Josh On Design

A diatribe in when I am greatly disappointed in my industry.

If you live on planet earth and you are at all connected to software you've probably tried out 'vibe coding', ie: using an AI tool to write software for you. As someone who's been writing software for close to four decades I've seen code automation tools come and go. Believe it or not, people used to talk about Visual Basic in the same breathless tones of today's vibe coding tools. The outcome has always been that the new tech never lives up to the hype but can be useful in some contexts. The tricky part is always figuring out what it's good at and what it isn't. I believe these AI tools will go the same way; but hey, maybe this time it's different. I can't talk about what I haven't experienced, so I tried experiments this week. Here's what I learned.

Layout is one of the hardest problems in UI toolkit design because there are so many different ways to design a layout. Creating a system that supports them all is practically impossible. Even creating a system that merely makes them all possible to implement (even if difficult) is a challenge. And making the layout fast is even harder. However, given that we are targeting embedded systems, rather than general purpose interfaces (ex: no resizable windows), we should be able to narrow down the scope to something usable. Let’s dig in.