Thoughts, Ruminations, & Pontifications

Web apps have trapped everything in a single, unyielding window -- the browser. Everything just exists inside the single rigid container; we can’t juxtapose, align, overlap our apps experiences without creating whole new frames. This has resulted in web browser vendors attempting to re-create the windowing capabilities of an OS inside a web browser, but ignoring the power of the operating system’s own windowing capabilities. It seems inevitable that we are to continue this struggle with the…

Everybody believes that people aspire to have an AI agent that will do their bidding -- book their flights, plan their trip, order their meal, etc. because the people funding it already have a personal assistant who has already been granted the permission -- trusted! -- to do everything on their behalf. But some of us just want to be able to do these things without having to turn the task into a quest -— I’m happy to pick the food I want, plan my trip… it’s part of the rich tapestry of life.…

The electrician pulls into your driveway. They're scheduled today to fix your fire alarms that have been going off intermittently at the most fucking inconvenient time (3am. Always 3am). The electrician had come by a couple of days beforehand, when you showed them the issues, talked about remedies, agreed the plan. The electrician comes to your door with all their tools and equipment. They bring their helper too. They're going to set the helper up for success so they can do the work…

How much of “AI will automate this away” is about work that is held back by poor UX, malicious regulatory interpretation, or intentional obstacles to dissuade leveraging of that work? “Filing insurance could be done by an AI rather than a health care worker”. Separate from “cost”, why is it so complex to file insurance anyway? Why do we need a complex process around this when, in reality, it should be much simpler. Much of what is there isn’t inherently complex, right? What if instead of…

The advent of AI chat bots has positioned ‘chat’ front-and-centre as the future of UX - the nexus of all conversations, all interactions. And they portend to have personality; they’re friendly and converse with you in your own colloquialisms. Coincidentally, “Chat Box” experiences are popular amongst software engineers. This is because they don’t need to build intuitive, usable, UI. It can be abdicated the LLM under cover of ‘articulate it in words’ and when it doesn't work ‘you’re dumb if you…

The rise of the “chat box” implies that the CLI was the only true interface, with GUIs being a 40 year detour till we found our way back to… describing what we want rather than just doing it.

Optimisation of the funnel & retention requires engineering investment. When your investment in funnel optimisation & retention is greater than your investment in features & product quality, it is likely your business is doomed. Optimisation is the original sin of tech.

IMHO the need to call customer service is often, in reality, a failing of UX — a bug, or an explicit decision to employ a dark pattern. ‘Why is my account not letting me do x or y’: bug. ‘Why can’t I cancel or step down on the website?’: dark pattern. ‘Why can’t I schedule this appointment right now’: UX failing. Why do they persist? I just want to do a thing, but you force me to call, when it’s a very simple transactional task. I’m not saying we don’t need to call a human occasionally, but…

Your perspective changes with age because you see less opportunity in front of you. Not because your experiences have made you cynical & jaded, but because you have less time on this earth to realise the remaining opportunity. You have to be intentional with your remaining minutes — dealing with other people’s bullshit is not a valuable use of those minutes.

What I value as a professional, and what I value as a hobbyist, used to be the same thing. They've quietly diverged, and I'm sitting with that.

We're using AI to write things nobody reads, and AI to read things nobody wrote.

We're not altruistic. We're mercenary.

LLM coding tools are powerful, transformative, and will absolutely generate you a pile of plastic goo if you let them.