2036
We are seeing future echos everyday; are we ready to admit it?
Thoughts, Ruminations, & Pontifications
Dominic Hopton's personal blog
Latest posts
Automate or simplify?
Why do we want to automate, when we could simplify?
The chat box can't be it
We've given up 'doing' for 'pleading' as we sacrifice it on the altar of the chat box.
The CLI was the only true user interface
The rise of the “chat box” implies that the CLI was the only true interface, with GUIs being a 40 year detour till we found our way back to… describing what we want rather than just doing it.
Optimisation is Tech’s Original Sin
Optimisation of the funnel & retention requires engineering investment. When your investment in funnel optimisation & retention is greater than your investment in features & product quality, it is likely your business is doomed. Optimisation is the original sin of tech.
Engineered Inefficacy
IMHO the need to call customer service is often, in reality, a failing of UX — a bug, or an explicit decision to employ a dark pattern. ‘Why is my account not letting me do x or y’: bug. ‘Why can’t I cancel or step down on the website?’: dark pattern. ‘Why can’t I schedule this appointment right now’: UX failing. Why do they persist? I just want to do a thing, but you force me to call, when it’s a…
No time for other people’s bullshit
Your perspective changes with age because you see less opportunity in front of you. Not because your experiences have made you cynical & jaded, but because you have less time on this earth to realise the remaining opportunity. You have to be intentional with your remaining minutes — dealing with other people’s bullshit is not a valuable use of those minutes.
Somewhere Along The Way
What I value as a professional, and what I value as a hobbyist, used to be the same thing. They've quietly diverged, and I'm sitting with that.
Communication Ouroboros
We're using AI to write things nobody reads, and AI to read things nobody wrote.
Tech says it loves you. Check the org's backlog.
We're not altruistic. We're mercenary.
Coding Agents are 3D Printers for software
LLM coding tools are powerful, transformative, and will absolutely generate you a pile of plastic goo if you let them.
The Journey Mattered
We're all still in the tunnel. Don't tell us there was never any light.
They're still next-token predictors. But what are we?
With so many tokens that came before the current token, and so many possibilities that come after, it’s the job of the harness, the system prompts, the post-training, et al in concert with the human to weave that into something useful. Something valuable. The LLM is the Temporal Loom. And we're The TVA.
A vision of computer interaction
There is a vision of the future of computer interaction. It varies by organisation. Apple showed us theirs — the Vision Pro. The rest of the world is — it seems — betting on The Chat Box™ with a side bet on "The Web" & offloading everything to the cloud. You see this through the development of more web experiences, and that web is the de-facto UX stack of choice. It's a stark comparison to Vision…
When going up is staying still
It’s often assumed that in the world of people managers people move up the org chart. It feels implicit . You become a manager of other managers, you’re going “up”! But often what actually happens is you’re staying still organisationally. You’re growing people below you — your teams become more specialised, often narrower. People who had been the rock-star ICs, expand to have a whole team to do…