[lithobraking]

On this note, I'm seeing this pattern crop up in retail WoW addons. (It's maybe an even more literal interpenetration of the title.) Many of the newer addons are heavy vibe-coded due to last-minute WoW API changes, like ArcUI.

The addons have _so_ many ways to customize displays that their configuration menus look like lovecraftian B2B products with endless lists of fields, sliders, and dropdowns. I hear a lot of complaints from raiders in my guild about how hard it is to put together a decently functional UI. I wonder if these tools are allowing and/or causing devs to more easily feature creep the software that we build.

[john_strinlai]

the sudden influx of low quality UI addons has certainly been interesting to watch!

but, i dont think it is really an ai problem in this specific case. the biggest addons in wow have been like that since way before ai was a thing (elvui, weakauras, plater, etc.). they all have a thousand settings.

and, to be honest, in the specific case of WoW, i am totally fine with it. i dont want 10 different addons to change how my UI looks. i want 1 addon to do it. and there is just so much stuff to edit that of course you are going to end up with a thousand settings.

[hinkley]

WoW at least figured out sometime around Pandaria or the previous expansion that they needed to launch the game engine changes a month or so before the full release and do beta servers so add on designers had time to adapt to api changes before everyone was trying to make World First achievements happen. It also probably saved their download servers from being slammed.