Kevin Rooseaward-winning tech columnist, podcast host

OpenAI Dots Is Already Changing How AI Agents Look

15 Oct 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:00

In this segment of the YouTube video, Kevin Roose asks what sets the AI agent product Dots apart. The guest enthusiastically describes how Dots is dramatically improving his workflow, handling a flood of business‑related, tedious questions that he never faced before. He compares Dots to a competing agent, Town, noting that Town’s recent redesign now mimics Dots’ running‑thread interface—where users simply type a request and the agent continues the conversation. This convergence suggests a emerging standard for agent UI design, and the guest believes OpenAI could benefit from these developments.

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You know, we hear all the time about agents. The thing that is different about Dots is what?
I gotta say, man, this thing is doing stuff for me that is like legitimately blowing my mind and making me very excited that I have it. Again, you know, this is the first time I'm doing what I like to call a real business. And so I have more business-related tedious questions to answer every day than I ever have had in my entire life. We've been using this other agent product called Town, and Town does some pretty cool stuff as well. But we started looking at this thing this week and we were like, this already just feels old and dated now because Dots exists. Well, literally a day later, Town introduced a redesign where they're now doing the exact same basic design as Dots, where it is also now just a running thread and you get in there and you tell it what you want it to do and it goes. So I think we're sort of like converging on like what is the actual desired user interface for these agent products. Yeah. And, um, and, and I think OpenAI really could cheer.