Simon Willison’s Weblog

27th July 2025 - Link Blog

Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs. Geoffrey Litt compares Copilots - AI assistants that you engage in dialog with and work with you to complete a task - with HUDs, Head-Up Displays, which enhance your working environment in less intrusive ways.

He uses spellcheck as an obvious example, providing underlines for incorrectly spelt words, and then suggests his AI-implemented custom debugging UI as a more ambitious implementation of that pattern.

Plenty of people have expressed interest in LLM-backed interfaces that go beyond chat or editor autocomplete. I think HUDs offer a really interesting way to frame one approach to that design challenge.