Here’s Your Towel

So, I've been thinking about this stupid app called Lovable.dev. And the reason I've been thinking about them is because the CEO mentioned that they've experienced massive growth, and allegedly, they attained the funds to acquire Figma. For those of you that are, as I would be, reluctant to click on the link, I'll mention what they are. It's generative AI for web apps. Get a product from a text prompt, a whole front end. And if you're feeling fancy, build the designs in Figma and use that to generate the app. Now, I don't know how credible this claim is. Given how the market has been lately with everyone tossing social contracts into the shredder and pretending they're still in the same dusty filing cabinet they've always been, it might as well be that anything can happen now. Companies, investors, and customers are all increasingly disconnected from the reality of products more and more these days anyway. But I'm stuck thinking about this product, because of the supposed primary use of generative AI: to do the work that no one else wants to do (or pay for). The tool that will supposedly free us to work on more interesting things.

Now, my immediate reaction was of course disgust and contempt. I hate generative AI for many reasons, all of them which have nothing to do with the technology's existence. So after I let the initial wave of emotion pass, I sat and thought about it. How successful could this product be? Can it adequately replace tech employees? (Well, someone feels threatened by it, because they apparently got banned from Github. Thieves hoarding their stolen goods away from other thieves.) And then I think about the fact that as a software engineer, I haven't solved a new problem in over ten years. Ten years! The same problems, over and over and over. Forms, authentication, carousels, navigation, etc etc.

For the following roles, I am going to be referring to the median employee. Not the best, worst, or even the average. Merely the most common type of people out there.

Front End Engineers

Front end engineers in particular have been on the strange path of avoiding their own profession. Rather than picking up abstractions as useful tools to increase their productivity, for a certain class of engineers, these are picked up in order to avoid understanding, learning, or using the underlying technologies. They stopped wanting to write HTML/CSS (grabs Boostrap). They stopped wanting to write Javascript (grabs a JS framework). They stopped wanting to build components (grabs the nearest Material Design component library). They're now starting to avoid writing code entirely (grabs ChatGPT for a session of vibe coding). They don't care about performance, maintenance, documentation, accessibility, or stability. For any given problem, regardless of the context, the solution is the same. Everyone gets the same tech stack and systems, regardless of their needs. It's been this way for so long that new engineers don't know any other way.

You can't be bothered to do the job anymore. Might as well let the AI take it.

Designers

I'm pretty confused by the median designer, honestly. They're obsessed with creativity and freedom. They love to make design systems, and they screech once they're complete enough that they need to start adhering to it. They cry that there's no room for creativity once a design system is complete. That's a lie, though. There's always work to do. But making another button or dropdown is apparently far more attractive than user research, systems design, and increasing consistency. The problem is, your median designer hasn't come up with a new design pattern since 2012. We're still making carousels, for god's sake. You refuse to learn anything from the world of fine arts, but also refuse to embrace the world of science (psychology, sociology, philosophy, humanities, etc.). You're stagnating. You're bored. You feel twitchy and don't know why.

You can't be bothered to do the job anymore. Might as well let the AI take it.

Product

Product people have the very important job of figuring out what customer and company needs are and articulating them into pieces of work for everyone to do. I think I've only met two product people in my 15 year career that were willing to do this. It is exceedingly rare to find a product person willing to articulate and write down a request at the level of detail necessary for everyone to understand what they want. Instead, it's written down with the same level of care as someone writing their number down on a napkin at a bar while heavily drunk and simultaneously desperately needing to use the restroom.

You can't be bothered to do the job anymore. Might as well let the AI take it.

End

You work on products you no longer believe in, and work under leadership that hates you. You design products for people that will never use it. You don't know if the person sitting next to you will be there tomorrow. You're dissassociating as a form of self-preservation. I'm not going to ask you to throw in the towel, but you obviously don't want to be here anymore. Here's your towel. Do what you will with it.