Hey everyone,
Dave J and I had a good conversation today about interface design and what we should be focused on.
We decided to go with focusing on a core interaction to focus our decision making and ensure we are always getting the most out of our work towards making it easy to build, control, and benefit from your own AI system.
Here’s an AI powered summary of what we discussed.
What Is a “Core Interaction”?
In product design, a core interaction is the one thing a product should make dead simple and satisfying. It’s the heartbeat of the system—the primary way someone uses the product to get value.
For Instagram, it was “share a photo.”
For Google, it was “search and get results.”
For WordPress, it was “publish a blog post.”
Defining this early—and obsessing over it—is how great products are built.
Why Define a Core Interaction?
Because once it’s clear, everything else gets easier. A well-defined core interaction gives us a simple but powerful filter for every decision:
- Does this help people succeed at the core interaction?
- If not, should it be cut or made a plugin?
It helps avoid scope creep, prioritize the right features, and design an experience that feels immediately useful.
BrainDrive’s Core Interaction
After lots of discussion, testing, and reflection, we’ve defined the core interaction for BrainDrive as:
“Chatting with your own AI system.”
Not just chatting with an AI—you can do that anywhere.
And not building an agent—that comes later.
The key insight is that the moment someone can open BrainDrive, type a message, and get a response from an AI system they own and control, is when the magic happens.
That’s the “aha” moment. And everything else—plugins, custom interfaces, workflows—builds from there.
How It’s Driving Our Design Decisions
We’re now using this core interaction to shape everything we do:
- When you first install BrainDrive, the system should launch directly into a working chat interface with a local model running.
- The model might be small, but it’s yours—and it works out of the box.
- No extra steps. No need to “build” the chat interface first.
- We’re building on top of Ollama to handle model management cleanly and allow for future upgrades.
We’re not trying to reinvent UX either. At this early stage, we’re taking inspiration from ChatGPT’s interface. Why? Because it works, it’s familiar, and it lets us focus our energy on what makes BrainDrive different—ownership, control, and extensibility.
What Comes Next
This initial experience—chatting with your own AI—is our launch focus.
After that, we’ll gradually introduce:
- Tools to customize the chat interface
- The ability to build and share plugins
- New interaction types (e.g., voice, images, agents)—all powered by the plugin system
But it all starts with a clean, simple, own-your-AI moment.
Let us know what you think, especially if you’ve already been tinkering with chat-based systems or have thoughts on what makes a chat interface truly great.
And thanks for reading!
Dave