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Building annotation tools for AI conversations — why the text box isn't enough, and what comes next.

The Text Box Is the Only Way to Talk to AI. That's a Problem.

I had a moment last week that probably sounds familiar.

I was deep in a conversation with an AI assistant — five turns in, discussing something strategic and nuanced. The AI gave me a long, detailed response. Three paragraphs were exactly what I needed. One paragraph was completely off base. And one sentence buried in the middle was genuinely brilliant — the kind of insight I wanted to build the entire next turn around.

So what did I do?

I typed a message. A long one. "I agree with your first point about X, but the part about Y is wrong because... and that sentence about Z — that's exactly right, let's go deeper on that, but ignore the stuff about W..."

By the time I finished typing, I'd spent more time writing my feedback than reading the original response. And I knew that half my nuance would get lost anyway — the AI would latch onto some parts of my feedback and miss others, because I was trying to communicate a complex, multi-layered reaction through a single text box.

This happens every day, to millions of people, across every AI chat interface in the world. And nobody seems to be working on it.