I think these same core frustrations have been voiced literally for decades, and certainly since the birth of the Unix and what evolved to be the modern shell (Ritchie's /bin/sh). As an example, the frustrations I experience when moving between modern MacOS and Linux/GNU command lines exactly mirrors that of switching between System V and BSD Unix back in the 80s. I distinctly remember how annoyed I was at having to relearn even basic commands when forced to move between my primary development machine (a VAX running 4.3Tahoe) and the target machine for a new product (a 386 running an early version of Xenix). Eventually GNU came along to hide many of the incompatibilities, but it still represented yet a third set of command-line patterns for me to understand/remember. Similarly, I remember the differences in keybindings between my VT-220 compatible terminal and the PC keyboard on my 386 as frustrating as hell.
These frustrations seem inevitable given the diversity of systems people need to interact with. But I think a lot of them could be eased with better help systems; in particular, with help systems that focus on learning by example rather than enumerating an exhaustive list of features (like most current man pages). AI clearly has a role to play here, but most tools I've seen seem focused on simply providing the answer rather than building proficiency in the user.
> help systems that focus on learning by example rather than enumerating an exhaustive list of features (like most current man pages)
I almost always prefer exhaustive lists of features. Examples don't really teach you what each flag being used does, so you end up just memorizing combinations of flags without knowing what they actually do. I suspect learning solely by example is exactly why so many people have a ton of trouble learning how to use tools like tar, and the common refrain of "I have to look it up every single time".
Examples are useful, but not sufficient on their own for learning.
These frustrations seem inevitable given the diversity of systems people need to interact with. But I think a lot of them could be eased with better help systems; in particular, with help systems that focus on learning by example rather than enumerating an exhaustive list of features (like most current man pages). AI clearly has a role to play here, but most tools I've seen seem focused on simply providing the answer rather than building proficiency in the user.