For twenty years, we've been trapped in the same pattern: dashboards, tabs, endless menus. The promise was that more options = more power, more completeness = better. What we actually built was cognitive chaos - forcing humans to adapt themselves to machines instead of the other way around.

My father is a brilliant man - a PhD who now creates generic Ozempic for a living. However, he's from the boomer generation who viscerally hates setting up new accounts. The endless configuration screens, the menu hierarchies, the assumption that you should learn the system. As a millennial, I internalized all this friction as just how computers work. I learned to navigate menu structures, to remember which sub-sub-menu held the setting I needed. But that friction was always there - we just normalized the cognitive overhead.

This is because the 2000s–2010s design mindset was "computer as filing cabinet." Skeumorphic design ruled because that's how we understood information: "folders" and "files" you would save, actual trash cans, desktops borrowed from physical office spaces. Personal finance apps like Mint and Quicken were just physical ledgers digitized - money managed in rows, columns, and tabs. Want to see spending? Go to the spending tab. Want budgets? Different tab. It was the filing cabinet mentality with pixels instead of paper.

The burden was on the human to double-click and navigate through information hierarchies, understand systems as trees - root nodes, branches, leaves. There was so much work just to use and extract information, let alone analyze and gather insights.

This made sense back then. It was the limitation of what was possible...but in the age of AI, we still have yet to evolve past it.

We've built incredibly sophisticated AI that can analyze complex patterns and predict market trends, assess semiconductor supply chain risks for billion-dollar companies, detect fraud patterns across millions of transactions - only to display these insights in the same old dashboards.

We obsess over physical ergonomics (posture, lighting, desk height) but ignore the interfaces reshaping our cognitive posture all day long.

So if not dashboards, then what?

Monofeed is an attempt at digital ergonomics in the AI age

The monofeed is a new interface paradigm: one surface, one flow, no navigation or tabs. Instead of forcing people to tab-hop through dashboards, the monofeed delivers a single contextual stream of cards, with each card being a self-contained atomic piece of information - processable within a 10-15 second window that gets to the meat of what's important.

Monofeed is built on a core idea:

Human cognition is serial, not parallel. Machines can crunch a billion rows at once; people think in cause-and-effect sequences. All that categorization, taxonomy, filtering and configuring - that's what computers do well. Dashboards flatten reality into abstract categories; monofeeds re-inflate it into narrative form - closer to conversation and memory. In an ironic way, AI is helping humans become more human again - receiving and communicating information like they've done for thousands of years.

Finance reveals this disconnect most clearly. At first it sounds heretical - how can you have a "finance app" with no dashboard? But money isn't just numbers to be filed away. It's autobiography. Every purchase is a line in the story of what you value, what you avoid, where you slip.

The tragedy is that banks and PFM tools flatten this autobiography into sterile tables, turning transactions into cold accounting entries instead of the living choices they actually are. People see the outcome - being broke at month-end - but can't trace it back to the lifestyle, mindset, and values that created it. That's why 90% of people never live up to what they think they could be doing with money.

Dashboards lecture and judge. Monofeeds narrate with empathy. Peek turns transactions into stories and actions you can actually follow through on.

for example: you open peek on sunday night. it's noticed your friday night ritual — uber rides + drinks adding up to about $240 every month. instead of just listing the charges, peek frames it back to you: "this is your party drinks ritual - want to keep tabs on it?" then it asks if you'd like a gentle alert next friday, right before heading out. it's not judging the choice, just helping you see the pattern more clearly.

The shift is already underway. TikTok and Duolingo proved feeds could captivate billions, but entertainment was always going to adopt this first. The deeper change will happen in finance, health, work - the parts of life still trapped in 2005's interface logic.

The "computer as filing cabinet" era asked us to be better computers - more organized, more categorical, more parallel in our thinking. We spent two decades learning their language. The monofeed finally lets computers speak ours.

When Peek shows you that Saturday spending pattern as a story instead of a pie chart, it's AI doing what it should have done all along - handling the categorizing invisibly, then delivering insights the way humans actually think: one thing at a time, right when it matters.

The monofeed isn't just the next interface. It's the first interface that actually fits the human mind.