[TeMPOraL]

It's worse. Few months ago we wanted to buy some specific books/toys from a local brand (we're in Poland). It was a relatively modern, small company, with appropriately modern and slick website - you'd expect everything to go smoothly, right? Unfortunately, we weren't able to complete the purchase, because whoever made their checkout page had a bright idea to integrate with...

...wait for it...

... an AI-powered address validation system, offered by some random local startup. That validation system tried to provide autocomplete and attempted to automatically segment the address in a seemingly free-form field, but something in the integration got botched, and it wasn't able to identify house numbers - and without identifying one, it would not let the check-out process to continue.

I've actually tracked down the startup making this "address validator" (who in the right mind funded them, and why companies pay for this, is beyond me); they had a demo form on the landing page, and it correctly segmented my address - which is why I know it's the integration with the particular seller that got botched. Nevertheless, I'm still in shock - why on Earth would someone do this in the first place? It's strictly worse than having multiple fields - name, street, address part 2, zip code, city, etc. Multiple fields are already bad for reasons discussed in this thread, but a single free-form field that's parsed by "AI" into colored segments as you type? What in the fuck.

[ryandrake]

Address validation is one of the major textbook cases of developers going out of their way to make their software worse.

And from the company owner's point of view: Imagine spending extra money on development that stops users from completing a purchase.

These cases are the perfect answer to "Why do we need senior developers on our team who have good judgment?" This is why--to prevent software like this from even being written in the first place.