What happens when you put a chatbot on your front door
A few weeks ago I typed “I want to remodel my house” into Better.com’s new AI prompt, the one that now greets you where an onboarding flow used to be.
It gave me two loan options. Reasonable ones. Then it did nothing.
It didn’t ask me to pick one. It didn’t move me forward. It just sat there waiting for my next question, as if the point were to keep chatting. So I typed “just tell me what to do next.” It told me to decide on a loan type.
That’s the moment that’s been bugging me.
Most users are not you
The conventional wisdom right now goes like this: everyone uses ChatGPT, everyone has used Google, so an open prompt is a universal interface. Drop a chat box on the homepage and you’re an AI company.
I don’t buy it. Less than 5% of people use AI every day. The person landing on a mortgage page isn’t a power user crafting prompts. They’re a first-time buyer who doesn’t know what a HELOC is or what they can afford. Hand them a blank box and you’ve handed them a deer-in-headlights moment. I’ve watched products lose up to half their top-of-funnel this way, people stuck in an agentic chat before they ever register.
The irony with Better is that one click takes you to their old railed flow (”what do you want the cash for,” then your address) and it’s the better experience. It frames the problem. It shows progress. It leaves room for testimonials and proof points. You’re further down the road in three steps than the chat got you in ten.
Chat isn’t the problem. Not converging is.
I build with Claude’s CLI every day, and it’s pure chat. But it drives me somewhere. It asks one sharp question, gives me options one, two, three, and I pick with a single keystroke. It’s trying to get me to a decision, not show me everything it can do.
That’s the whole difference. Better’s prompt diverges into more questions and more loops. Claude converges. Same interface, opposite product sense.
Here’s what I think actually happened: an executive said “make us AI-native,” and a team shipped a chatbot. Portlandia’s “put a bird on it,” except the bird is an LLM. Box checked. Nothing built.
The real opportunity was never chat versus forms. It’s using AI to make the railed experience smarter. Autofill the address. Ask the next question based on the last answer. Remove steps instead of adding a blank box. Use the prompt where the need is genuinely fuzzy, and a button everywhere else.
Don’t force someone to write a prompt when they could click. Don’t force a hundred clicks when they could just ask.
Taste didn’t get less important when generation got cheap. It got more important.
