Thoughts, Ruminations, & Pontifications

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.