4 ms·

While the speed of prototyping and even shipping to production has increased, I have been asking myself at what cost? I see a lot of garbage being shipped. Not

While the speed of prototyping and even shipping to production has increased, I have been asking myself at what cost? I see a lot of garbage being shipped. Not because the code quality is bad, because execution has become cheap now. Ideas even though crap, are getting prototyped. Things which look effective on the surface, but has real UX problems in the underneath, are getting prioritised because someone in the room can talk better and enrol a leader to align with the idea. Good old user research or talking to users to validate ideas, iron out issues in the user flows has become too slow for the new process!!

KaiShips 4mo ago
[flagged]
speff 4mo ago
Similar experience here, however my feeling is that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Garbage being made is indicative of a gap in the currently-available tools. User research should shift towards analyzing these prototypes and enhancing existing tools to fill this need.
jfim 4mo ago
Prototypes aren't only for UX though, sometimes they're for exploring whether something is technically possible, or what are the unknown unknowns in a particular area. For example, for personal projects, I've been wondering if it's possible to automatically create RSS feeds for pages that don't have them (yes), what are the challenges when building an archive-style page dumping system (need to dump CSSOM alongside getOuterHTML, remove/rewrite remote content, walk iframes, automate Chrome, scroll to load lazily loaded content, etc.), and if training a model to remove native ads from markdown coming from readability is possible (no, at least not with my current approach, but using the dom might work).
- dakolli 4mo ago
  Why wouldn't you use Archive Box? https://github.com/archivebox/archivebox https://github.com/archivebox/archivebox
  - abalashov 4mo ago
    I was today years old when I learned about this. Thank you!
  - jfim 4mo ago
    A few reasons. Learning is one of them, since I don't normally deal much with browser and web related technologies, so it's a good way to learn more about them. I also think there are a few interesting things you can explore that go beyond a simple carbon copy of what's on the Internet. Ideas that I've implemented are things like automatic extraction of audio tracks, transcription, and summarization, loading a page or podcast transcript into the context window of a LLM to discuss the arguments or factuality of the claims being made, automatically turning articles to reader view using readability/trafilatura, etc. Directions I'd like to explore would be things like multimodal search ("that page I read six months ago about computer security with neon green text on a black background", or give me a list of fitness related pages I've read in the last twelve months), personal statistics (how is the mix of topics I've been reading about changing over time), annotating pages instead of just passively reading them, maybe even P2P archiving or discussions about pages, and all kinds of other things. But installing archivebox would be easier indeed.
  - theshrike79 4mo ago
    Mostly because I only need to get a site into an RSS feed, I don't need a massive archival solution to do that.
tptacek 4mo ago
Can you help me understand what the "cost" of other people producing garbage is? Prototypes are generally shop jigs. You'd feel weird gold-plating a stop block.
- godelski 4mo ago
  > the "cost" of other people producing garbage is? Sure can! It's a well known phenomena, won the researchers a Nobel, and explains a lot of the American economy and "lack of taste". The Market of Lemons[0]. Lemon Markets really require one important thing: at time of purchase, the average consumer is unable to differentiate the quality of the product. Consumers are "rational"[1], so with "all other things being equal"[2], will make their purchases based on price. Therefore, the product that is cheaper but is also _in reality_ lower quality wins. This then pushes out any competition who is trying to differentiate their product through quality. Thus all products in that category decrease in quality and it becomes a race to the bottom, maximizing profits. I want to stress that this doesn't require that the quality of products are distinguishable by experts, but only by the average consumer. You can probably look around at tech and notice this pretty quickly. The average consumer is not really tech literate[3]. They can't tell the difference. Hell, my parents don't even know the difference between the internet speeds from their ISP, even with the numbers displayed. The numbers mean nothing to them. Do they want 1GBps? 100 MBps? They don't know! > Prototypes are generally shop jigs The problem is people are shipping prototypes. We may disagree what is a prototype and what is a shippable product, but that disagreement in itself is worth noting as part of the problem. I mean FFS we in the tech industry love selling things with the promise of future improvements. The last few iPhones shipped with the promise that they were going to get better with AI (did Apple intelligence really pan out? Did it pan out anywhere near what they promised? My Google Pixel phone still can't schedule a haircut for me or book a reservation at a restaurant, despite multiple promises). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons [1] Economics uses this term differently than what we use colloquially. Read "consumers make decisions based on the information available to them" not "consumers are geniuses and making perfect decisions" [2] i.e. the only distinguishing purchase criteria is price [3] If you think I'm wrong, please go spend a month outside Silicon Valley. Hell, go try a different country, and not in the major metro areas. We're nerds here. Every single person on HN is above average in this respect.
sarchertech 4mo ago
The same thing happened when figma made it easier make prototypes that looked real and people stopped doing low fidelity mockups. Everyone understands that a wireframe isn’t done yet and it’s easy to change at that phase.
- cm11 4mo ago
  This I believe is lowkey one of the core ways design broke at tech companies. There are other big ones, design (really product) is broke deeply, but once mockups became easy we stopped having discussions about information architecture and UX. We're talking about whether we think this looks nicer in blue or green. Happened before Figma, but Figma really grew it. The designers that tried to hold onto wireframes (or went to mockups, but tried to still have architecture discussions with them) fought an uphill battle—what were these guys even talking about? Even the other designers thought this. Once mockups became easy, that little bit of vocational gate (as in gate-keeping) that was holding the wall for UX work went away. Execs and PMs could make decent looking rectangles, so designers became the people who could make especially nice looking rectangles. So you got a lot of product/UX designers that were much more visual designers. That matters, but the prior part was bigger in that the product processes and sprints often started to have little design in them at all. What was a two or three phase process was one, designer got requirements and made design—often they didn't even really get requirements before design. The design was the impetus for the requirements not the other way around. This is what became standard: Leader would give something vague because they didn't have much idea or vision yet. They probably had something blue-sky-ish, meaning they had a bunch of ideas, which in amorphous abstract blue skies come together. Once those things appear side by side on paper/screen, they're off putting and contradicting. There are problems not just with how to fit the pieces, but with the pieces. The visual the designer provides triggers this. Designers being visual people can see a lot of that in their head beforehand, but won't be heard until they show "bad work." It's pretty common though to see the PM or the leader look at it and say it wasn't the vague requirements, it's that the designer didn't get it. Anyways, it's that design that then kicks off some assessment against reality. Then you have a little bit of a shot at real requirements starting to leak out.
  - 4mo ago
fHr 4mo ago
Time saves on stupid shit management thinks works!
- jayd16 4mo ago
  But there's always more stupid shit to work on, so it just increases noise to signal in the app, no?
Fabricio20 4mo ago
> Good old user research or talking to users to validate ideas, iron out issues in the user flows has become too slow for the new process I haven't seen these in at least a decade in the industry!! Everywhere I used to work was always "PM wanted" or similar and the validation was always just QA making sure the thing works/does the bare minimum!!! Customer input was just for bugs. I hope that with AI speeding up prototyping we can actually go the other way long term, where we go back to ACTUALLY talking to a customer and then quickly prototyping it to see if it is what they wanted. Figuring out what the customer wants remains the hardest part of software engineering, but at least right now its mainly because we just dont talk to the customer.
Applejinx 4mo ago
I'm in an industry where I can really see this, executed by honestly talented people able to interpret what the LLMs produce. It's bikeshedding hell. If you pursue every possible idea and get to implement all of them and it actually works, in the best possible scenario with no technical debt because you're able to stay on top of it (presumably in the window you have before you just burn out), you end up with all the ideas at once. The project has tracked your imaginative state, and perhaps the states of your beta testers as they imagine things. It's a power armor suit tailored to specifically you. Nobody else will ever fit it because it's evolving too fast, all to implement your every whim. I've seen this take 1.0 projects that are intentionally wildly scope-limited and great at that, and balloon until the project is the Everything Machine, doing everything but send email. I guess in the new era, every project expands until it becomes alive and devotes itself to your service… or at least, does its level best to be that for you and your beta team. These things are not approachable. They're fever dreams, unparsable by outsiders. Discipline is lacking.
jayd16 4mo ago
Making software for users? Who even does that any more?
totetsu 4mo ago
Before if you had a crap idea you atleast had to face the social back-pressure of explaining it to someone at a local hackers meetup and trying to convince them to build it for you..
virgil_disgr4ce 4mo ago
> Things which look effective on the surface, but has real UX problems in the underneath, are getting prioritised because someone in the room can talk better and enrol a leader to align with the idea This has always existed. The ability to rapidly prototype has not changed it in any way. An extremely experienced UX researcher once told me that, having been doing field research and user research for 3 decades now, every time it's a Fortune 500 company, after presenting mountains of research, it comes down to what color the CEO liked in the moment. I don't understand the proclivity to latch onto whatever the new thing is and blame it for shitty decision-making that has existed as long as humans have existed.
deterministic 4mo ago
The same thing happens because of tools like the Unity/Unreal engine. Lots of low quality barely-more-than-a-demo "games" uploaded to steam. However those games rightly fail to make any decent $ so probably not a problem long term.
onion2k 4mo ago
I see a lot of garbage being shipped. One of the second order effects of AI collapsing the cost of building things is that product management is much more important now. A Product Owner/Manager who lacks the taste and insight (or data) to know what they should put in front of users and what they should just put in the bin will cause a company real harm, especially if the company moves to a "there's zero effort in building something, so we'll try everything!" model. The only part that's really collapsed in effort is the translation from requirements into code. If you're using AI to generate requirements you're effectively building things based on what a 'random' requirements generator says. If that's as good as the requirements a Product Owner was writing then that person needs to improve.
socalgal2 4mo ago
I'm having a hard time seeing your point. Faster iteration = easier to fix UX issues. That's all the LLM is providing here. Problems with UX = bad decisions. Those happen with or without LLMs.

KaiShips 4mo ago

[flagged]

speff 4mo ago

Similar experience here, however my feeling is that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Garbage being made is indicative of a gap in the currently-available tools. User research should shift towards analyzing these prototypes and enhancing existing tools to fill this need.

jfim 4mo ago

Prototypes aren't only for UX though, sometimes they're for exploring whether something is technically possible, or what are the unknown unknowns in a particular area. For example, for personal projects, I've been wondering if it's possible to automatically create RSS feeds for pages that don't have them (yes), what are the challenges when building an archive-style page dumping system (need to dump CSSOM alongside getOuterHTML, remove/rewrite remote content, walk iframes, automate Chrome, scroll to load lazily loaded content, etc.), and if training a model to remove native ads from markdown coming from readability is possible (no, at least not with my current approach, but using the dom might work).

dakolli 4mo ago
Why wouldn't you use Archive Box? https://github.com/archivebox/archivebox https://github.com/archivebox/archivebox
- abalashov 4mo ago
  I was today years old when I learned about this. Thank you!
- jfim 4mo ago
  A few reasons. Learning is one of them, since I don't normally deal much with browser and web related technologies, so it's a good way to learn more about them. I also think there are a few interesting things you can explore that go beyond a simple carbon copy of what's on the Internet. Ideas that I've implemented are things like automatic extraction of audio tracks, transcription, and summarization, loading a page or podcast transcript into the context window of a LLM to discuss the arguments or factuality of the claims being made, automatically turning articles to reader view using readability/trafilatura, etc. Directions I'd like to explore would be things like multimodal search ("that page I read six months ago about computer security with neon green text on a black background", or give me a list of fitness related pages I've read in the last twelve months), personal statistics (how is the mix of topics I've been reading about changing over time), annotating pages instead of just passively reading them, maybe even P2P archiving or discussions about pages, and all kinds of other things. But installing archivebox would be easier indeed.
- theshrike79 4mo ago
  Mostly because I only need to get a site into an RSS feed, I don't need a massive archival solution to do that.

tptacek 4mo ago

Can you help me understand what the "cost" of other people producing garbage is? Prototypes are generally shop jigs. You'd feel weird gold-plating a stop block.

godelski 4mo ago
> the "cost" of other people producing garbage is? Sure can! It's a well known phenomena, won the researchers a Nobel, and explains a lot of the American economy and "lack of taste". The Market of Lemons[0]. Lemon Markets really require one important thing: at time of purchase, the average consumer is unable to differentiate the quality of the product. Consumers are "rational"[1], so with "all other things being equal"[2], will make their purchases based on price. Therefore, the product that is cheaper but is also _in reality_ lower quality wins. This then pushes out any competition who is trying to differentiate their product through quality. Thus all products in that category decrease in quality and it becomes a race to the bottom, maximizing profits. I want to stress that this doesn't require that the quality of products are distinguishable by experts, but only by the average consumer. You can probably look around at tech and notice this pretty quickly. The average consumer is not really tech literate[3]. They can't tell the difference. Hell, my parents don't even know the difference between the internet speeds from their ISP, even with the numbers displayed. The numbers mean nothing to them. Do they want 1GBps? 100 MBps? They don't know! > Prototypes are generally shop jigs The problem is people are shipping prototypes. We may disagree what is a prototype and what is a shippable product, but that disagreement in itself is worth noting as part of the problem. I mean FFS we in the tech industry love selling things with the promise of future improvements. The last few iPhones shipped with the promise that they were going to get better with AI (did Apple intelligence really pan out? Did it pan out anywhere near what they promised? My Google Pixel phone still can't schedule a haircut for me or book a reservation at a restaurant, despite multiple promises). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons [1] Economics uses this term differently than what we use colloquially. Read "consumers make decisions based on the information available to them" not "consumers are geniuses and making perfect decisions" [2] i.e. the only distinguishing purchase criteria is price [3] If you think I'm wrong, please go spend a month outside Silicon Valley. Hell, go try a different country, and not in the major metro areas. We're nerds here. Every single person on HN is above average in this respect.

sarchertech 4mo ago

The same thing happened when figma made it easier make prototypes that looked real and people stopped doing low fidelity mockups. Everyone understands that a wireframe isn’t done yet and it’s easy to change at that phase.

cm11 4mo ago
This I believe is lowkey one of the core ways design broke at tech companies. There are other big ones, design (really product) is broke deeply, but once mockups became easy we stopped having discussions about information architecture and UX. We're talking about whether we think this looks nicer in blue or green. Happened before Figma, but Figma really grew it. The designers that tried to hold onto wireframes (or went to mockups, but tried to still have architecture discussions with them) fought an uphill battle—what were these guys even talking about? Even the other designers thought this. Once mockups became easy, that little bit of vocational gate (as in gate-keeping) that was holding the wall for UX work went away. Execs and PMs could make decent looking rectangles, so designers became the people who could make especially nice looking rectangles. So you got a lot of product/UX designers that were much more visual designers. That matters, but the prior part was bigger in that the product processes and sprints often started to have little design in them at all. What was a two or three phase process was one, designer got requirements and made design—often they didn't even really get requirements before design. The design was the impetus for the requirements not the other way around. This is what became standard: Leader would give something vague because they didn't have much idea or vision yet. They probably had something blue-sky-ish, meaning they had a bunch of ideas, which in amorphous abstract blue skies come together. Once those things appear side by side on paper/screen, they're off putting and contradicting. There are problems not just with how to fit the pieces, but with the pieces. The visual the designer provides triggers this. Designers being visual people can see a lot of that in their head beforehand, but won't be heard until they show "bad work." It's pretty common though to see the PM or the leader look at it and say it wasn't the vague requirements, it's that the designer didn't get it. Anyways, it's that design that then kicks off some assessment against reality. Then you have a little bit of a shot at real requirements starting to leak out.
- 4mo ago

fHr 4mo ago

Time saves on stupid shit management thinks works!

jayd16 4mo ago
But there's always more stupid shit to work on, so it just increases noise to signal in the app, no?

Fabricio20 4mo ago

> Good old user research or talking to users to validate ideas, iron out issues in the user flows has become too slow for the new process I haven't seen these in at least a decade in the industry!! Everywhere I used to work was always "PM wanted" or similar and the validation was always just QA making sure the thing works/does the bare minimum!!! Customer input was just for bugs. I hope that with AI speeding up prototyping we can actually go the other way long term, where we go back to ACTUALLY talking to a customer and then quickly prototyping it to see if it is what they wanted. Figuring out what the customer wants remains the hardest part of software engineering, but at least right now its mainly because we just dont talk to the customer.

Applejinx 4mo ago

I'm in an industry where I can really see this, executed by honestly talented people able to interpret what the LLMs produce. It's bikeshedding hell. If you pursue every possible idea and get to implement all of them and it actually works, in the best possible scenario with no technical debt because you're able to stay on top of it (presumably in the window you have before you just burn out), you end up with all the ideas at once. The project has tracked your imaginative state, and perhaps the states of your beta testers as they imagine things. It's a power armor suit tailored to specifically you. Nobody else will ever fit it because it's evolving too fast, all to implement your every whim. I've seen this take 1.0 projects that are intentionally wildly scope-limited and great at that, and balloon until the project is the Everything Machine, doing everything but send email. I guess in the new era, every project expands until it becomes alive and devotes itself to your service… or at least, does its level best to be that for you and your beta team. These things are not approachable. They're fever dreams, unparsable by outsiders. Discipline is lacking.

jayd16 4mo ago

Making software for users? Who even does that any more?

totetsu 4mo ago

Before if you had a crap idea you atleast had to face the social back-pressure of explaining it to someone at a local hackers meetup and trying to convince them to build it for you..

virgil_disgr4ce 4mo ago

> Things which look effective on the surface, but has real UX problems in the underneath, are getting prioritised because someone in the room can talk better and enrol a leader to align with the idea This has always existed. The ability to rapidly prototype has not changed it in any way. An extremely experienced UX researcher once told me that, having been doing field research and user research for 3 decades now, every time it's a Fortune 500 company, after presenting mountains of research, it comes down to what color the CEO liked in the moment. I don't understand the proclivity to latch onto whatever the new thing is and blame it for shitty decision-making that has existed as long as humans have existed.

deterministic 4mo ago

The same thing happens because of tools like the Unity/Unreal engine. Lots of low quality barely-more-than-a-demo "games" uploaded to steam. However those games rightly fail to make any decent $ so probably not a problem long term.

onion2k 4mo ago

I see a lot of garbage being shipped. One of the second order effects of AI collapsing the cost of building things is that product management is much more important now. A Product Owner/Manager who lacks the taste and insight (or data) to know what they should put in front of users and what they should just put in the bin will cause a company real harm, especially if the company moves to a "there's zero effort in building something, so we'll try everything!" model. The only part that's really collapsed in effort is the translation from requirements into code. If you're using AI to generate requirements you're effectively building things based on what a 'random' requirements generator says. If that's as good as the requirements a Product Owner was writing then that person needs to improve.

socalgal2 4mo ago

I'm having a hard time seeing your point. Faster iteration = easier to fix UX issues. That's all the LLM is providing here. Problems with UX = bad decisions. Those happen with or without LLMs.