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Comment by dataviz1000 | Hacker News Reader

Products that people use require the developer to imagine they are the person using this. Those of us who develop user interfaces whether visual dashboards or automations driven by voice agents call it "empathy for the user."

AI is not capable of empathy.

AI is not capable of having good taste.

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So to clarify it can imagine its way through writing massive gnarly page-long regexps or imagine how a complex API works and what will happen if it makes a given call or imagine just by reading disassembled code precisely how a binary works, but it will never be able to imagine how a human might feel about a user experience?

I have an experiment to offer. Find a really, really great example of something poorly-designed, too busy or whatever other metric you want to use as your "poorly-designed" thing, then ask Claude what's wrong with it and how it should be improved?

Ok and then in your thought experiment, after Claude builds its solution, what are the chances you can prompt it to be improved even more? Or has Claude reached perfection?

If you drink Anthropics cool-aid you might think that it has indeed reached perfection.

Does that work with a human-created UI as well?

Because I can imagine how that conversation would go with most of the designers I've worked with.

yeah you got it. they really can't. I'm a product manager, I'm STRUGGLING to create a harness for product work, the llms models just can't model a user's mindset very well and make very obvious bad choices that seem to be consistent (and getting worse with the new generations). That doesn't bother me, the code is getting better, but the work to talk to users and understand what needs to be built is still far from being conquered by AI.

It doesn't "imagine" at all.

This is like explaining to someone that there are no little people in the TV set, what a movie is, and then they go "yeah but sometimes they don't just talk, they also sneeze, and you can't fake sneezing, I read that in an article".

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