Stripe is the company I usually hold up as the exemplar of polished internal tools. Hopefully this is taken the right way and I don't want to be negative towards the teams working on this, but I see a distinct lack of polish in these tools and presentations. Some examples:
- Unnecessary AI copy throughout the interfaces like "Browse, discover, and manage skils for your agents", "No favorites yet — hover a card and click the star to pin it here", "One execution environment, shared across agents". These instantly read as AI copy and decrease my enthusiasm.
- Inconsistent, AI-sloppy look-and-feel with different typefaces spattered across the interface.
- The session metrics slide looks busy and AI-generated. It repeats 360,014 sessions in one of the cells at the top, but also has a "360K sessions" in the heading.
I don't know if I'm the only one that notices this stuff, or whether others see it too.
I think there’s been somewhat of a mask-off moment post-AI in which we’ve realized that a lot of the careful and considered output we’ve come to expect of some companies wasn’t out of a respect for the craft or desire to produce “good work”.
Pre-AI the attitude was: if we are going to do something, it is going to use up our precious resources, so we should do it well, because our staff are capable and the marginal cost of doing it well vs. doing it at all is negligible.
Post-AI: we can churn out things quickly, we don’t have to worry about resource allocation, churn churn churn!
Ultimately, it is pragmatic for businesses to behave this way, but it is a shame for those who love the craft. I think we took for granted the beautiful ornate hand carved furniture era of software engineering. We are now in the ikea era.
I don't think the beautiful ornate hand carved furniture era of software engineering has existed for many decades now.
What's happening right now is more like, we're moving from a hyper-optimized era of just-in-time manufacturing (in software, this is called "Agile", "scrum", "sprints", etc.) to getting our manufacturing outsourced to another country. In software, the "other country" is AI.
quadrifoliate · · focus · HN ↗
- Unnecessary AI copy throughout the interfaces like "Browse, discover, and manage skils for your agents", "No favorites yet — hover a card and click the star to pin it here", "One execution environment, shared across agents". These instantly read as AI copy and decrease my enthusiasm.
- Inconsistent, AI-sloppy look-and-feel with different typefaces spattered across the interface.
- The session metrics slide looks busy and AI-generated. It repeats 360,014 sessions in one of the cells at the top, but also has a "360K sessions" in the heading.
I don't know if I'm the only one that notices this stuff, or whether others see it too.
reticulates · · focus · HN ↗
Pre-AI the attitude was: if we are going to do something, it is going to use up our precious resources, so we should do it well, because our staff are capable and the marginal cost of doing it well vs. doing it at all is negligible.
Post-AI: we can churn out things quickly, we don’t have to worry about resource allocation, churn churn churn!
Ultimately, it is pragmatic for businesses to behave this way, but it is a shame for those who love the craft. I think we took for granted the beautiful ornate hand carved furniture era of software engineering. We are now in the ikea era.
hax0ron3 · · focus · HN ↗
What's happening right now is more like, we're moving from a hyper-optimized era of just-in-time manufacturing (in software, this is called "Agile", "scrum", "sprints", etc.) to getting our manufacturing outsourced to another country. In software, the "other country" is AI.
SandersAK · · focus · HN ↗
sebastiansm7 · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗