alt Hacker NewsThis article is a bit rambly so I'll just focus on some things from the beginning:
>If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in.
This concept was betrayed far before agentic tools, with a much earlier concept: Automatic updates.
To use one product as an example: When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP and a pretty good OS in Windows 7 respectively. No longer is that an option, your workflow will simply be interrupted by automatic updates.
>Vim and Emacs, in their infinite customizability, can be molded to fit your exact hand and workflow
Vim is one major exception to the automatic update problem. I trust vim not just because it can do a ton of shit (although that is certainly nice), but because unlike most other software, its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change. Aside from switching from vim to neovim (my decision, not a forced update), my muscle memory from a couple decades ago still works today.
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> When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP
This timeline doesn't seem to make sense, as Windows XP came out in 2001, and Windows Vista in 2006-2007. Maybe you are referring to Service Pack 3 in 2008?
This is part of why my text editor is built from source on my own branch where I only occasionally pull in changes from master. I know I'm probably a very rare exception here.
> Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP
Prior to XP, MS had two lines of Windows: the Windows 9x kernels and the Windows NT kernels. Windows XP was meant to be the merger of the two lines, adapting Windows NT to have compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows 98 features. Unfortunately, Windows XP development went overlong, so MS wedged in Windows ME to give a stop-gap release until XP could actually be released.
Vista came out after XP. They rushed 7 out after that.
A good tool does a job well with minimal side effects and maximal predictability.
Perhaps this is why users dislike monthly SaaS - they cannot trust stability of the tool, because often the incentives are to keep adding features well past peak utility [ resulting in enshitification ]
That's not just developers as you noted.
It is "velocity fallacy" — product people want "all the features ASAP or right away".
Until users with their managers come with pitchforks and torches. I worked on such internal project where we as developers were able to deliver new features and new version every 2 weeks (which is not a pinnacle of the game of course) and were thinking if we can move to daily delivery. Because we were good devs and wanted to appease product owner.
Until one day product owner came back with feedback, how everyone is pissed off at him for shifting ground under people feet, while he also thought he is doing great delivering all those great features. It was pushed back to limited amount of features each month.
People need training, people need to understand what and why.
In the end it turns out it is also AI coding fallacy, because most of the software is built for limited audience, which has its specific timeline on accepting and internalising new features or different ways of doing stuff. Unless we take humans from the equation and we start building for AI itself.