You really think cost is the main reason humanity hasn't expanded into space? I'm all for space exploration and learning from space but actual humans are quite squishy, like gravity, dislike radiation, and would need to take a lot of water with them just to visit a rock very indifferent to their existence.
Definitely. Humans expand. It's probably an evolutionary imperative in many of us. Africa was essentially an oasis and yet some of us decided to go make our way outward to inhospitable freezing ass places where the environment itself is just constantly trying to kill you in a million different ways. And we knew nothing about how to deal with it, at first.
Or take the early sea voyages. Not only were there endless cares about things that were ultimately nonissues like sea monsters or falling off the edges of the Earth, but there were endless very real dangers we had no clue about or how to deal with - scurvy, rogue waves, and much more. In the aforementioned Age of Sail, it was just expected that a significant chunk of your crew would die. Yet somehow we pushed onward and outward.
And the infinite possibilities of space are going to absolutely dwarf all previous frontiers in terms of interest and potential.
TBQH it used to be easy. I remember watching one person with Access set up dashboards that worked 1000x better than all of the dozen SAAS tools no one can wrangle together today. Small businesses pushed updates and menus from Frontpage. We used to spin up quick code on our calculators, meanwhile our much more powerful phones act like executing our own code is an act of terrorism.
LLMs (maybe) get us a little closer to closing the complexity gap and making our personal computers personal again, but with the funny problem of needing to use someone else's computer to do so.
> Access set up dashboards that worked 1000x better than all of the dozen SAAS tools no one can wrangle together today
I will always maintain that it's disgraceful that we still don't have anything with the ease of use / accessibility of Access and Visual Basic. How did we so thoroughly lose them?
The 3 common issues used to be solved by a manual with an FAQ page, or just you know, actually intuitive and usable software and hardware.
The real kick in the pants these days is spending a lot of money on something and trying to contact customer support over delivery or warranty issues. I'm convinced they just want you to give up and keep the sale (and lose a customer?) over ever resolving an issue. Or there's some internal metric that they're tracking that looks great and no one has ever actually used the system themselves.
"The 3 common issues used to be solved by a manual with an FAQ page, or just you know, actually intuitive and usable software and hardware."
Having led customer support, this grossly misunderstands how people interact. People don't read. It's as simple as that. You can write something as clear as day in a FAQ, and they don't want to put in the effort. ~50% of the inbounds I receive are fully written out in plain language in an FAQ.
LLMs are perfect for this scenario. It puts the answer in clear english and will endlessly re-word the answer when clients followup.
Most of my AI usage amounts to "read this ticket and do the work", the ticket documents the requirements, a better model could, I suppose, do a better job?
Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better? This does track with what I've experience in my career, where we've gone from everything being to better the user experience to tech companies sort of trying to out-do each other in their technical solutions while the software continuously gets worse and more antagonistic.
Plenty of value comes from things the customer doesn't care about.
Customers want features as fast and as cheap as possible. I derive joy from solid test suites that avoid me getting paged while on call and team processes that don't allow config changes on Friday so pages don't happen on the weekend.
Very few craftspeople derive their joy from the customer experience. An electrician isn't happy because their work allows me to watch TV. A carpenter isn't happy because a new set of stairs lets me get to the basement faster. They're happy because of their perception of the quality of their work. This goes away when the visible or fun parts are no longer "their work"
I wouldn't agree with that. The issue with software is that the people you make things for are usually anonymous and you'll never meet them, but if you've ever built software that helped someone and you witnessed it, it feels really good.
Meeting your customers feels good. It's still not why I do it. I've written components that were used by billions of people and generally loved (pieces of the Windows 7 taskbar) and talked to people about that work. I've worked in the education space and talked directly to the staff at schools who use my product to hear their use cases, thoughts, and feedback. It's fun, humbling, and rewarding. It's not what motivates me day to day.
I don't agree with your statement. Individual productivity is very different from team productivity. AI is much like the traditional cowboy coder - prioritizing speed above all else leads to disaster.
As to customers, customers value stability. They don't want the UI changing every week, they don't want random changes of the data model that corrupt their content, and so the traditions of quality, strong testing and integration pipelines, and so on are just as important in established products - in some ways more important than ever, as there are plenty of opportunities for your competitors to burn user trust and drive them away.
I have yet to encounter an established product demonstrating a massive improvement in velocity due to AI. Being able to spit out prototypes doesn't matter all that much.
I'm handling the AI wave by holding on to my sanity and skills and working to establish a reputation in preparation for big paychecks fixing the messes everyone else is creating with their tokens.
This is the danger of isolating engineering from customers, or even internal customer-interfacing employees.
If all they see is code, they will get satisfaction from tidy code, not user happiness. One good thing about AI is it elevates product engineers because they more directly bridge the customer-product-code divide.
Not just isolating them from customers but also from engineering-adjacent work that isn't code.
I've been at a place that is basically microservices slop (several dozen services per engineer). They're all poorly maintained and at least a solid 40% of all this code that they've written could have been just a traefik or nginx configuration/container.
When you have a lot of inexperienced (relative to industry) and overworked software engineers, the solution to every problem becomes to write code and writing new code should be a last resort.
Worse still, there's just a poor general understanding of the internet protocols they're working with and of how to do distributed systems right. Unfortunately with LLMs I've been seeing this get worse, not better.
They use the LLMs for code generation but not architecture review. Bad ideas are getting fully-baked quickly before anyone with good sense can intervene.
That's my take as well... the dev effectively takes on QA/QC and PM roles as a team working with AI for the baseline of development work. Of course, this is also a slightly different skill set and cognitive load. It also needs to completely upend how project planning happens when you are using Dev+AI in coordination.
There are plenty of projects that are green lit that have good intent but are bone headed when it comes to solution and implementation. Good engineers hate these types of projects. Good PMs try to avoid these at all costs but sometimes your hand gets forced because some VIP, either internal or external volun-tells you to do it.
> Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better?
Quite a few don't, no.
Different people derive enjoyment in different things and some of the best engineers do not find satisfaction in "delivering better customer experience" but in working with, and improving, cool technology. Its up to management to find areas of the business where they can deploy these people in a way that dove-tails with business success.
Its also the case that only working on projects that "deliver customer value", and having to justify every single endeavor through that lense, is how you end up in a local maxima in your tech stack, get mired in technical debt, and then get lapped by your competitors who have the foresight to work on foundational technology that enables future velocity.
To be frank, its endlessly frustrating that your median Hacker News poster doesn't get this, and instead prefer to brow-beat people about how they're caring about the wrong things.
Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well. I'm not terribly frustrated that you don't get this. I've certainly worked with devs (and managers) who wanted to push new technology for the sake of using new technology, and they should have found a side project as an outlet for this.
The person you're responding to never said those teams didn't have customers.
It's not about new technology for the sake of new technology, it's about taking pride in one's work and what that person created.
Honestly, the American obsession with "everyone should think of what the customer wants" is exhausting verging on toxic. The people who talk about that point loudest are inevitably owners saying "you should all care more to make me richer". If you want your employees to care about the customer more than their own personal satisfaction, give them significant equity and significant autonomy such that they can see how their actions have direct impact. Saying they should think of the customer and then treating the employees as an interchangeable cost to be minimized is insulting and won't lead to anyone focusing on the customer.
> The person you're responding to never said those teams didn't have customers.
> It's not about new technology for the sake of new technology, it's about taking pride in one's work what what that person created.
Thank god, I really want to say that I appreciate that you got what I said. A simple upvote didn't feel like enough.
Employees are humans, not robots. Its inconvenient, but if you want a world-class team then you're going to have to deal with the fact that people derive satisfaction from different things, and you're not going to be able to motivate them by beating them into submission about what they "should care about." This may involve having to think creatively about how to manage your people instead of treating them as fungible work units.
I'm going to apologize in advance for being long-winded, but I feel there's a lot to unpack here.
> Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well. I'm not terribly frustrated that you don't get this.
Respectfully, this response here is a perfect example of you not getting it and assuming that I am the one that doesn't get it. You have not said anything that I have not already heard and understood before. The fact that people have different values does not mean they "don't get it." But saying something like "Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better?" does imply that you don't understand other peoples' values.
The fact that you posted "Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well." indicates to me that you missed the point. Whether they are on those teams and whether they consider other engineers their customer is besides the point; they may not derive satisfaction from "delivering value" to those people regardless. That doesn't mean they don't care about their customers, which is the take away the median HN poster takes, but rather that they are not energized and motivated at the end of the day by delivering value to them.
> I've certainly worked with devs (and managers) who wanted to push new technology for the sake of using new technology,
Sure, everyone has. But the flip-side of this is a class of people who assume any tech improvement that doesn't directly move a metric is just an effort at resume-building. Just as often I've seen efforts and building a more robust system as unneeded resume building despite clear need (usually because the need is very hard to measure).
> and they should have found a side project as an outlet for this.
I mean, this is incredibly dismissive and exactly the attitude I was talking about. No-one is saying that engineers should be allowed to just do whatever to have fun. Work is work. But ideally you find ways to organize your team so that everyone is motivated and energized by their work, and doing so requires that you understand that not everyone is motivated by the same thing. But in these discussions, the attitude comes across as "everyone should be motivated by delivering good customer experience and if they aren't we shouldn't care."
If there's no opportunity to give these sorts of people fulfilling work, then fair enough. It *is* work. But the attitude displayed here is that we shouldn't even try and understand their values and think about ways to productively deploy that.
As an aside about customers, internal and external customers are, in my experience, treated vastly differently. We care about experience for external customers, but internal customers is usually all about velocity and trade offs. The bar is substantially lower, and rough edges are almost always ignored. So I am skeptical at the idea that we can just frame internal users as customers and all the discrepancies go away.
It also misses the fact that other people on my team are also my customers, because they have to maintain the system! And I am also my own customer, because I also have to maintain it!
Force me to click hundreds of buttons per release and I'm going to be disinclined to go through that. You wouldn't have a surgeon have to go hunting for the right tools.
I dunno about everyone, but I do. It drives me up the wall when software is slow, stutters, etc. There’s almost no good excuse for it. But it happens anyway because of some combination of, “nobody cares,” and, “money.”
I derive joy out of people using a thing i helped design and they never get frustrated with it. It works, it’s fast, it solves the problem and it’s rarely a pain to maintain or extend for me or my team. Thats good, solid stuff right there.
I say this every time: the average person never wants to hear the letters A and I. Not because it has a negative connotation, but because they don’t care how their phone gets them an answer to “when is my dentist appointment” they just want it to do it.
Yep, by using the terms intelligence, and occasionally Apple Intelligence and not AI[1], they get to talk about these features in a way that don't trigger an automatic mental gag reflex. The fact they cottoned on to this 2 years ago is actually pretty impressive.
"Mental gag reflex" is exactly right. I'm running two different instances of Claude Opus 4.8 on xhigh right now, and I'm absolutely fine with it because that's what _I_ want to do.
AI features on my toothbrush, toaster, refrigerator, doorbell, washing machine, word processing software, TV, whatever, without my actually asking for them first are THINGS I DO NOT WANT, and adding those features to those devices will cause me either to have go to great lengths not to use them, or - much more likely - just not to buy them at all if I can.
I wrote this in another thread recently: AI is a technology, not a product. Consumers don't care about technologies, they care about products.
This is pretty elementary stuff. SV has a propensity for conflating technology and products, I'll give you that, but Apple's product management has always been relatively good about this kind of thing.
I think you're trying to say, the term 'AI' is _associated_ with chatbots being added in places (websites mostly) where they are more of a nuisance than added value.
OpenAI's ChatGPT is AI consumer software and is a hit, albeit mostly free tier users.
Don’t forget Google search and Copilot giving you wrong answers. The first time someone gets graded poorly or called out at work for obviously not checking what they sent tends to reframe their perspective.
And that's the thing, 90% of people's interactions with "AI" is negatives in places it didn't belong, Klarna had to roll back "AI" customer service, useless chatbots everywhere "because AI", copilot this and that and so on.
And yes, ChatGPT is a hit but who will subsidize the hardware for freeloaders, Google's (cheap to run) AI is good enough now that I don't need to move over to ChatGPT for simple answers, thus the Google moat will probably remain intact denying OpenAI the search revenue stream all whilst OpenAI proposals/trials to add ADs were met with annoyance.
AI where useful is becoming a commodity, Apple did the correct thing in waiting and using the commodity parts and we're otherwise also quickly heading to the bubble's pop, HN even censoring articles on the topic sure seems to be an indicator that those in power are afraid.
I think this is the jaded HN way of seeing AI in products. It's not reality.
I work on a popular consumer product (from well before AI existed) which is incorporating more and more AI features. When we release AI features they receive far more attention and usage than traditional features.
Users who interact with AI features are much "stickier" (more likely to still be users months from now). Free users who interact with AI features are much more likely to convert to paid users. AI features get more press, more online comments, more usage, more conversions. If this wasn't true we wouldn't be spending so much money on it.
I keep hearing that "the average person hates AI", but their revealed preference is different. Any time they need to make anything that takes effort a lot of people immediately turn to ChatGPT.
People don't like to consume AI-made things but they sure like to use it.
Deep, deep down, the average person wants to be controlled and told what to do, just so long as they don't have to acknowledge it to themselves. Clinging to the garment of a Daddy or a Mommy or a god or priest or a Great Leader is the usual way to do this.
Buying brands that advertising has told us will make the anxiety go away, or equivalently believing ideologies that propaganda has told us the same, is another.
Note that I count myself among this number - I'm not holding myself out as a superior free-thinker, I think it's likely that I'm just as unaware of my personal flavour of self-deception as anyone else.
Clinging to chatbots is just a new version of the same thing.
But also because it has a negative connotation. Not with everyone, but with a lot of people. If someone says "That looks like AI", do you think they are intending to make a compliment?
Yeah that comment is making it seem like people don't care if they are using AI only the results, but they not only do care they actively hate AI and tech companies associated with it too.
There is a reason why there is a massive backlash against data center buildouts across the US.
While I agree with your assessment, these data centers cause substantial noise and water pollution-- even if people didn't have a problem with AI the data centers would be a problem for people.
Exactly. Even though Siri is completely lost today, my friend asks it a number of random things, all she wants is an answer. Currently it redirects to the web, it’s enough for her. I told her “next year it’ll work!” And boom. We’re in the EU. Sad.
Exactly this. I want a system that can understand basic instructions like this, in context, with all the necessary unspoken assumptions implicit in natural language and the problem domain, and get it right _every single time without fail_. A bit like AppleScript, but in natural language and smarter.
Most definitely _not_ a cleverer system that sometimes hallucinates or goes off on tangents, or sends my personal information to parties unknown.
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