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The inspiration for Marble comes from the GUI work at Xerox PARC, the 1984 Macintosh, and later NeXTSTEP, which became the foundation for Mac OS X. Before GUIs, interacting with a computer was limited to strange terminal commands:
C:\> DIR
C:\> COPY FILE.TXT A:
You had to remember the command, syntax, paths, and parameters.
The GUI made those capabilities visible. Instead of remembering commands, you could point at files, drag them, click buttons, and select actions from menus. It didn't necessarily make entirely new things possible; it just made existing capabilities much easier to understand and use. We feel like AI is still somewhere around this command-line stage.
Even though the strict syntax has been replaced with natural language, the interaction can still be quite stiff and depend on heavily recall. Tools like Claude Cowork still look surprisingly terminal-like: /skill-name [param1] [param2]. The parameters are written in natural language, but the user still needs to know the capabilities that exist, and how to invoke it. Command-line flags and arguments have just been replaced with tools, skills, and context.
ChatGPT works very well for asking questions, but we aren't convinced that it's the final interface for delegating work across multiple agents. A blank text box and a list of chat threads feels limiting. An agent's capabilities are mostly invisible. With Marble, we're exploring an interface that treats AI more like a workspace than another chat app. Each delegated task becomes a card. Multiple jobs can sit next to each other and run at once. Files, tools, and finished artifacts are visible at once. Before a task runs, Marble also shows which tools it expects to use. The basic idea is that the user should not have to hold the entire structure of the task in their head. And the result should be something directly usable, like a spreadsheet, PowerPoint, or other file, rather than something buried in a transcript.
Marble is our attempt at exploring interaction models beyond the chat box. The product is mainly for people who already use ChatGPT or Claude, but haven’t really adopted agent workflows yet. We’ve found that when the tools and possible actions are made more visible, people start delegating work they would not have thought to do through normal chat.
The site includes a downloadable beta if you want to try it. Does Marble feel like a genuinely novel interface?
Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
With that said, from the material you show in your homepage, it still seems like you're doing something very similar to OpenAI and Anthropic's first party apps? I think it would help your pitch if you could show some task or workflow where your interface truly makes a difference; loading files and asking questions about them is a staple of most harnesses.
Marble keeps the tools you use most close at hand and will surface other useful ones for the job. Combined with a birds eye view of multiple tasks running, it makes agent work easier to set up and manage. The goal is to minimize cognitive overhead in day to day tasks (both in specifying what you want, and managing after you ran something)
Isn't that what current agents already do? e.g. codex: https://ibb.co/Y71qJJZb
It's similar to needing aol to get online in the 90s/00s. Eventually this will become built in and become invisible in a sense.
I'm glad someone is working on this because it's been annoying having to sacrifice process to gain capability.
A smart, tiling window manager with workspaces and a great tool harness. An everything app, if you may; bring the terminals, code reviews, etc. into the tool itself, and make it high fidelity: no blocky terminals for the app itself.
I'm not so sure about that tool toolbar. It might as well just be a tool selector dropdown in a typical chat window.
Go and have a look at the history of Microsoft OLE and OpenDoc and you'll see some of these ideas have been around for a while. When these ideas were first being shared in the industry (and yes, I am that old), here's the story that was being told:
In the future, you wouldn't buy "a word processor" or "an image editor", you'd buy components that could do specific tasks, and you'd bring them to your document/work as and when you needed. I'd have DTP components for layout, word processing components for spell checking, image components for resizing and colour balancing, and I'd be heads down in my fancy newsletter or report, and I'd be bringing functionality to the work I needed to do, without having to context switch and import/export things by hand.
The demo you've shown on the homepage is almost the opposite of this: I'm not bringing things into my work (fanning in), I'm starting agents to go and do lots of different bits of work (fanning out), that eventually I'm going to need to think about how to structure and fan in again.
I think coding interfaces kind of force us into a fan-in: here's my code base, now I want to improve test coverage, now I want to refactor, now I want to add this SDK, now I want to change this logic to use the SDK based on configuration params, now I want to improve my integration tests, and so on. I'm flowing through my work in a single asset (the code base), and able to bring agents and other tools to it.
Now, I'd like that, but for everything else. The UI I'd like allows me to build around the assets I am building.
Planning a trip? OK, I need to bring various agents along to help me plan an itinerary (in my calendar), based on location, budget, and preferences. It's not good enough to list the top 10 must-see places in Venice, I need them to fit into my calendar including travel time, and my budget - I want agents to help me plan that out. Ideally I want agents to help me and my partner both contribute to that based on our wants.
Need to do a report for the big boss? OK, I need to start with an empty report doc, and bring various sources of data, and take it through transformations to build the narrative/deck I need to write. Here's some excel data, here's an agent that can do some competitive analysis, here's another that is pulling quotes from real customers on social media, and so on...
Want to learn a new skill? We're going to need to have a framework for assessing where I am in terms of that skill (the "single asset" we're working on is "what I know"), and then agents to figure out the best way for me to fill gaps and reinforce what I already know.
Your demo is nicer than a chat box, but I think you need to think about the job that needs to be done, and how to bring agents to that job (perhaps even suggest those jobs - that could be another agent), not build a UI to just allow me to fire off dozens of agents that then have output sat in multiple windows across my screen.
I think that for a lot of tasks, you will not need to stay inside the document or app the whole time. The workspace becomes the place you work from, where you can bring in files, tools, and agents to do the work.
With that in mind, I agree that just fanning out into various disconnected task outputs is not enough. The results need to stay visible and easy to bring back into the next task. In some cases, the document, calendar, or other asset should probably become the center of the workspace.
If people start giving enough power to AI, with ill thought out goals, and no human in charge, don't be surprised...
Why would it need "free will" or "consciousness" whatever that means?
A concrete example might be putting an AI in charge of health policy, and telling it to "eliminate suffering" without any human to check and push back. Well, the best way to eliminate suffering is...
The problem is that AI workflows are inherently different for each person.
The current approach feels like it's forcing a CLI-based model on users. I also don't think chat is a suitable fundamental unit for task delegation.
I've worked on writing a compiler using both hand-written code and AI. Once the project exceeds a certain size, the chat itself becomes a bottleneck. In those cases, I needed proof and gates like Rocq. So in essence, AI coding requires clear negative gates that should be rejected when approaching the goal.
I think something like Figma's canvas model might become the new interface.
Because no matter how meta you make it, agent workflows are ultimately optimized for the individual. My settings often don't match someone else's.
Computers also have this problem, but in that case, you can enforce defaults. With AI agents, it's different.
That's why I think we need a canvas—something like a workspace next to the user space where agent workflows can be dynamically adjusted.
I focus most of my coding effort on building gates that AI-generated code must pass through when it's being produced. That approach has allowed me to handle much larger volumes of code.
The future agent GUI will be about supervising multiple asynchronous tasks.
In a way, this might end up resembling object-oriented programming—just with task graphs instead of object graphs.
Once AI starts generating code, it flows out like water through a burst dam. It's impossible for any human to fully understand it all. At first, I tried to understand every line, but that actually turned out to be less efficient than just writing the code myself. There's a clear fundamental mismatch between the way AI thinks about code and the way I do.
This mismatch seems like an unsolvable impedance mismatch problem—similar to the one between ORM and SQL. So once you decide to use AI agent code, you have no choice but to shift your focus from reviewing the code itself to trusting the gates you've built around it.
The key question is how tightly you can build those gates. And I don't think chat-based interfaces are capable of providing that level of control.
For small tasks, you don't need AI. You can produce high-quality code just fine on your own. I can maintain very high quality for codebases up to about 40,000 lines. But using AI means you're trying to handle complexity at the scale of 100,000, 200,000, or even 300,000 lines, complexity that an individual can't fully digest. That requires an additional interface, and I believe that interface should be graph-based.
I agree with your view. I like this product quite a bit, but for controlling AI, I think it's still at the prototype stage
However, I believe the GUI for AI agents that will win is a plain text editor with a file tree, a terminal pane for coding (or preview pane for other kinds of tasks) and a chat sidebar.
Even if the code editor is not used to type, it's there for psychological safety. It lets you inspect and navigate what is being created. Has tremendous value.
Plain text has survived countless software revolutions, so it's likely to become the dominant format for artifacts produced by AI. Non-plain text things are likely to adapt instead of the other way around.
"Strange terminal commands" have survived, while even poweruser toolbar style have started to fade (I love them, but they're fading away). It clearly has some value (hint: speed over familiarity).
I think the poweruser toolbar style was indeed the only thing in the past couple of decades that really tried to match the terminal for speed of interaction. In my opinion, it succeeded, but it has its limits too (tends to clump with stuff over time; has a limit on the amount of abstractions it can hold). I would love to see a candidate GUI that tackles that speed angle.
I don't know the exact reason for that, but it's undeniable that it happened.
Lots of people try completely new novel GUI stuff all the time, always from basic principles. Looks clean and neat but doesn't survive the real world. Meanwhile, plain text tools have been improving and spreading roots consistently for decades.
Could be that a GUI gets some showtime, but wouldn't bet against plain text at any time. It's like betting against spoons.