team. Text interfaces make workflows more concrete.”

- “Text interfaces are much easier for machines to use. And as more work is done autonomously by the workflows we teach machines to perform, text interfaces are starting to matter just as much as human ones.”

- “Modern software workflows cross application and service boundaries all the time. Textual interfaces provide an enforceable, rigorous contract between services and applications that can act as the interfaces for apps to integrate with external services, in a way that visual interfaces can’t.”