"in practice"? Disrespectful, of course, but also not true.
In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job. If yours doesn't, you hired a quack.
Here. Try this, in practice, most business owners don't know what they are doing. In practice, most programmers write shit. It's easy to bitch at artists because most people don't understand what they do. Don't be one of those people.
In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job
I would qualify that as most graphic designers know what they’re doing, when they’re working in graphic design media: logos, magazines, billboards, and other print media.
Unfortunately, our industry (software) has shifted towards hiring graphic designers to do user interface design, a task which they’re often grossly unqualified for. This is how we get interfaces which are attractive but frustrating and difficult to use, both for beginner/non-technical users and for expert/power users, for different reasons. Beginners need intuitive interfaces with high discoverability for the most important operations and power users need efficiency and clean access to automation tools for the most common tasks.
Graphic designers often sacrifice power user features entirely in favour of minimalism. They also sacrifice intuitiveness in favour of their own artistic vision. In both cases they frequently sacrifice information density in favour of minimalism, making it hard for users to quickly locate the information they need. This is especially egregious on mobile-first designs where the accuracy of mouse pointers and the information capacity of large displays is ignored.
if you’re hiring a graphic designer without UX experience to do a UI then you’re hiring the wrong person and your end product will be hated by your userbase
Tons of consultants are missing expertise in their clients' wheelhouses. The client and consultant each have domain knowledge, and when those domains overlap, there might be conflicts.
If you hire an architect to redo your house, it's fine to say "I see where you're going with this thing for my kids, but I know them and they will never go for it."
Which types of designers? Because by the way you said "artists" it seems you're referring to graphic designers not UI/UX designers which, while they may make pretty websites and apps, are not artists and the article explicitly says to not treat their artifacts as such.
The website is a tool to get customers and most designers do not know marketing, scaling or growth engineering because it's not their job to know, it's the marketer's job to say, let's add an onboarding flow with these features and the designer collaborates with them on what it should look and work like.
It can't do things with me like a human, it's not human, it's not intelligent, it's not thinking, it's not aware. It's an aide I use, not a tool I rely on.
I have had things like your React instead of Vue problem. I solved it by always having Claude write a full implementation spec/plan in markdown which I give to a fresh context Claude to implement. Typically, I have comments and make it revise until I am happy.
An advantage I have enjoyed is that I am insanely careful about my fundamental architecture and I have a project scaffold that works correctly.
It has examples of all the parts of a web app written, over many years, to be my own ideal structure. When the LLM era arrived, I added a ton of comments explaining what, why and how.
It turns out to serves as a sort of seed crystal for decent code. Though, if I do not remind it to mimic that architecture, it sometimes doesn't and that's very weird.
Still, that's a tip I suggest. Give it examples of good code that are commented to explain why its good.
even if it can be decided on a test, there is the point of "it works, but the code is shit". For instance, I'm doing a website with some e-commerce. Upon executing a sale, I connect to the accounting software to create an invoice, and then send a confirmation email to the customer attaching the invoice. Claude Code decided to put all the functionality to connect to the accounting software inside the `sendConfirmationEmail` function. The code was placed in the right order so it "worked", but hiding invoice creation inside a function named after sending confirmation email is, IMO, bad code.
Some people might say that, with AI, having well structured code no longer matters because no human is expected to read it any more, but I don't think we're there yet.
YES YES YES!! I so wish that we could go back in time and never, ever have even suggested anything other that what you say here. AI doesn't do it for you. It does it with you.
You have to figure out what you want before the AI codes. The thinking BEFORE is the entire game.
Though I will also say that I use Claude for working out designs a lot. Literally hours sometimes with long periods of me thinking it through.
And I still get a ton more done and often use tech that I would never have approached before these glory days.
This. Code generation is cheap, so you can rapidly explore the space and figure out the architecture that best suits the problem. From there, I start fresh and pseudocode the basic pattern I want and have Claude fill in the gaps.
In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job. If yours doesn't, you hired a quack.
Here. Try this, in practice, most business owners don't know what they are doing. In practice, most programmers write shit. It's easy to bitch at artists because most people don't understand what they do. Don't be one of those people.
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