OP: Perhaps it is, but this article honestly took me 12 months to research & write. I really struggled to find trustworthy sources. Do you know of any others I should look at?
Totally agree; I had to cut a few sentences about that :). (I also tried to steel-man the paper as much as possible).
Oddly enough, it seems like, although the value of "blind operation" is well-understood, it's not super well researched. As one of the papers I cite puts it:
> Little research deals with the optimal design of haptic features and how haptic feedback can support the user in searching for control elements.
OP here: I always disliked touchscreens in cars, so I didn't understand why automakers kept shoving them in. I always assumed I was weird in some way, and that most consumers preferred touchscreens or something (Reddit seems to argue this in circles all the time). I planned to keep buying Mazdas, with their lovely buttons and stuff.
But when Mazda unveiled their button-lite 2026 CX-5 about a year ago, I started investigating.
I'm pretty convinced that touchscreens today are primarily a cost-saving measure, and every other justification is secondary. I hope I can convince you, too!
OP here: I really enjoyed learning about the history of industrial design for this.
I wanted to understand the parallels between software engineering and industrial design (well, chairmaking) through the Industrial Revolution. Matthew Bird's [History of Industrial Design series][1] was fantastic, especially this quote [from John Ruskin][2]:
> Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is — we should think there might be some loss in it also.
I've been using "Big noun pages" in my technical documentation for quite some time now, and I wanted to formally explain the concept to my teammates. Thus: this blog post!
Perhaps this is a bit OT, since the article focuses more on self-development ("When training a muscle, you only get stronger with resistance"), but I wonder about the subtitle:
> Every week there seems to be a new tool that promises to let anyone build applications 10x faster. The promise is always the same and so is the outcome.
Is the second sentence true? Regardless of AI, I think that programming (game development, web development, maybe app development) is easier than ever? Compare modern languages like Go & Rust to C & C++, simply for their ease-of-compilation and execution. Compare modern C# to early C#, or modern Java to early Java, even.
I'd like to think that our tools have made things easier, even if our software has gotten commensurately more complicated. If they haven't, what's missing? How can we build better tools for ourselves?
OP here: I thought it might be interesting to document how I (a random engineer) have been using AI day-to-day. I tried to ground everything with real examples, so you can judge for yourself :)