Hands-on with generative UI
I’m thinking about generative UI as a kind of evolution of the managed agentic environment (like Firebase Studio). With an agentic IDE, you can rapidly prototype UIs by typing in a description of what you want. GenUI is a logical next bridge, where the user prompts the hosted chatbot (like ChatGPT) to produce UI components that the user can interact with on the fly.
In a sense, if an AI tool, even something like Gemini or ChatGPT with Code Live Preview active, becomes powerful enough, it will push the person using it to wear the user hat, rather than the developer hat. We’ll probably see that occur gradually, where we eventually spend more time designing rather than coding, diving into developer mode only when things break or become more ambitious.
To get hands-on with this idea, we can look at Vercel’s GenUI demo (or the Datastax mirror), which implements the streamUI function:
