Comment by rglullis
13 hours ago
> Which results in them making more
Not necessarily.
You are assuming that the people can consume whatever is put in front of them. Markets get saturated fast. The "changes in the industry" mean nothing.
13 hours ago
> Which results in them making more
Not necessarily.
You are assuming that the people can consume whatever is put in front of them. Markets get saturated fast. The "changes in the industry" mean nothing.
A) People are so used to infinite growth that it’s hard to imagine a market where that doesn’t exist. The industry can have enough developers and there’s a good chance we’re going to crash right the fuck into that pretty quickly. America’s industrial labor pool seemed like it provided an ever-expanding supply of jobs right up until it didn’t. Then, in the 80s, it started going backwards preeeetttty dramatically.
B) No amount of money will make people buy something that doesn’t add value to or enrich their lives. You still need ideas, for things in markets that have room for those ideas. This is where product design comes in. Despite what many developers think, there are many kinds of designers in this industry and most of them are not the software equivalent of interior decorators. Designing good products is hard, and image generators don’t make that easier.
Its really wild how much good UI stands out to me now that the internet is been flooded with generically produced slop. I created a bookmarks folder for beautiful sites that clearly weren't created by LLMs and required a ton of sweat to design the UI/UX.
I think we will transition to a world where handmade software/design will come at a huge premium (especially as the average person gets more distanced from the actual work required to do so, and the skills become rarer). Just like the wealthy pay for handmade shoes, as opposed to something off the shelf from footlocker, I think companies will revert back to hand crafted UX. These identical center column layout's with a 3x3 feature card grid at the bottom of your landing page are going to get really old fast in a sea of identical design patterns.
To be fair component libraries were already contributing to this degradation in design quality, but LLM s are making it much worse.
Paying a premium for "luxury" makes sense for people looking status signaling or an unique experience. Software is (most of the time) an utility. People would be willing to pay for a premium when there is tangible performance improvement. No one is going to pay more for a run-of-the-mill SaaS offering because the website was handcrafted.
Yeah. For a few years, I’ve been predicting that human-made and designed digital goods will be desirable luxury items in the same exact way the Arts and Crafts movement, in the late 19th/early 20th century, made artisan furniture, buildings, etc. to push back against the megatons of chintzy shit produced during the Industrial Revolution.
Component libraries can be used to great effect if they are used thoughtfully in the design process, rather than in lieu of a design process.