No Design is the Best Design

The author gives an example of what a todo list app should do: 'Users should be able to press cmd+E and just type in "buy milk today #personal, high priority.'

But the issue with command line syntax is there's no discovery there. The syntax and keyboard shortcut are obvious to the author because they created this, but no one else would realize what's possible or not, without a whole lot of trial-and-error. Even Google's fairly simplistic query syntax has taken years for a small number of people to use, and for the majority they are still surprised that they can use a + or quotes.

The last bit is about task-centric design, which is also a tradeoff. You design for a common tasks, but this butts against the 80/20 rule in many applications that 80% of users use 20% of features, but for each user it's a different 20%.

Anyways, I think we have to be careful of reducing design to catchphrases based on a few anecdotes. Design is usually about tradeoffs, and is situation-dependent.

Each and every software user-interfaces has it's own constraints. It can be solved with a goal in mind that this software has to be accessible first without accumulating much of user's time to get themselves learn about on how to use it.

It's a bit trickiest thing, that that we take UI design as an art-form like a painting. It is different, good painting will evoke user's emotions in many ways. Whereas software UI design doesn't, instead it is there just to get the functionalities clear and concise for the user to do their work. That being said, UI design is an art-form in itself if we try to master it.