The issue with UI has at least two dimensions: how nice it looks and feels for the end user, and how easy it is to use and implement on the programmer side. The first one is only partially better in the web world, where a lot of designers have been involved in the development of thousands of UI frameworks.
And while it looks better, the feel is often not good at all. For the same reason why systems programmers tend to do better work on the implementation side - the underlying web tech is complete dog shit. I'd rather use Dear IMGUI for the rest of my life than touch all these layered JS frameworks and CSS nonsense.
And if a programmer has taste and actually puts effort into the UX side as well, you get a much better result on both fronts. Just look at FilePilot, for example.
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).
It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.
The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.
We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.
I worry.
The time has come.
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