I'd always been amazed over the years by how many people didn't even attempt CSS. They looked at it like an after thought. Reminds me of a favorite Archer quote: "I thought we skipped that step.", "Skipped a step... in bomb defusal...?"
> much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much less a superintelligence.
I'm always blown away when I see comments like this.
It just makes me think the people that say this either work for a competitor or simply haven't used their products.
The things that OpenAI and similar companies have created are literally revolutionary. It's insane. Pretending it's "little return" is a very strange opinion.
Their manifest v3 enforcements on third-party extensions are problematic. I was trying to update one of my extensions recently that used a Google library (ironically) and had trouble finding a way to allow cousin libraries to be loaded.
Especially since it was a refactoring, it's generally better to handle those in stages if you're working with a team.
There are lot of ways/patterns for solving the same problem... but tearing apart an existing interface being used by others isn't a good start.
The best part about abstraction is that you can modify the underpinnings to be more flexible without hurting the rest. A good step would be to create more flexible math functions underneath, like you're saying, and leave the rest alone.
Afterwards, there can be deeper conversations with the team about how they want the interfaces to communicate to provide an obvious facade but an abstract implementation.
I think a lot of it is the major influx of people that joined the industry in the mid-2010s that never had to write code before. They started on fancy UIs so that's what they know.