The Future of Software: Insights into AI-First Design Patterns from WWDC 2024
Apple’s latest developer tools and the new Siri and Apple Intelligence platform, unveiled at WWDC 2024, signal a shift in software architecture from apps to AI-first platforms built around facts and actions.
Here are the key takeaways:
- Controls (via control panel) are being prioritized over apps.
- Apple’s new generative AI features (math notes, text refinement, image tools) were highlighted primarily as embeddable functionality not as standalone apps.
- Apps are given two ways to integrate with Siri: “App Intents” and “App Entities.”
These developments suggest that the golden age of apps is coming to an end.
Operating systems will transition from app-first to AI-first platforms, and what we now know as apps will be deconstructed into embeddable controls and semantically indexable content.
The primary model of user interaction will become dynamically generated, context-aware dashboards of controls and content integrated from multiple domain-specific “apps.”
Extensible GenAI: RAG and Tools
The architecture of the new Siri and “Apple Intelligence” system combines two fundamental ideas in generative AI: retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and generative actions.
These techniques address the fundamental limitations of raw generative AI systems: that they are not inherently factual and they cannot perform actions.
RAG attempts to solve the factuality problem by looking up relevant facts first and ensuring the generative AI has access to those facts while generating its response.
Generative actions address the inability to perform actions by providing the generative AI system with a list of actions and instructions on how to reference them in its output. When an action is referenced in the generative output, it can be automatically invoked.
To extend the functionality of an LLM-based generative AI system, developers need to supply it with searchable facts and invocable actions.
This is precisely the integration interface that Apple has provided to their application developers as “App Entities” and “App Intents.”
Facts and Actions: The AI-First Architecture
This architecture is not specific to Apple platform applications; it is the best way to think about, design, and architect software tools for all future AI-first software platforms.
The software tools of AI-first platforms will not be vertically integrated individual apps, but rather domain-specific collections of facts and actions.
To ensure your software tool is ready for AI-first platforms, you’ll want to design the core architecture to consist of a structured set of domain-specific facts and actions.
This is essentially domain-driven design but with the integrating application shell removed and the domain entities and methods exposed directly to the platform.
Designing applications in this way will allow agentic AI-first platforms to take full advantage of the applications built for them.
Applications not designed in this way will be replaced by those that are.
I’m Miah. #biohacker, #natureboy, #coder and #reluctantphilosopher. Follow along here, or at miahwilde.com, for more content like this. I write about tech-leveraged and data-driven health and prosperity.
Be well and die later,
Miah
