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.

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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..

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.

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

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.

> 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.

Time saves on stupid shit management thinks works!

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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.