ChatGPT appeared in 2022, with its chatbot as the doorway into this strange new world of AI, and within months every company was adding AI chatbots to their apps.

It was the simplest way in, but simple doesn’t mean best. It’s a stopgap, a horseless carriage moment (thank you, Pete Koomen, for the metaphor). A horse without a horse, not yet a car.

If you’ve ever tried vibecoding for a few hours straight, you’ll know what I mean. The prompt fatigue eventually gets to you.

The tragedy is, we’ve been here before. History is littered with “horseless carriage” eras. The early web was just digital brochures before it became interactive. The first mobile apps were miniaturized desktop widgets. And the first online stores? They were mail-order catalogs without the glossy paper.

There’s an anecdote from the 1950s that I keep going back to. Boxed cake mix launched with the idea to just add water. People should’ve been thrilled, right? Wrong. Sales were a flop. Turns out people didn’t feel like they had actually baked anything.

So they tweaked the mix and you now had to add eggs, oil, and water. Suddenly, sales skyrocketed because people felt like they were part of the process.

That’s where we are with AI today. We’ve built the “just add water” version of software.

What we need (and I mean need in an almost survival sense) is software that makes us feel like creators again. Tools that allow us to shape, to steer, to wrestle with the machine in ways that leave our fingerprints on the final work. A chatbot’s results might be technically correct, even dazzling, but they’re not ours. And humans, fickle creatures that we are, have this deep craving for authorship. AI software has to find that balance.

So yes, reinvention is overdue. A rethinking from first principles about what it would mean to build with AI.

Maybe it looks like an interface that remembers your style and flows with you. Maybe it looks like tools where you sketch half an idea and the AI nudges, expands, questions. Maybe it’s something stranger, something we haven’t even named yet.

But one thing’s certain: the chatbot is a stepping stone, not the destination.