Ward Bell

@blovedev So what comes next? Can MCP be fixed? Will it be? Or are alternatives emerging? And what are YOU doing about it?

and here comes the backlash not surprised tbh i've been building AI agents and fullstack agentic web apps and MCP never "felt right"

@billyhollis Dear Billy. There are 2 kinds of people: those that divide people into 2 kinds and those that don’t. I am the latter. The world of words & symbols, where you clearly belong & are welcome, has the same range of empathy as the other worlds. Agree empathy is critical for design.

AI companies and their enthusiastic supporters seem oblivious to the results of this survey. I have a theory about it. I consider one way to divide people is those who live in a world of words vs. those who live in a world of things. In the world of words (and symbols), everything is focused through lens of text and symbolism. Generative AI is almost totally based in that world, and its results reflect that. People who live in that world like the results, and since AI produces text and symbolic results faster, they just can't get enough of it. People who live in the world of things are not like that. They are the ones who grow crops, who repair air conditioners, who pave streets, etc. Their world is centered around outcomes and results of interaction with objects in the real world - not symbols or text. Sure, there is overlap. AI could be used to suggest a repair procedure for an air conditioner. But a guy with twenty years experience probably doesn't need it. His mind is trained on real world objects and interactions with them, just as a programmer's mind is trained on code and related symbols. In design, we're always trying to look inside the mind of users, so that we can create products that they will like. That requires us to step outside our own default preferences. This isn't drop dead easy. There are some in the technology industry who simply can't do it. Intuitively, they consider other people's minds as working more or less like theirs. I try not to include such people on design teams. Their participation is like throwing sand in the gears, because they simply can't see why the users won't like the grand ideas they have that appeal to them personally. I have to put the most enthusiastic proponents of AI in that bucket. They seem incapable of understanding the reservations and dislikes of AI experienced by people who don't think like them. This survey is a strong indicator of that.

@jeffbcross Remember also to specify when you will be back in your room

Pro tip: always write your room number on your hotel key card. That way, if you lose it, whoever finds it knows how to get it back to you!

@Live360events @billyhollis “With a contrarian streak that often challenges” The pronoun “that” throws me. I thought it was you, Billy, who often challenges and not your streak. Or have you found a different pronoun to announce your gender preference? A person of mystery indeed!

Billy Hollis will take the stage at #Live360 Tech Con, Nov 16-21! @billyhollis is a software designer and developer with a contrarian streak that often challenges conventional wisdom in the industry.

@juristr Those “devs” will never get a job as Devs. They might get jobs as business analysts; their experience as “jive coders” (ha ha) could make them better at THAT BA job than BAs are today (and wouldn’t that be welcome!).

I think we're in a period of time where there are devs that actually learned to code and now leverage AI to amplify their impact. But there is gonna be more and more devs that never actually learned it but are just vibing things together...which is scary

@victorsavkin These are important observations, not special pleading from defensive IT staff. MANAGEMENT should read. I don’t know that people who have never programmed at all can understand these points. Maybe by analogy and self-reflection?

1/10 A thread on using AI agents well, mechanical sympathy, and why you should not become a manager.

@billyhollis Or maybe we chose to delegate in different regions of our lives at different times? I’m reluctant to divide people into those who do and do not value their agency. It can seem that way, especially in circumstances where we are frustrated by the people who are apathetic

I had not thought of this comparison, but it's apt. I think it's all a question of agency. I value mine. Some people don't; they actually prefer to delegate decision making to someone, or something, else. Lack of self confidence, perhaps? (If you're wondering, this was one of the two Twilight Zone episodes starring William Shatner. It's called "Nick of Time". I hope our adventure with generative AI turns out to have some similarity to the end of that episode. I'll follow with a reply tweet containing a link to an interesting article about the episode and its meaning.)

@billyhollis @VSLive This is a very good idea. As you observed, the legacy app is the product of a dev saying “Because no one knows, I’ll design the UI myself.” But is there a better understanding of actual workflows now? Can AI find them? What is AI doing for me? I’m looking forward to it Billy!

I've been doing a conference session on this: Improving Legacy Apps with UX Design. Just did it yesterday at @VSLive, I fact. This Dot Net Rocks episode focused on the biggest potential improvement in most legacy apps - workflow. Most legacy apps have menus and app navigation based on the way *developers* think about the app, emphasing how the data is structured. I maintain that most of those apps can have some workflow navigation retrofitted on top of the existing navigation. That does require better understanding of the users' jobs than you probably have now. But once you've gained that, it's not a huge effort to add workflow views to an app. The payoff for that can be major - faster users, less training to become productive, and fewer errors from skipping steps or doing them out of order. I'll do that session for your company's Lunch and Learn or other professional development activity if you are interested. It's free. Ping me for details.

@billyhollis @Dorizzdt SILLINESS. My remarks were half in jest. There are a few truly terrible languages (hi there COBOL) in which it is almost impossible to write something good. JS isn’t one of them. Except at the margins where “bad fit” really exists, it’s the “man not the clothes” that matter.

@wardbell @Dorizzdt Joke's definitely not on me or my team. Clients pay us twice what most front end developers make to produce advanced, highly interactive UI that users love. I think the joke's on those users stuck w/ subpar UX made w/ a tinkertoy language & frameworks thrown together in 2 weeks.

Part 1 - JavaScript: The Language Nobody Chose JavaScript wasn’t designed. It was discharged. A ten day fever dream during the 90's browser wars, hacked into existence by Brendan Eich while the walls of Netscape burned. No spec. No vision. Just make the web dance. It wasn’t a language. It was a survival mechanism. And it should have died. Flash, Java Applets, ActiveX, all better equipped. All faster. More consistent. But they needed plugins. They needed permission. JavaScript didn’t. It was already inside the house. Developers hated it. Everyone did. No types. No modules. No classes but kind of. It hoisted variables like drunk ghosts and let you compare a string to a number and get away with it. It was chaos. But it was default. That made all the difference. Then came jQuery. The morphine drip. It masked the pain. Let you pretend the DOM wasn’t a nightmare. Right as devs lined up for the great escape, plugins started dying. Flash got gutted. Applets were a joke. Silverlight was a slow death. Suddenly JavaScript was the last man standing. The cockroach that wouldn’t die. And then came betrayal. Microsoft folded. Around 2010, with Silverlight bleeding out and WPF stagnating, Redmond had a choice. Push managed code. Double down on C# and XAML. Or walk. They walked. Told developers to embrace HTML5 and JavaScript. Web tech was the future. Silverlight was dead. If you didn’t want native C++, you had better get cozy with document.getElementById and the rest of the circus. The guy behind that call? Not at Microsoft anymore. He cashed out. Now he teaches product management at Harvard and probably calls it strategic repositioning. Meanwhile the wreckage smolders. MAUI is a meme. WPF is a ghost. Xamarin is stitched together with marketing promises and Stack Overflow duct tape. XAML? Pick a flavor. None stable. None agree. So what did devs do? They went all in on JavaScript. Not because it is good. Not because it is right. But because no alternative was left. And to cope with the pain, they built frameworks. React. Angular. Vue. Svelte. Entire ecosystems built to help you forget the monster at the core. These frameworks are not enhancements. They are quarantines. Their job is to change how you interact with JavaScript. To erase it from your brain. JSX? Not JS. Illusion. State libraries? Illusion. Virtual DOM? Illusion. It is all there to keep your fingers off the raw language. Because the minute you touch it, you remember. This thing was never supposed to survive past 1999. The modern dev stack is a shrine to a mistake. TypeScript? Not JavaScript. A bulletproof vest on a leaky raft. ESLint? A chaperone enforcing rules the language forgot. Babel? A translator for a language still rewriting itself mid sentence. Why do we keep propping it up? Because we have no choice. The entire front end world is a hostage situation. You do not choose JavaScript. You inherit it. Part 2.... @UnoPlatform .....

@billyhollis @Dorizzdt “Frameworks thrown together in two weeks”? You mean JS right? All others known to me have been carefully cultivated over years. We measure quality by how much clients pay now? Or do they pay you twice as much because it takes you four times as long? KIDDING!

@mgechev What’s not to like? You are “driving the conversation forward”! You are one of the select voices. That is so innovative! - Mr A.I. Marketspeaker

Working on features related to developing innovative frameworks for technology at Google. Keywords from my profile that make no sense together. These scam attempts are just getting more creative!

@MikeRyanDev I’ve looked at Hashbrown and I think you will want to as well. It’s a pragmatic way to integrate AI tools with an app to create user experiences that are natural for regular people. With guardrails. That’s a dream within reach for developers and their employers

You can get started with generative UI on the web using hashbrown.dev for Angular and React

@billyhollis The telling karmic consequence is the impoverishment of their souls. These principles are foundational to a rich and happy life, without regard to accolades or advancement (the least important “achievements”). Sorry for them … and the people they hurt.

I can think of three quite talented, intelligent people from my past whose careers never really took off. All three failed to follow some or all of these principles. It's another way of describing karma, I think.

@DanielGlejzner Publicly auditable, incorruptible audit trails (think tracking food from field to shelf for food safety). Then I am out of ideas.

@wardbell Right now there aren’t any realized use cases due to the fact that it’s still hard to access and use + a lot of bad rep due to crypto casino. However I can list at least 10 awesome use cases for blockchain that I think will land sooner or later

“Blockchain is useless”

@DanielGlejzner Let’s hear them!

@DanielGlejzner So many candidates 🤔 - Micro-services - Giant business application frameworks (think SAP) - Application Generators (but AI may finally deliver) - Test Coverage (most instances) - Waterfall - UML - Blockchain - Agile certification (any certification really) - Stored Procedures

What’s the biggest BS in software development that you’ve encountered?

@interlogus @abampakos Why I don’t love this change: - we skim file lists many times a day - looking quickly for artifacts as well as specific files - components & services being most frequent - semantic suffix quickly jump out - and disambiguate names (what is `agent.ts`?) Is there a better way?

@abampakos Why?

#Angular CLI 20 will remove the type from the filename and class for components, directives, and services. github.com/angular/angula…

@Dutch_Guy @evyataral @angular @vestjs I love vest with template-driven as I showed at ngConf a few years back. Of course it works with reactive. But why bother?

So I gave up on @angular template based forms with @vestjs (multiple reasons, happy to expand). I now seem to have Vest working quite nicely with reactive forms, including dynamic FormArrays - with minimum requirements. No custom directives needed. VestJS is freaking awesome!l