AI adoption is a UX problem

Nan Yu:

These tools are casually dismissed as ā€œGPT wrappersā€ by some industry commentators — after all, ChatGPT (or Sonnet or Gemini or Llama or Deepseek) is doing all the ā€œreal workā€, right?

People who take this perspective seem to be throwing away all the lessons we’ve learned about software distribution. It’s like they saw Instagram and waived it off as an ā€œImageMagick wrapperā€ā€¦ or Dropbox as an ā€œrsync wrapperā€.

Those products won because they made powerful, highly technical tools accessible through thoughtful design. The biggest barrier to mass AI adoption is not capability or intelligence; we have those in spades. It’s UX.

Amen.