The message is not words but a thing — a few fields to fill, a card to confirm, a slider to nudge, a chart to read. Every GUI is already a conversation in the loose sense; this is the literal case.
The most familiar instance is a form conducted as a conversation — its fields asked and answered turn by turn, each control rendered inline:
Boundary with generated content
Generated content is about the actor negotiating produced output — judging it, trusting it, refining and appropriating it; the artifact is the thing under evaluation. Inline interface is about the surface hosting interface the actor reads or acts through in place. The two interlock — a generated chart the actor then filters, a draft they edit inline — but the moves are distinct: one asks “do I trust this output?”, the other “how does the conversation hand me something to do?”.
Related components
- Conversation — the exchange this move renders into; the Messaging component is its mechanism.
Resources & references
- CopilotKit / Generative UI overview — agent-driven rendering
- AG-UI / Generative UI specs — the agent-emitted end as declarative specifications
- Slack Block Kit, Microsoft Adaptive Cards — the practitioner mechanism for author-controlled inline interfaces.
Related patterns
Enacts
- Conversation — the foundational claim this concretises: the inline interface is where the conversation metaphor becomes a literal rendering.
Complements
- Generated content — produced output the actor negotiates; interlocks with, but distinct from, this move.
- Status feedback — system and progress signals during inline work.
Related
- Data entry
- Form — fields distributed across an exchange; the form↔conversation move.
- Conversation — the exchange this move renders into; the <ComponentRef id="components-messaging--docs">Messaging</ComponentRef> component is its mechanism.
- Bounded choice — selections offered inline as chips or cards.
- Suggestion — recommendations the actor can accept, modify, or reject in the flow.
- Human goes first — inline confirmation and correction checkpoints
- Bot repair — inline confirmation and correction checkpoints