Prompt the User and Designing Moments of Intent

I've been building an agent for Press Mate over the last month or so, and I have been hitting an inherent tension in designing AI generated interfaces - I want to harness their ability to handle unknown scenarios so that the agent can "prompt" the user back to get what they really need, but my instinct, decades of practice, is to contain that complexity with predetermined flows to smooth out the end user experience — but then all we are doing are building is fancier forms.

These systems can't 'fit in your head' anymore. In traditional digital products, we try to control every path because users drop off in an instant, but this forces us to question what we're actually trying to achieve. Building these interfaces requires articulating not just what each piece does, but why it exists and how it serves the user's intent. It's pushing us toward a model closer to service design, where we create frameworks that adapt to needs rather than prescribing every step.

The challenge isn't technical implementation - it's rethinking how we measure the value of these fluid interactions.