The suggestion chip
A pre-written prompt the user can tap instead of type.
Most suggestion chips above the composer are generic, decorative, and wrong. They exist to fill space, not to start a session. Done right, though, a chip is the cheapest form of onboarding a product ever ships. It's a sentence the user was going to try anyway, typed for them.
The job of a chip isn't to advertise what the model can do. It's to model what a good prompt looks like, for this user, right now. That distinction rewrites the whole feature.
"A chip isn't a menu. It's a memory. What did this user just ship? What did they not finish? Start from there."
Chips borrow from the last turn.
Cold chips feel like a demo. "Summarize this." "Translate to Spanish." They never match the user's actual task. Warm chips reach back to what the user was doing yesterday and suggest the obvious next move. Adaptive chips go further: they know the week, the deliverable, the half-finished doc sitting in a tab.
The heuristic is almost boring: the better the chip, the more it reads like a note-to-self.
Warm chips borrow from the user's last turn. Already better.
Users don't know what they're allowed to ask.
A new user doesn't know the model's boundaries. A returning user doesn't know what's changed. In both cases, chips are scaffolding for intent. They teach without lecturing. A specific chip is instantly more useful than a paragraph of documentation, because the user can click it.
Chips that earn their place.
- Resume. "Continue where you stopped." Cheapest, most reliable. Works in 90% of sessions.
- Contrast. "Compare these two drafts." Surfaces a use-case the user might not think to ask for but clearly needs.
- Re-read. "Ship-ready version of Friday's doc." Implies the model has memory. When it does, this chip is gold. When it doesn't, don't fake it.
Chips that betray their own promise.
The failure mode is chips that reference things the model can't actually do. "Summarize last week's meetings" when the product has no calendar access. The chip writes a check the product can't cash, and the user clicks it once before deciding the product lies.
What this pattern gets wrong when it gets wrong.
- Confidence theater
- Language or typography that performs certainty beyond what the model actually has.
- Empty disclaimer
- A legal-feeling warning that carries no specific information about this particular response.
Three shipping variants worth copying.
- Three rotating chips with a 'shuffle' control
- Chips that fill the composer but don't auto-send
- A single 'why these?' link that opens a sentence of context