Building a unified experience from the CLI to the Web Application

In my last post, I discussed our architecture adoption and how it enabled us to have a blazing-fast user interface. This is not about speed only for the sake of speed. We need to meet practitioners, like you, exactly where they are.

Today, engineers love working in their editors and have their keyboards dialed with shortcuts to increase efficiency. I want to bring the same efficiency and overall editor experience to our web application, which is one of the ways users interact with System Initiative. We need application speed and user interaction speed. Because that is the life our users and future users are living today.

Most web applications ignore the keyboard, much to my chagrin. Beyond tabIndex, many web applications don’t invest much more in the keyboard for some reason. We can emphasize the keyboard in our web application for many controls and user behaviors. But we need to go beyond that!

At SI, we are bringing together the web browser and the terminal to deliver a new, unified experience for infrastructure automation. Use your terminal, you know it, you have customized it exactly how you need it, and you love it. It's familiar to how you’re currently doing your work. We’re not building a chatbot that lives in a browser. Use your terminal and all the power of your host machine in a familiar way. Everything you do in the terminal will be reflected in our web application, allowing you to collaborate in real-time with other users on tasks that were previously difficult or impossible to accomplish.

Agents

Having a partner like Claude is another speed gain for the user. Typing out “Find me all the X” is pretty darn fast. And it is definitely quicker than mousing around to find things.

Let’s appreciate the size of the problem that all of us DevOps folks are facing here. System Initiative is a world-model program. It models text-based relationships between nodes on a graph. Depending on the size of your system’s infrastructure, hundreds or thousands of individual relationships need to be managed and connected. Doing that by hand will never be an efficient method.

Describing the shape of a problem and letting an automated agent bash its head against it—with good errors, guardrails, and a human approving changes in the loop — is a sweet spot! Efficiency and productivity can’t be fully understood until you work with an Agent in an AI Native Platform for the first time.

Authoring

We are building a unified CLI. One part of the tool we’re calling “Conduit”. This lets you write TypeScript functions in the way you want to; vi, emacs, VSCode, we don’t care. You get text on your host disk, manipulate it as needed, and then push your finished code back into SI with Conduit.

UX Principles in a Browser

Searching is a crucial part of the SI experience. Cmd+K always brings you to a search box. That is true for finding infrastructure components in the Explore grid & the Map. Additionally, you can also find the specific attributes you are looking for on an individual component page. When we modeled the cloud providers one-to-one and created a digital twin, the number of attributes for many components grew significantly. Just like people Ctrl+F in API docs to find what they need—they need to find attributes in SI, too.

Thinking about the system as modeling text-based relationships is instructive again. When you’ve found the attribute you need to set, there is a potentially massive list of data points you are choosing from. Quite literally a needle in a haystack. SI already has built-in hints to make this easy. But the user’s keyboard is the primary method of control here. Filtering and navigating the list of potential options is done by typing and using the down & up arrow keys.

We want users to have as much control and power over their interactions with System Initiative as possible. That is how we can provide the best experience possible. For us, best includes the speed at which users can act and move within the system, whether it be through the CLI or the web application.