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thwarted 3 days ago

> It’s an extension of the current Product Management trend to give software quirky and friendly personality.

Ah, Genuine People Personalities from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

> It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and “Noodling”.

This reminded me of a critique of UNIX that, unlike DOS, ls doesn't output anything when there are no files. DOS's dir command literally tells you there are no files, and this was considered, in this critique, to be more polite and friendly and less confusing than UNIX. Of course, there's the adage "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all", and if you consider "no files found" to not be nice (because it is negative and says "no"), then ls is actually being polite(r) by not printing anything.

Many people interact with computers in a conversational manner and have anthropomorphized them for decades. This is probably influenced by computers being big, foreign, scary things to many people, so making them have a softer, more handholding "personality" makes them more accessible and acceptable. This may be less important these days as computers are more ubiquitous and accessible, but the trend lives on.