The thing I keep circling back to is how strange it is that computers still treat installation like a covert operation. You click Install, the screen goes quiet, and suddenly you’re staring at a progress bar that looks like it was designed by someone who has never actually installed software. Meanwhile, the machine is doing a thousand things behind the scenes — loading drivers, poking at the GPU, negotiating with the network stack like it’s trying to get a toddler into a car seat — and it explains none of it. It’s the IT equivalent of asking a teenager what they’re doing and hearing “nothing” while they slam the door.
Editor’s Note: In my humble opinion, all live CDs should be built with a tiny local model whose only job is to save you from yourself.
And the wild part is that the system already has everything it needs to talk to you. Drivers load at startup. The display server is awake. The network stack is alive. The keyboard works. The microphone works. The machine is fully capable of having a conversation long before the GUI staggers out of bed and pretends it’s in charge. We could have a quiet, monospace, plain‑text conversational interface from the very first boot screen, and we just… don’t. It’s like discovering your router has had a web UI this whole time and you’ve been configuring it through arcane button‑press rituals like a medieval monk.
That’s why the future of computing has to be conversational. Not bubbly, not animated, not “delightful” in the way product managers use that word when they mean “we added confetti.” I mean calm, text‑first, monospace, and capable of explaining itself as it acts. The kind of interface where you type plain text and it hands you back the literal Markdown syntax — the actual characters, not a rendered preview. So instead of hiding the structure, it shows you things like:
- Heading
- bold
- list item
Because showing the Markdown is honest. It’s transparent. It’s the difference between a chef handing you the recipe and a chef handing you a mystery casserole and saying “trust me.” IT people don’t trust mystery casseroles. We’ve all seen what happens when someone installs a random executable from a forum post written in 2009.
Installation is where this matters most. Imagine booting into a new system and instead of a silent wizard with a Next button the size of a postage stamp, you get something like: “Welcome. I can walk you through this installation. Where would you like to put the software? I can suggest a directory if you want.” Or, for local AI workloads — and this is where every sysadmin’s heart grows three sizes — “I detected an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA support. Would you like to enable GPU acceleration? I can explain the tradeoffs if you’re unsure.”
No more guessing whether the installer is using your GPU, your CPU, or the ghost of a Pentium II haunting the motherboard. No more “why is this taking so long” while the progress bar jumps from 2% to 99% and then sits there for 45 minutes like it’s waiting for a manager override.
A conversational installer could tell you exactly what it’s doing in real language: “I’m downloading dependencies. Here’s what they do. Here’s where they’ll live. Here’s how they affect your system.” It’s humane. It’s accessible. It’s the opposite of the “click Next and pray” ritual we’ve all been performing since Windows 95.
And this shouldn’t stop at installation. This interface belongs everywhere — onboarding, updates, system settings, recovery mode, file management, creative tools, developer tools. Anywhere the computer acts, it should be able to explain itself. Because the truth is, half of IT work is just trying to figure out what the machine thinks it’s doing. The other half is pretending you knew the answer all along while frantically searching for error codes that return exactly one result from a forum post written by someone named RootBeard in 2011.
The simplest prototype for all of this is a Copilot panel inside Visual Studio Code. It’s already plain text. Already monospace. Already Markdown‑native. Already cross‑platform. It’s the closest thing we have to a universal studio for thinking. Adding a conversational panel there would give millions of people the quiet, transparent, neurodivergent‑friendly environment computing has been missing for decades.
But the long‑term vision is bigger. It’s a universal relational layer across the entire computing stack — calm, text‑first, explanatory, voice‑optional, and capable of telling you what it’s doing before it does it. Not because users are fragile, but because clarity is a feature. Because neurodivergent users deserve quiet. Because IT people deserve honesty. And because the machine already knows what it’s doing; it’s time it started sharing.
We already have the architecture. We just need the courage to build the interface.
Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.
Stories That Are All True 