Language as the new interface

Working with Claude this whole week, I realised that text and voice are the new interface. I've been designing, generating, and creating all week, and most of it has been through prompting — typing, talking through changes and thinking, building the tools I need.

It's a fundamentally different way of working. What's great about it is that most of the compute goes to the tool. And most of these tools are browser-based or cloud, so it doesn't matter too much what kind of computer you have.

There are also different levels of engaging with the work. I can sit at my desk and work with Cowork or Claude Code to build applications and documents. I can also chat with Claude on my phone and generate ideas, document plans, create proposals, run tasks, etc. The workflow is flexible and productive at every level.

So a typical workflow might be to plan and spec out projects on chat, then move to Cowork or Claude Code to build it out properly in a local environment.

When you can move and create at the speed of voice, you get very powerful in terms of output — trading off granularity of control. Which is something to take note of.

For instance, I've been enjoying working on the landing page for the new website, and I think I'm going to embrace what the style has evolved into working with Claude. I do feel somewhat restricted by the way it builds and what it's good at. But I'm choosing to embrace that as a constraint and see what level of creativity I can reach within it. Plus, there are other tools and platforms where I can create special assets and bring them into Claude projects.

File outputs — instead of working in canvases, documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets, I'm now working primarily in code. How is output, delivery, and feedback affected when we are delivering mostly HTML? What is lost? What becomes possible?

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Vault note, not part of the published piece. This was the first base note, 20 Apr 2026, and the seed of the sequence that follows it: AI is really just templatised knowledge, Working on things that scale, An Agentic OS Is Not a Dashboard, The conversation is the work. The claim here, that language is the interface, was proven again on 16 Jun 2026, when a whole working session, the Lebakang proposal, this corpus, the morning digest, the handoff system, ran through language alone while Oto was mid cross-country move. April named it. June lived it. See [[Ten years to get ready. One shower to build the pitch]].