Agreed. That’s the one area where I think my experience will still have value (for a while anyway): translating customer requests into workable UI/UX, before handing off to the LLM.
Absolutely. I never thought I’d have to retrain, and I’m still uncertain if I will have to because I’m not really sure where software development will be in the next few years. It was quite an epiphany to run my first agent on a code base and be simultaneously excited at the implications for productivity, and numb at the realisation that the work it was saving was the work I enjoyed and the expertise I was being paid for. There are only so many roles for developers to write the prompts and review the output, and it does feel a bit like prodding a machine and waiting for it to go ding.
I think usability almost always suffers when the native UI isn’t used. It’s not that platform-neutral UIs aren’t usable, or good looking. However when native UIs were prevalent, there were standards built up over years of hard-earned experience: for a Windows app, you wanted to get your tab order right, and you knew the convention of getting the Cancel button mapped to the escape key etc etc. See also the Mac and the HIG, encouraging apps to look and work roughly the same.
There were always outliers and ugly UIs, but it always felt like there was a uniformity that made it easier to get around in an unfamiliar app. Whereas now, electron apps look and work very differently (comparing slack to Spotify to VSCode and so on).
That said, I think very few people care as much as I do about it, and cross-platform UIs save a ton of development work.
Not only usability, but also raw capabilities. Most native toolkits handle UI and basic ux well and has good interoperability with system components. With most cross platform frameworks, the developer is often reimplementing these or trying to resolve platform incompatibilities (always badly). And the project quicly balloons in complexity.
They’re great to get started, and when what you need is already available. But they’re a pain for everything else.
Part of my curiosity was sparked by the article on HN the other day discussing the hamburger menu icon: it used to be confusing, but now is pretty widely recognized as long as some guidelines are followed. So while I used to agree with you re: usability, these days I'm not so sure anymore.
One idle thought I had: when computer interfaces were still new, using physical analogies like file cabinets was good practice for teaching new users. Maybe GUIs are now commonplace enough that people are able to speak the different "languages" without as much trouble.
I totally get where you’re coming from but for me it’s the predictability that’s key. Hamburger menus are familiar but they’re also not always there. On a traditional native UI you’d always have a menu bar, you’d always have a File and Edit menu. These days you may have a hamburger menu but it also may just be a wrapper for a menu bar. It’s just all a bit……vague I suppose.
Tbh it doesn’t matter really. As I implied in the previous comment, I can’t imagine many people bemoan the fact they can’t press Alt-f to get an illustrative menu drop-down, even if I do.
The casual nature is what made it so popular. You could write some fairly disciplined code with VB6, but once you turned Option Explicit off and added some On Error Resume Nexts and embraced variants, you had something you could write with without knowing much about programming. I’m a big fan of C#, but I’m a professional developer and I know how types and exceptions work (for example). I knew plenty of have-a-go managers who would have balked at C# but produced reams of…interesting…VB6 code.
