This, unfortunately, takes time, as one has to restart many times because of ideas that turned out not to be as great as one had initially thought. And it results in software that is called "opinionated", and often does not follow what the "industry" does.
Also, where are the AI-operated startups?? Why has nobody’s openclaw biz gone multinational by now?
AI is not capable of empathy.
AI is not capable of having good taste.
I have an experiment to offer. Find a really, really great example of something poorly-designed, too busy or whatever other metric you want to use as your "poorly-designed" thing, then ask Claude what's wrong with it and how it should be improved?
The lies of this decade. Hopefully we will heal sooner than later
This puts large orgs at a disadvantage because they are built to coordinate work across a collection of narrowly scoped roles and keep people in their lane, so they aren’t built to hire for and leverage broad skillsets.
Then we will soon forget how our airplanes works
Defining what to build in enough details is how you get the business logic nailed down (aka essential complexity, aka the domain in DDD). Code is just formal writing and architecture is there for maintenance (a program can be in a single file).
Sure there are accidental complexity like the intricacies of the tech, but those are actually explained very well in the docs.
Unfortunately, humanity seems like a race destined to kill itself. People are more interested in how much they hate their neighbor or feel excited about an advertisement than anything meaningful. such a society has no basis for stable governance.
When you're creating art or even a product, what you create is a result of your particular values and particular tastes and those drive some sort of purpose for whatever it is you're creating. What you're building is, generally, made for the consumption or use by another person (even if indirectly), and we mostly have empathy and want those people to have a good experience with whatever we're creating. We think about our audience and weigh their particular needs.
When you use good software, you can sense the intent in what was made. The person (or team) combined their particular point of view with that of the goals of the user. At this point, I don't think agentic coding is going to give you that, at least not fully. It might get most of the shared values and common things right as a result of its training data, but a human still needs to edit the output or steer it on a good path that only they can see and which is part of a larger vision. For simpler needs, taste and values matter less, but for more complex things, it makes a difference, in my opinion.
It may not be your taste, but it certainly has taste, and its taste will only get better with more training. Yours, if you use it, will atrophy, as you reduce contact with the details of your problems.
Agentic coding is a replacement for your agency.
I'm sure we've all met someone who has a unique speaking style and might repeat phrases or words unusually often, but that still doesn't bug us as much as "the honest truth.." or "load-bearing.."
Even with newer model generations larger efforts still seem to drift back towards "default choices" vs "steered specific aims."
In many areas, "good" taste is not particularly good anymore when it's everything's default style.
The edge then becomes finding the niches that (a) can be better served w/ non-defaults and (b) have economic characteristics that make it worth catering towards those.
I think the days of one-size-fits-all huge-scale-and-ROI SaaS swiss army knives are quite numbered, but I think the replacement world could be a much more vibrant ecosystem with a much more varied set of players.
I don’t see how this is any different. The input comes in a different section of context and potentially before rather than after generation, but that doesn’t change that human taste is needed.
let foo = {
if bar {
1
} else if baz {
2
} else {
3
}
};
foo = bar ? 1
: baz ? 2
: 3;AI lets people get personalized software for "free" as derivative of existing work. Think adobe suite but with the 5% that an individual needs.
Then taste loses value as everyone has their own software.
That's where I am in that train of thought at least. Pretty grim I know.
I sometimes think, "what art would a rogue AI consciousness create to satiate its own artistic impulses?"
If the target audience was fellow rogue AI entities, I don't think there's any guarantee that such art would be compelling to humans, or even comprehensible.
And if its a human directing the AI so that the output is compelling to humans, then there's a human in the loop, whose "values, intent, and taste" matter.
How do you know that? AI is also software. Who controls that software?
Plus, AI picking up data from real human means they will also incure bias aka "taste".
This is a a very good and succinct summarization.
What I'm also observing recently also is that pretty much every product tries to expand to do things that completely different products used to do, and become a mega-product-for-everything. It's like a Zawinski's Law on steroids.
I'm not trying to buy a labyrinth.
From the user's perspective, sure. Or when a particular product or version ships, then it's "done" as far as that version is concerned.
But from the maker's perspective... nothing will ever be complete. Even in the most meta sense possible.
Philosophy is fun :)
The opinions are those of the creators and that isn’t changing with AI.
I agree that with AI it's very tempting to throw together a bunch of code without any thought of the longer term. But a lot of people are acting as if all programmers are artisans that produce well written code following the highest standards. That is just not true.
That said, if you think developers have never enjoyed telling other people what to or not to build, I recommend checking out Stack Overflow.
Claude is better because it validates its work visually and seems to have a more intuitive sense of what makes an interface pleasant to use.
Codex manages to be both rigidly literal about the spec but also prone to adding unnecessary explanatory text, helper elements and visual clutter, oddly like a 1990s ERP system.
The role of product manager/product design is literally to turn whatever is being asked for into the optimal solution someone would actually want to use - it's this translation instinct that is missing from AI.
Yes, it looks like people've choosen chat interface. They don't like filling forms.
> Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently, each operating a small software factory. Each change might make sense on its own, but together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.
Before agents people do the same and our code bases not perfect.
Behind software not only creator, it's people who interested in and users. To make software creator needs a factory.
> Making software is getting easier.
Nope, cuz we have a lot of Frankensteins and chat interface
This week Porsche showed the mission-S concept, not even a screen in the car. Few features, dedicated to driving and I guess the user manual won't be a 500 pages book. In France Dacia Sandero (low cost car with only basic features) is the most sold in the country. I am not a fan of Steve Jobs and never owned an Apple but, correct me if I am wrong, he wanted a limit set of useful and perfect features for his products.
> Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently,
> each operating a small software factory.
>
> [...] together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster
> rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.
I thought so too, makes you fuzzy and stuff inside. I wonder if this person behind X template is limited to software though? Curious if we can feel the aura of the sweatshop workers' "experiences, perspectives and hopes and dreams" while using our smartphones and gadgets. It's nice to think about, isn't it? AI couldn't replicate these intangible and difficult-to-quantify delights.