Menus Are a Legacy Pattern. AI Makes Them Optional.

David Raigoza — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:18:48 +0000

Menus are an answer to a problem we stopped questioning.
You land on a website and immediately have to learn its logic. Where they put things, what they decided to call things, how deep the rabbit hole goes before you find what you actually came for. The website makes you do the work.

I wasn't trying to reinvent navigation. I was trying to finish my portfolio so I could stop doomscrolling. But somewhere between adding an AI chatbot that hallucinated experiences I don't have and testing it with real people, something clicked.

The problem was never information. Websites have always had plenty of that. The problem is that we still navigate them like it's 2005, clicking through menus someone else designed, learning someone else's logic. AI doesn't fix that by answering questions. It fixes it by becoming the guide.

So I built the obvious thing first. A chatbot. Got a Groq API key, added a route, fed it my resume, and told myself it was done.
It wasn't done.

I sent the portfolio to some friends and my girlfriend and stood behind them watching. This is something I'd recommend to anyone building anything. Don't ask for feedback. Just watch. They asked the AI whatever they wanted, and at some point they stopped asking about me entirely. One of them asked if I could build a plastic recycling system. The chatbot said yes. It connected a microcasting process for silver jewelry to plastics and invented a solution I have never thought of and definitely cannot build.

Technically impressive. Completely useless.

The hallucinations weren't the real problem though. I could tune the temperature, tighten the prompt, and add guardrails. What I couldn't fix was the fundamental thing I had built: a chatbot that sat there waiting to be asked questions. That's not an agent. That's a FAQ page with a personality.

I went back to the question I should have started with. What does a recruiter actually need when they land on a portfolio? They don't need answers. They need a path. They have two minutes, maybe less, and 200 other tabs open. They need someone to say: here, this is what matters, let me show you.

Instead of giving the model more context, I gave it more agency. I exposed my Next.js router and project schemas as tools. The model could now open projects, trigger guided tours, and move visitors through the portfolio. It wasn't generating descriptions anymore. It was operating the interface.

That's when it stopped being a chatbot.

Here's what I think is actually happening.

Menus exist because websites couldn't know who you were or what you needed. So they built a map and made you navigate it. That was a reasonable solution in 1999. We just never stopped using it.

AI changes the premise. Not because it can answer questions. There are a thousand tools that can answer questions, but because it can understand context and act on it. That's a different thing entirely. That's the difference between a sign and a person who walks you there.

What I built is small. A portfolio with a guide instead of a nav bar. But the pattern scales. Imagine onboarding flows that route themselves based on your role. Documentation that asks what you're trying to do before showing you anything. E-commerce that doesn't make you navigate categories and filters. You describe what you want, and it takes you there.

We're not replacing interfaces. We're replacing the assumption that users should have to learn them.

I thought I was building a portfolio assistant. What I actually built was an argument against menus. Whether that’s the future of websites or just an interesting experiment, I don’t know yet. But I think we’re about to find out.

DEV Community: David Raigoza

Menus Are a Legacy Pattern. AI Makes Them Optional.