Comment by storus
18 hours ago
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.
This is what I sees getting missed in a lot of LLM conversations. They're amplifiers. Full stop. If you have good practices they supercharge them, if you had bad practices, same thing.
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.
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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?
Give me a break. This was already happening with Web 2.0 and things like "microservices".
I know it's just that we are in an accelerated state of Putt's Law
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.
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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.
The sentiment is mutual.
[dead]
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.
> 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.
And those LLMs will run on unicorn farts and world hunger will be solved too. Do people lack basic logic or is it just when it comes to LLMs?
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.
Perennial HN trope: all bad tech evolutions are management's fault. Engineers are flawless paragons of technical purity.
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.
that defense did not work at nuremberg trial
The torment nexus was built by engineers. Not management.
It couldn't exist without engineers.
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Of course there are shitty engineers, but they aren't allowed to do anything without shitty management.
Found the project manager
Remind me who makes the final decisions in these scenarios. Also, how do boots taste?
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.