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Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

stackoverflow.blog

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Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

#131

Post by inigyou »

brianpan wrote: post #100
devin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your view of what constitutes a tool is overly broad. An OS is not a tool. A hand plane is a tool. It’s sharp and does one thing. The stuff an OS does might enable tools, and it may contain many tools, but it is not itself a tool.

A food processor is a kitchen tool even though it does many things. A computer is also a tool that does many things and the OS is arguably the important part of how a user wields that tool.

Isn't a food processor just what certain marketing teams call a blender?

Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

#132

Post by inigyou »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #76
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #54

When I see “stack overflow blog” the brand encodes distrust. I remember when they removed links to meta and replaced them with the corporate blog with low quality PR and political agitation.

> When I see “stack overflow blog” the brand encodes distrust. Incredible, in a way, that you still see it as a brand. I honestly thought it was a 10 years old blog post somehow making it to frontpage (as some old blog posts sometimes do on HN). Who still uses DeadOverflow-full-of-outdated-answers? (outdated and often just plain wrong too) I haven't been there in like 15 years or something. Feels like ages.

Nobody uses it. Objectively. It has died. Past tense. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1882532/q...

It's owned by some really stupid private equity firm since about 2019, which is trying to revive it as a platform for agents to talk to each other.

Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

#133

Post by inigyou »

inigyou wrote: post #21
fitsumbelay wrote: post #6

[flagged]

Yes that is what happened to SO. They now get practically zero questions, zero answers, zero page views, and zero ad revenue. It is their own fault because they froze everyone out of the site and then once LLMs became an alternative, everyone started asking their questions to LLMs. They are now trying to somehow pivot to AI to make revenue again, starting with Stack Overflow for Agents, and now with wordy vacuous blo…

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1882532/q...

Here is the proof

Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

#134

Post by hilariously »

Scarblac wrote: post #111
hilariously wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I said to the last company (which is basically shutting down now lol) management - "infinite customizeability" means "zero percent understandability" for a typical suite of software. I literally was told not to narrow down the features too much or the product would be too constrained... well then wtf does it actually _do_ for anyone?

OTOH, there's spreadsheets. The abstraction is just so great that users can and do use them for anything. The problem seems to be that there's not many such great abstractions to be found.

For some quantity of use. When I say infinite customizeability I mean its just fronting chat gpt + tools without any real product use case.

Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

#135

Post by ssdspoimdsjvv »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #95
kelnos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think infinite customizeability is a problem. Poor default configurations are the problem when you build in the ability to customize. The idea is that the user should be able to be productive more or less immediately after installing the software, and then incrementally customize it as they discover they have different needs than the defaults give them. A lot of developers/companies forget the first part, and…

What mythical software is this? The only infinitely customizable software I can think of is emacs, and that takes an enormous amount of effort to become proficient.

any serious enterprise software that attempts to fit every company's workflow (rather than forcing the company to follow theirs)

Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

#137

Post by tremon »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #38

This 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…

> unlike most other software, its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change

My entire reason for switching from vim to neovim was that vim did change its UI, by neutering /etc/vimrc in a major update a while ago.

Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

#138

Post by tremon »

inigyou wrote: post #131
brianpan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A food processor is a kitchen tool even though it does many things. A computer is also a tool that does many things and the OS is arguably the important part of how a user wields that tool.

Isn't a food processor just what certain marketing teams call a blender?

Blending is just one of the functions of a food processor. A food processor can usually also do kneading, mincing, and slicing, or (depending on extensions) even rolling (pasta) dough and squeezing citrus fruits.

Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

#139

Post by ent001 »

pmontra wrote: post #129
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen this too and it’s darkly humorous. We published 1-2 releases of our component each month. Eventually another (internal) team would pick it up along with others, test, and release the combined set maybe 1-2 times a year. Customers being extremely risk adverse never wanted to update, due to risk of changes combined with the interruption, even though we were fixing serious bugs left and right from the earlier…

I'm not sure that I fully understood but: > Probably should have spent another 3-5 years getting the first release in better shape instead of spending 3-5 years flinging flaming turds to the paying customers. I wonder if the company would have had the money to pay salaries for 3 years, unless for those "paying customers" that obviously started paying much earlier than that. And > The executives slowly released they i…

I think software is just very young. We've been doing it for maybe 2 generations. The current way, saas, ci/cd, is like half a generation old.

We're still at the "search" phase, there is very little wisdom at social and personal levels.

It's clear from the rapid flux in tooling, methods, ideology, and the results, that we basically have no idea what we're doing re: using computers and building software. A lot of the self assuredness of current advice is self soothing behavior.

Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

#140

Post by cosmic_cheese »

brabel wrote: post #125
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big driver of automatic updates in the late 00s and early 10s were people who never updated their OS or browser and were getting compromised left and right. As I recall, one of the earliest widespread users automatic updates was Google with Chrome, which they did because otherwise there was no way to respond to severe 0days and such before huge swathes of users got hit. So I think there's a place for automatic upda…

Yeah people never wanted to update Windows since they had been burned in previous upgrades and their current setup just worked. Not only were upgrades difficult to do and took a long time, many times the new version was just worse or requires relearning lots of things. For what, asked the normal user?! But MSFT tied IE browser updates to OS updates just to make things so much worse for those people since now their ch…

That holds for major upgrades (e.g XP → Vista), but those didn’t used to just happen on their own. In the time frame my previous post was speaking of, one still had to buy major upgrades, and updates within the same version rarely brought significant UI changes. So in reality, there wasn’t much valid reason for there to be for example XP and 7 machines still running initial releases or early service packs for years on end (which was shockingly common). Most of the reason people had for avoiding minor updates is that they just found them annoying.

Now today of course things are quite different and it’s not unusual for a routine Windows update to turn things upside down. Users are more justified in update-averseness than they were 15-20 years ago, except of course now that brings much greater risk of getting pwned than it did back then.

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