In Windows-land everything is so inconsistent that it doesn’t really stand out like it does on MacOS.
97% of Windows users wouldn’t notice if it followed OS conventions and the remaining 3% would complain that it was following the current conventions instead of copying Word 2003 :)
This is about keyboard navigation rather than TUI vs GUI, there is no reason you have to render your app with plain text to support efficient keyboard nav.
It's also about consumer software versus business software.
Consumer software is all about conning people who don't currently own the software into thinking it's good and buying it. Once they have it, their experience doesn't matter at all. In fact, you should actively make the software less capable - really dumb it down, to appeal to the widest audience. Yes, more white space, yes, more menus. An error message that says 'oopsy something went wrong'? What a splendid idea! Information density does not matter. Speed does not matter. Accuracy of data does not matter. Hell, even bugs don't matter, if your software looks pretty.
Business software is different. It's crufty, it's ugly, and it doesn't change. Because you're optimizing for your users using the same software for 8 hours a day for the rest of their lives.
It's also from an era where you used one piece of software doing routine tasks that rarely changed.
Imagine learning all the keyboard shortcuts for every website you use nowadays.
For example I worked at a video store long ago that had some dos program to manage everything, I didn't own a computer and I didn't use any other software. It was still often a slow turd, and it wasn't networked with the 2 other local stores, so if I wanted to know if a customer had an account there, or if they had some stock there, I had to call.
I can’t get it to use my password manager on that screen either, and navigating to another app closes the modal so you have to copy your password and then start over.
It is quite bleak to me. Thinking has always been an important part of what makes us human, much more so than physical labor.
Craftsmanship and tool usage are physical activities that also define us as a species and you will find no shortage of people lamenting our loss of those skills, too. Both those and thinking are categorically different than water carrying, ditch digging, and other basic heavy labor.
You don't have to stop thinking. Just switch to thinking about other stuff that is more interesting to you and potentially more complicated.
AI will never completely replace human thinking; it will just ease the annoying/boring parts.
The same arguments were given for the innovation of the calculator, but we didn't stop thinking with math/calculations, we just make the calculator do the boring computation part (and now you can calculate with much bigger and more complexe operation without having to spend loads of times and paper for it).
> This is the part where I simply don't understand the objections people have to coding agents. It seems so self-evidently valuable --- even if you do nothing else with an agent, even if you literally throw all the code away.
It sounds like the blank page problem is a big issue for you, so tools that remove it are a big productivity boost.
Not everyone has the same problems, though. Software development is a very personal endeavor.
Just to be clear, I am not saying that people in category A or category B are better/worse programmers. Just that everyone’s workflow is different so everyone’s experience with tools is also different.
The key is to be empathetic and trust people when they say a tool does or doesn’t work for them. Both sides of the LLM argument tend to assume everyone is like them.
