I've always hated interfaces that try to complete my sentences for me. It started with suggested replies in email and IM apps. I sure noticed it when they started showing up in the llm chat interfaces and it really bugs me.
This is the one case I don't mind it. Suggested responses feel like they cheapen human interaction, but here I'm talking to a robot that really does tend to know what I want next, and also is highly unlikely to be offended by a less-than-heartfelt response.
The suggestions in the box where I put my text push me out of flow. Bad enough it says “want to do X?”, but when it’s in my own text box it screws me up. It’s not more efficient. It actively makes things worse for me.
The worst is Gmail's recent feature to suggest an entire goddamn email that includes cheery little details, doing its best to mimic human pleasantries and small talk. Rather than simply offering "yep/nope" type short replies like it once did, it'll now auto-compose and suggest a multi-paragraph email responding to questions like "How's the family doing?" or "Is your older cat tolerating the new kitten yet?" with completely fabricated saccharine slop.
It's like Clippy pops up and goes "It looks like you're trying to maintain a shred of human connection in an online interaction. Would you like a smiling skinwalker to do that for you instead?"
The world has a lot of tech journalists, but I have yet to see the longform article, with actual interviews, trying to dig into what is happening in this kind of manic push for features that seem to have no traction with anyone
There are failures in the history of software that come down to believers not realizing that they could never deliver on the promise they were selling, but at least the promise was compelling. But nowadays we are seeing this large orgs try to ship things that could never work. The 1000s of copilots. The hallucinated cat story... The kinds of thing you'd never demo to a serious product-centric exec, because it'd be your last day at the company.
And then there's the current execs, but I guess you'll never find one that will be honest with a journalist here. Can they not see that their product orgs are bankrupt? Whatever Nadella wanted, it sure wasn't the current copilot situation. It's not one product going wrong, but large parts of organizations going in directions that don't pass the smell test. We are in one of the least stable moments in tech since Windows 95 changed winners and losers. The times where malinvestment ruins established companies. How are we seeing basically every large company flailing?
Sadly, I believe there are some geniuses being paid a half mil a year who are so misguided, they think the only problem is the skinwalker doesn't sound enough like me.
If they can just keep working on it and make sure to train it on all my past emails, it'll be a perfect simulacrum, and its oily token secretions will be impossible for my friends and colleagues to distinguish from my own writing. I'll have one that's just like me and you'll have one that's just like you. And then we can automate away those pesky distractions that occasionally delay us from consuming content perfectly matched to our interests. Won't that be grand?
Fold? You'll pick coveralls from the daily bin with the other Amazon warehouse picker scum. Now come back to lineup before the cameras dock you three meals again...
You get a feeling some people would send a robot wearing their face to hug their mom if they thought the mom couldn't tell the difference. And to have sex with their wife. It'll happen too which is the sad bit.
“““One evening he felt the need for a live model and directed his wife to march around the room.
“Naked?” she asked hopefully.
Lieutenant Scheisskopf smacked his hands over his eyes in
exasperation. It was the despair of Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s life to be chained to a woman who was incapable of looking beyond her own dirty, sexual desires to the titanic struggles for the unattainable in which noble man could become heroically engaged.
“Why don’t you ever whip me?” she pouted one night.
“Because I haven’t the time,” he snapped at her impatiently. “I
haven’t the time. Don’t you know there’s a parade going on?”""" - Catch 22, Joseph Heller.
“““All Colonel Cathcart knew about his house in the hills was that he had such a house and hated it. He was never so bored as when spending there the two or three days every other week necessary to sustain the illusion that his damp and drafty stone farmhouse in the hills was a golden palace of carnal delights. Officers’ clubs everywhere pulsated with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and sex orgies there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most beautiful, the most tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily satisfied Italian courtesans, film actresses, models and countesses. No such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies ever occurred. They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.""" - also Catch 22, Joseph Heller.
This is hilarious as someone who hasn't used the gmail composition interface in years. I left it to use my own domain, but it seems like I get to enjoy this mess with popcorn too instead of tears.
This isn't that though. I agree, I hate those interfaces too.
But this is more like, when I've read 7 paragraphs of its reply and want to accept all of its recommendations and go ahead, I can just press the right-arrow key and hit enter, rather than typing out "Yes, agreed with recommendations 1-3, go ahead and build".
It saves me from any typing on probably something like a third of turns. Like I don't use it at all during the "design" phase of a session, but I use it constantly during the implementation phase, where I'm basically just sanity-checking that it is resolving all the edge cases correctly that are coming up.
It's a milder version of that situation where you talk to a microphone, but it has a slight delay so you're like stunlocked for feeling like eternity 3 seconds.
I hate that too, but I think it’s more the ux than the concept of a default. There are definitely situations (“here’s the default install path, press enter to confirm”) where defaults are a good experience, and LLM generated ones can fall in this category.
What I hate about sentence completion or suggestion is usually that it happens right when I’m trying to think and so destroys my focus, it’s actually way worse than just a passive option, it’s actively harmful to the task I want. The worst is google docs “help me write” - that may be gone now, I’ve blocked it with ublock origin, that waits until you’re thinking amount what you’d write and then hits you with a distracting pop up. It’s obviously PMs that don’t care about their users and want to maximize some AI use metric.
Anyway rant aside, it’s the interface more than the concept that’s the big problem.
