[mbrumlow]

> They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they.

Because companies want to make MORE money.

Your hypothetical company is now competing with another company who didn’t opposite, and now they get to market faster, fix bugs faster, add feature faster, and responding to changes in the industry faster. Which results in them making more, while your employ less company is just status quo.

Also. With regards to oil, the consumption of oil increases as it became cheaper. With AI we now have a chance to do projects that simply would have cost way too much to do 10 years ago.

[rglullis]

> Which results in them making more

Not necessarily.

You are assuming that the people can consume whatever is put in front of them. Markets get saturated fast. The "changes in the industry" mean nothing.

[DrewADesign]

A) People are so used to infinite growth that it’s hard to imagine a market where that doesn’t exist. The industry can have enough developers and there’s a good chance we’re going to crash right the fuck into that pretty quickly. America’s industrial labor pool seemed like it provided an ever-expanding supply of jobs right up until it didn’t. Then, in the 80s, it started going backwards preeeetttty dramatically.

B) No amount of money will make people buy something that doesn’t add value to or enrich their lives. You still need ideas, for things in markets that have room for those ideas. This is where product design comes in. Despite what many developers think, there are many kinds of designers in this industry and most of them are not the software equivalent of interior decorators. Designing good products is hard, and image generators don’t make that easier.

[dakolli]

Its really wild how much good UI stands out to me now that the internet is been flooded with generically produced slop. I created a bookmarks folder for beautiful sites that clearly weren't created by LLMs and required a ton of sweat to design the UI/UX.

I think we will transition to a world where handmade software/design will come at a huge premium (especially as the average person gets more distanced from the actual work required to do so, and the skills become rarer). Just like the wealthy pay for handmade shoes, as opposed to something off the shelf from footlocker, I think companies will revert back to hand crafted UX. These identical center column layout's with a 3x3 feature card grid at the bottom of your landing page are going to get really old fast in a sea of identical design patterns.

To be fair component libraries were already contributing to this degradation in design quality, but LLM s are making it much worse.

[DrewADesign]

Yeah. For a few years, I’ve been predicting that human-made and designed digital goods will be desirable luxury items in the same exact way the Arts and Crafts movement, in the late 19th/early 20th century, made artisan furniture, buildings, etc. to push back against the megatons of chintzy shit produced during the Industrial Revolution.

Component libraries can be used to great effect if they are used thoughtfully in the design process, rather than in lieu of a design process.

[rglullis]

Paying a premium for "luxury" makes sense for people looking status signaling or an unique experience. Software is (most of the time) an utility. People would be willing to pay for a premium when there is tangible performance improvement. No one is going to pay more for a run-of-the-mill SaaS offering because the website was handcrafted.

[DrewADesign]

> People would be willing to pay for a premium when there is tangible performance improvement.

Developers like to assume this because it’s something they value in their own software usage, and something they know how to address. That’s not something you can generalize to non-developers. Look, feel, and features are the main difference users see between FOSS and most commercial software— not performance. In fact, FOSS performance is obviously better in many/most cases. That’s why almost the only FOSS software projects with a significant number of non-dev users are run by organizations that employ designers — Mozilla, Blender, Signal, Android, etc.

Unless you’re making a tool for developers or gamers, or the competition is intolerably bad, people rarely pay for increased performance.

[rglullis]

> people rarely pay for increased performance.

I wasn't using "Performance" in the sense of "how fast does it go?", but it the sense of "how well does it do what I need to do?"

> Mozilla, Blender, Signal, Android, etc.

First, this is selection bias. I'm sure we can find plenty of cases of software that failed even when designers were around, and I can certainly point to software/services that have horrendous "UI" but were still incredibly useful/valuable: Craigslist and Bloomberg Terminal come to mind.

Second, you are confusing cause and effect. The examples you gave only employ designers now because they were valuable even without designers working on it.

Anyway, you did not address the core point of my argument: no one is going to pay more for a run-of-the-mill SaaS offering because the website was handcrafted.

[SoftTalker]

> With AI we now have a chance to do projects that simply would have cost way too much to do 10 years ago.

Not sure about that, at least if we're talking about software. Software is limited by complexity, not the ability to write code. Not sure LLMs manage complexity in software any better than humans do.