Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

darylcecile.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 119 posts

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#61

Post by [deleted] »

thankyoufriend wrote: post #60
whstl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand both sides. Quality must come from engineering. If you’re depending on a product manager to ask you that you can improve the quality of the code, you already lost. So it requires soft skills, proper framing and ability to iterate quickly on quality-related tasks without leaving junk and multiple-versions behind. But I completely understand push back for “doing improvements developers want to do”: A lot o…

I think there's an argument that it could be cheaper and better for morale to let employees upskill while working on the thing that makes money.

[deleted]

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#63

Post by whstl »

thankyoufriend wrote: post #60
whstl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand both sides. Quality must come from engineering. If you’re depending on a product manager to ask you that you can improve the quality of the code, you already lost. So it requires soft skills, proper framing and ability to iterate quickly on quality-related tasks without leaving junk and multiple-versions behind. But I completely understand push back for “doing improvements developers want to do”: A lot o…

I think there's an argument that it could be cheaper and better for morale to let employees upskill while working on the thing that makes money.

It really depends on how mature the developer is.

If they have the soft-skills to do it, then by all means.

If not, they need to upskill their soft skills before tackling anything big.

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#64

Post by godelski »

tptacek wrote: post #57
godelski wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the "cost" of other people producing garbage is? Sure can! It's a well known phenomena, won the researchers a Nobel, and explains a lot of the American economy and "lack of taste". The Market of Lemons[0]. Lemon Markets really require one important thing: at time of purchase , the average consumer is unable to differentiate the quality of the product. Consumers are "rational"[1], so with "all other things being equ…

The premise here is that people are selling these prototypes, and they are being bought . I mean, fine, that's bad, but when we discuss "prototypes", I assume uninformed cash transactions are off the table.

I gave the example of Apple and Google for a good reason. Because these big companies are selling products that don't even exist yet. You don't consider that selling prototypes? Fair, they're selling stuff that isn't even a prototype. I'm not sure that's any better.

Or maybe you're making a very different point, which I have entirely missed.

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#65

Post by cm11 »

sarchertech wrote: post #42
baisampayans wrote: post #27

While the speed of prototyping and even shipping to production has increased, I have been asking myself at what cost? I see a lot of garbage being shipped. Not because the code quality is bad, because execution has become cheap now. Ideas even though crap, are getting prototyped. Things which look effective on the surface, but has real UX problems in the underneath, are getting prioritised because someone in the room…

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.

This I believe is lowkey one of the core ways design broke at tech companies. There are other big ones, design (really product) is broke deeply, but once mockups became easy we stopped having discussions about information architecture and UX. We're talking about whether we think this looks nicer in blue or green. Happened before Figma, but Figma really grew it. The designers that tried to hold onto wireframes (or went to mockups, but tried to still have architecture discussions with them) fought an uphill battle—what were these guys even talking about? Even the other designers thought this.

Once mockups became easy, that little bit of vocational gate (as in gate-keeping) that was holding the wall for UX work went away. Execs and PMs could make decent looking rectangles, so designers became the people who could make especially nice looking rectangles. So you got a lot of product/UX designers that were much more visual designers. That matters, but the prior part was bigger in that the product processes and sprints often started to have little design in them at all. What was a two or three phase process was one, designer got requirements and made design—often they didn't even really get requirements before design. The design was the impetus for the requirements not the other way around.

This is what became standard: Leader would give something vague because they didn't have much idea or vision yet. They probably had something blue-sky-ish, meaning they had a bunch of ideas, which in amorphous abstract blue skies come together. Once those things appear side by side on paper/screen, they're off putting and contradicting. There are problems not just with how to fit the pieces, but with the pieces. The visual the designer provides triggers this. Designers being visual people can see a lot of that in their head beforehand, but won't be heard until they show "bad work." It's pretty common though to see the PM or the leader look at it and say it wasn't the vague requirements, it's that the designer didn't get it. Anyways, it's that design that then kicks off some assessment against reality. Then you have a little bit of a shot at real requirements starting to leak out.

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#66

Post by rtf62831 »

godelski wrote: post #47
tptacek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the "cost" of other people producing garbage is? Sure can! It's a well known phenomena, won the researchers a Nobel, and explains a lot of the American economy and "lack of taste". The Market of Lemons[0]. Lemon Markets really require one important thing: at time of purchase , the average consumer is unable to differentiate the quality of the product. Consumers are "rational"[1], so with "all other things being equ…

[dead]

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#67

Post by totetsu »

baisampayans wrote: post #27

While the speed of prototyping and even shipping to production has increased, I have been asking myself at what cost? I see a lot of garbage being shipped. Not because the code quality is bad, because execution has become cheap now. Ideas even though crap, are getting prototyped. Things which look effective on the surface, but has real UX problems in the underneath, are getting prioritised because someone in the room…

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..

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#68

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

baisampayans wrote: post #27

While the speed of prototyping and even shipping to production has increased, I have been asking myself at what cost? I see a lot of garbage being shipped. Not because the code quality is bad, because execution has become cheap now. Ideas even though crap, are getting prototyped. Things which look effective on the surface, but has real UX problems in the underneath, are getting prioritised because someone in the room…

> 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.

Re: The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

#69

Post by abalashov »

dakolli wrote: post #56
jfim wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

Why wouldn't you use Archive Box? https://github.com/archivebox/archivebox

I was today years old when I learned about this. Thank you!
Post reply on HN