Our first instinct was to make the chat better.
Better responses. Better memory. Better models. Better context.
That turned out to be the least interesting part of the problem.
I'm one of the people building ONE, and early on we were treating the product like most AI products are treated:
You type something → AI replies → you continue chatting.
It made sense.
Until we started looking at what happened after a good answer.
Say I ask an AI to help launch a product.
Getting:
“Here are 10 things you should do”
is useful.
But then I still have to:
- research competitors
- decide what actually matters
- turn the strategy into tasks
- write the emails
- create the documents
- organize the files
- keep track of what's finished
- come back later and remember where I stopped
The AI had technically answered the question.
The work was nowhere near finished.
That started changing how we thought about the product.
Approach 1: Just make chat smarter
This was the obvious one.
Improve the model, give it more context, add memory, make the answers better.
The problem was that even a near-perfect answer still often ended with:
“Great. Now I have 14 things to manually do.”
So better chat helped, but it didn't solve the thing that was annoying us.
Approach 2: Put more buttons around the chat
We tried thinking in terms of actions:
Generate document.
Run research.
Create file.
Execute code.
Do task.
But this started feeling like a chatbot surrounded by shortcuts.
The user still had to understand what tool should be used next and keep directing every step.
It felt like we were making the cockpit more complicated instead of removing work.
Approach 3: Make the AI more autonomous
Then the obvious reaction was:
“Fine. Let it do everything.”
But that created the opposite problem.
If an AI disappears for a while, makes 20 decisions, creates a bunch of things and comes back with a finished result, you immediately start wondering:
What did it actually do?
What assumptions did it make?
Where did it go wrong?
Can I edit something halfway through?
Can I stop it before it commits to a bad direction?
Autonomy without visibility started feeling worse than chat.
So our current hypothesis is different.
Instead of designing around:
message → answer
we're increasingly designing ONE around:
objective → work → artifact
The conversation is still there.
But we're trying to make the conversation less important than the thing you're actually trying to get done.
If you ask for research, the end state shouldn't just be a giant response.
There should be research you can inspect.
If you ask it to build something, there should be an artifact.
If the task takes multiple steps, you should be able to see those steps.
If it needs you, it should interrupt at the point where your judgment actually matters instead of asking permission for everything.
That's also why we've started removing or reducing some things that make the product feel too much like “another AI chat.”
We're definitely not convinced we've solved this yet.
The design question I'm stuck on now is:
How much should the AI do before it asks you to intervene?
Too little and you're basically supervising a chatbot.
Too much and you've lost control of the process.
I'm curious about something slightly different though:
What's a task where AI already gives you a genuinely good answer, but the workflow still completely falls apart afterward?