It's a complete takeover of technically incompetent management that feels like it can finally execute their ideas to the fullest instead of relying on those pesky swengs with their obstructions, complaints and problems. We'll soon get the management utopia everywhere.
Principal engineer balks at bad UX when the PM should know better (it's their job)
2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it
2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please
To be fair, it was already done by bad managers long before.
I saw a trend of UX/UI designers coming with practice which I knew better were wrong. But they insisted. E.g hijack brosser native controls.
Will never know whether they passed along some manager/PM commandements or were just incompetent.
> But they insisted. E.g hijack brosser native controls.
[Rant-Example] The goshdarn ticketing-system hijacks alt-f, so that instead of opening the File menu of my browser, and instead toggles the favorite-status of whatever ticket I happen to be viewing.
A mistake was made early on even letting web apps see keystrokes like that. In a better world, modifier keys were used in a principled way from the start - only the window manager gets to see meta-anything, only the shell or GUI app gets to see control-anything, and web apps can work with alt-anything.
Have you tried creating a ticket complaining about this?
Press alt f to pay respect with the "respect my AI.thority" subscription
To be fair, the native browser controls have had too many quirks and features fox UX/UI consistency.
Corporate needs their Brand™ look precisely as specified in their expensive Style Guide. IBM wouldn't want the Google vibes of Android Material Design TextFields, I imagine.
Scratch beneath the visuals, and starker technical differences appear.
Safari on iOS (used to?) has a 350ms debounce delay on every tap / click, in case you want to do a multitouch gesture.
JavaScript (Frameworks) were the only way this arbitrary delay to user input could be reduced before 2015, when Apple finally released a native API for this.
https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/
> To be fair, the native browser controls have had too many quirks and features fox UX/UI consistency.
Well, too many to have a single website be consistent across browsers.
But as a user I'm using one specific browsers, and I expect all websites be consistent for that browser.
With some resistance. Now they do it far more often.
2026: you're fired. Hey Claude, implement bad idea please
That is a great idea, very inspirational!
Do you want me to implement another bad idea, too?
That's how I got my first opportunity 20 years ago
Don't hate the player hate the game I guess
:'D
It wasn’t AI that brought us Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards, nor the 10,000,000 ••• menus that have infested every webapp in the past 10 years as an alternative to thoughtful UI design. We humans made everything shitty before we made AI.
> Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards
It's a tangential point, but I turned on System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast (the on/off option, not Display Contrast) and now at least the windows are outlined sharply.
The "Differentiate wihout color" is one I like. All of the on/off sliders now have a 1 or 0 to indicate on/off
OMG this is wonderful! Thank you.
A lot of people who think of themselves as able-bodied never think to poke around in the Accessibility sections of their settings menus. But it turns out that accessibility options are for everyone; people should really think of and evaluate them as first class tools more often
Or,are we just getting older and these things suddenly matter?
Nah, one of the things I found in Discord's accessibility settings is an ability to turn off or reduce animations and other visual effects by default, which is wonderful no matter your ability.
Possibly a factor, but I also think these issues are becoming much more widespread, leaving us less able to tolerate them than when they were less common.
A button looking like a button isn't an age (of the reader) thing.
Of course it is. What should a button on a screen look like, after all, it has absolutely nothing to do with a large mechanical button from the 80s the old designs tried to emulate. In fact, such buttons are becoming rare even in the physical world, the younger generation is more and more accustomed to touch buttons for operating all kinds of machinery around them. So "like a button" is very much an age thing
Looking like a "touch button" is still looking like a button. Some indication that an element is tappable is still useful.
[flagged]
They really should just have a single checkbox, "Prioritise usability over wank", and leave it at that.
Good thing we trained our fortune teller calculators on all that historic shittiness!
Maybe, but at least the 10,000,000 options were there instead deemed that they are not to be used by those pesky users. And now its they are not just hidden. They are simply not there.
Guns and bombs also didn't create war. But they did made it way more lethal.
It makes perfect sense / there was that talk by the ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying something along the lines "imagine you could develop the software, but without that arrogant programmer". They just hate people, that's all.
Some time ago my then project owner remarked that possibly in the future apps won't require an UI and people will just interrogate the LLM directly.
I read that as a sign to make a coordinated exit.
Truth be told our project was one of many "catalogue of stuff" kind of apps which at this and projected scale could have well been a spreadsheet in the cloud with search enhanced by LLM.
100%
This AI boom is not a boom because its good for developers or users. It's a boom because it's a management dream; the promise of pumping up growth while reducing expensive workforce is simply too good for them to not throw decades of platitudes and "best practices" out the window. When people point out where AI fails, they're not seeing past the end of their nose. They don't realize they're not the real customers. It is leadership with millions in buying power who are the customers, and they're the same ones who only ever cared about managing the perception of success and growth; your clean code and user-focused development practices didn't matter to them back then and they certainly don't matter to them at all now. When it comes to an absolute state of garbage products and software, we still ain't seen nothin' yet.
To be fair, most of our industry is so stupendously bad at executing that you can keep growth and save costs by simply laying people off. No AI required.
That is true. AI reveals a festering problem.
Bring on the feature creep and epic down time
On the other hand, no one to place the blame on if management does it themselves.
The recent cases of companies who deleted their prod DBs while using LLMs are blaming “the rogue AI”. So it seems you can just blame AI lab companies and folks roll with it. Even better, they asked it to generate its own apology, no need to spend time trying to explain to your customers why everything is gone
That's definitely not true.
There's always people for management to blame. That's the great part of being management.
By definition, there's someone/thing you're managing that you can pass the blame onto.
Aren't you guys glad there are no programmers gatekeeping programming with their "morals" and "etiquette"? Any marketer with an LLM can update the programming tool now. AI really levels the playing field and it's time for pesky programmers to get off their high horse, don't you think? :)
Come off it. Sure some of them had "morals" but a decent chunk of them just lacked the imagination or connections to monetize their lack of morals.
after 2+ years of non-engineers vibecoding applications, show me one startup/app without devs.
Perennial HN trope: all bad tech evolutions are management's fault. Engineers are flawless paragons of technical purity.
Of course there are shitty engineers, but they aren't allowed to do anything without shitty management.
Hard to blame the engineer when the engineer gets fired for not implementing management's whims. As much as I'd like to hold people accountable and say they should just accept getting fired instead of compromising the ideals, the truth is I've got a family now and if they paid me enough I'd do the same.
The torment nexus was built by engineers. Not management.
It couldn't exist without engineers.
> The torment nexus was built by engineers. Not management.
Before the more recent wave of successful tech startups (say, from 2010 on), a very large amount of programmers were incredibly sensitive to anything related to topics like (posisbility of) surveillance, privacy, authorities (including government), centralized infrastructures, DRM etc.
In my feeling, the only reason why this mindset shifted is because from this wave on, in the USA, programmers were showered in money.
The interesting question rather is: now that tech companies want to become more frugal with respect to paying programmers, will the mindset among programmers shift back or not?
Only because murdering your project manager for terrible ideas is illegal
And engineers couldn't get rich themselves without the billionaires shelling out for them to build their torment nexuses.
I want to get rich too. I want to live a good life, and provide for my family. I don't want to just survive. So I can't say I don't empathize.
That's fine, just know that you permanently forfeit any right to complain about others doing things for personal gain that indirectly harm yourself.
> I want to live a good life, and provide for my family.
This is a lie you're telling yourself, you can do both just fine without building the torment nexus. Billions of people do so indeed.
> I want to get rich too.
You should've stopped here, but then it became too much so you had to resort to appending that nonsense. It's pure greed at the cost of everyone else, that's all. Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.
> you can do both just fine without building the torment nexus
Doubt. You don't become truly wealthy without doing what sociopathic CEOs do on a daily basis. Society actively rewards that stuff, and it's only getting worse with time.
> Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.
Sounds like a winning strategy to me. That's the exact sort of person this world rewards.
Things are not looking good out there. Billions of people get by without compromising? Billions of people live in poverty too. Not something I'm looking forward to dealing with, should the great AI replacement ever come knocking on my door.
Which would be fine if the only two choices were build the torment nexus or starve. But it's not the only source of income out there.
Yeah, maybe you won't "starve"... But will you live? Or will you merely survive? If that?
It's not looking too good out there. We've got trillionaires bragging to people's faces about how they're all going to be replaced by their AIs. It got to the point someone threw a molotov into one CEO's home.
Source of income? The promise of AI is to literally make all humans economically redundant. In a capitalist world, what is the point of keeping economically useless people alive? People who do nothing but cost society money? Why not turn them all into soylent instead?
If we don't create a post-scarcity society now, I'm not sure we ever will. Choices aren't looking too good out there.
Right, workers build the world. We should run it. Actually. Why does management get to tell us what to do without elections?
Workers are necessary but not sufficient for most businesses. You also need capital. This can be provided by the workers and is for many worker owners businesses, but when the business is very capital intensive that's just not feasible.
Are workers going to be able to fund Apple's factories or ExxonMobil's oil exploration? No, so they're not in charge.
You absolutely can start a worker owned business right now, or go work for one.
Remind me who makes the final decisions in these scenarios. Also, how do boots taste?