AI in UX is a tool, not a personality
When I built Pantry Chef — an AI kitchen assistant app using the Anthropic Claude API — the hardest design decision was not the interface. It was deciding what the AI should not do.
Everyone building AI products right now is trying to give the AI a personality. A name, a tone of voice, a little avatar that blinks. The assumption is that if the AI feels like a character, users will engage more. In my experience, the opposite is usually true.
Users want outcomes, not conversations
Pantry Chef users open the app because they are standing in their kitchen with random ingredients and no idea what to cook. They are not there to chat. They are there to solve a problem in the next 30 seconds. The first version of the app had an onboarding chat — the AI introduced itself, asked preference questions, built a flavour profile. Users skipped it entirely. They just typed their ingredients and expected a recipe. The personality was in the way.
The interface should disappear
The best AI UX is invisible. It takes what you give it and returns what you need, without making you feel like you are operating a piece of software. The moment a user has to think about how to phrase their input, or wonders why the AI gave an unexpected response, the interface has failed.
For Pantry Chef this meant designing tight input constraints — structured ingredient entry rather than open-ended text — combined with a Claude API prompt engineered to return exactly one recipe, clearly formatted, with substitution suggestions below. Not a conversation. A result.
When personality is appropriate
There are contexts where AI personality genuinely helps. Customer support bots benefit from warmth. Educational tools benefit from encouragement. Creative writing assistants benefit from enthusiasm. But even then, the personality should be subordinate to the function. The AI should never make the user feel like they are managing a relationship.
The practical principle
Before adding any AI interaction to a product, I ask one question: what does the user need to happen? Not what would be clever, not what would be impressive. What does the user need to happen in the next 10 seconds? Design the AI interaction around that answer. Everything else is decoration.
