Why Your Agent UI Feels Broken (And How to Fix It)
You've shipped a capable agent. The underlying model is strong — it retrieves the right context, calls the right tools, produces coherent outputs. Then you watch a user try it for the first time and the session falls apart. They don't know when the agent is working. They can't tell if it understood them. They interrupt it mid-task because the silence feels like a hang. They give up and call your support line.
The model wasn't the problem. The interface was.
This is the pattern engineers keep rediscovering after building their first agent product: the human-agent interaction layer is its own engineering discipline, and most teams treat it as an afterthought. They spend months on retrieval quality and tool accuracy, then wire up a chat box as the interface, and wonder why the product feels unreliable even when the backend logs show success.
