--- title: "When the user interface moves from pages into agents" date: 2026-06-12 author: "Richard MacManus" featured_image: "https://ricmac.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/user-interface-agents.jpg" categories: - name: "Field Notes" url: "/category/field-notes.md" --- # When the user interface moves from pages into agents This week, my [Agentic Web News](https://agenticweb.news/) posts circled around one question: what happens when the web stops being organized only around pages, and starts being organized around machine-readable capabilities, agent interfaces and brand systems? I’ve been writing for a while now about the shift from a web of pages to a [web of capabilities](https://ricmac.org/2026/04/07/the-agentic-web/). But to me, that has never meant that the human web is going away. Clearly I don’t think that, otherwise I wouldn’t have started a new tech blog. Rather, the point is that there’s an extra layer of the web emerging — one built for our machine helpers. This week, that extra layer began to look less abstract. ## From busy bots to atomic brand kits In [my weekly market signals post](https://agenticweb.news/agentic-web-machine-readable-business/), I argued that the machine-readable web is becoming a business problem. Cloudflare’s bot traffic data — stating that bots have now passed human traffic for the first time — was the most obvious signal: websites are facing a large and growing machine demand. And if there’s demand, then a viable market will undoubtedly form too. The old web monetized human attention — first with banner ads, then with targeted advertising based on user profiling and social activity. But the agentic web won’t be about attention in quite the same way. It will have to find a way to monetize access, permission, attribution and action. All of which is still in [the wild west stage](https://agenticweb.news/agentic-web-advertising-commerce-identity/). One of the more intriguing concepts I came across this week was the “atomic brand kit,” [as outlined](https://x.com/emmettshine/status/2054539694097015171) by Emmett Shine from the New York digital studio, Little Plains. It’s a deceptively simple idea: if your website is becoming machine-readable, shouldn’t your brand do that too? Little Plains has started to deliver brand systems to their clients with two folders: `/human` and `/agent`. The human side contains the familiar assets — logos, guidelines, visual identity. But the agent side encodes the brand as instructions using YAML, JSON, Markdown, HTML, CSS and SVG files. In other words, a brand becomes something closer to a software program that agents can run: a structured, machine-readable understanding of what the brand is, who it’s for, how it sounds and how it looks. That matters because agents will not always interact with a company through the canonical homepage, or even through a traditional app. They may generate brand-consistent pages, interfaces and content across contexts the brand does not fully control. [This week’s market signals](https://agenticweb.news/agentic-web-machine-readable-business/) also covered Salesforce’s agreement to acquire Contentful, a so-called “headless CMS” company. In the early 2020s, headless CMS systems were mainly framed as a way to decouple the frontend from the backend. Fast forward to 2026, and AI systems are less dependent on the traditional “head” of a CMS — they primarily want the backend data. So Salesforce buying a headless CMS makes sense if Agentforce needs to dynamically assemble and deliver personalized experiences across channels. ## MCP Apps and the rise of agentic apps That brings me to my second AWN post this week, [an interview with MCP Apps](https://agenticweb.news/mcp-apps/) co-creators Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef. MCP Apps began as MCP-UI, an open source project that provided a way to add web-based user interface components to AI agents. The goal from the start was “UI over MCP”: letting an MCP server return a UI resource, usually HTML, which the host renders inline in the conversation, with interactions passed back through the host. What interests me most is that MCP Apps is not just a developer convenience. As Salomon put it, this is “a new way to distribute applications.” But as both Salomon and Yosef pointed out, discovery, ranking and monetization are still open questions in this new agentic apps paradigm. The capability may exist, and MCP Apps may be available inside chatbots, but that does not mean users know when or how to invoke them. The more I think about this, the more I see MCP Apps, atomic brand kits, and headless CMS infrastructure as parts of the same larger shift. Apps, brands and content systems are all being decomposed into machine-readable components that agents can understand, assemble and present back to users. ## From UI chunks to generative UI In [the MCP Apps post](https://agenticweb.news/mcp-apps/), I used the metaphor of “UI chunks.” A user of ChatGPT, Claude or another AI system will often need only a small part of a host app or website, depending on the context. If MCP Apps works as intended, developers will not only build websites, mobile apps, desktop apps or SaaS dashboards. They will also build app fragments that run inside AI assistants. Those fragments will be interactive, contextual and portable across different AI systems. The next step may be generative UI: interfaces generated on the fly for a particular query or task. Google is already talking about this for Search, and Claude’s freeform Imagine feature points in a similar direction. Yosef’s framing was useful here: MCP Apps may provide a unified UI standard across hosts, but the next goal is a broader umbrella standard across methods of UI generation. ## The strategic question for orgs So my field note this week is this: the agentic web’s interface layer is starting to come into focus. It will not be just websites plus APIs (or MCP!). It will involve app fragments, generated interfaces, brand systems that agents can interpret, and content backends that can feed personalized agent-mediated experiences. The strategic question for companies is no longer just whether you have a website or an API, but whether your product, content and brand can show up as a useful, trusted interface inside an agent’s workflow. That is still early, messy and unresolved. But it’s no longer theoretical.