My 2 cents. It's when OKRs are executed without a vision, or the vision is that one and well, it sucks.

The goal is AI everywhere, so this means top-down everyone will implement it and will be rewarded for doing so, so thrre are incentives for each team to do it - money, promotions, budget.

100 teams? 100 AI integrations or more. It's not 10 entry points as it should be (maybe).

This means for a year or more, a lot of AI everywhere, impossible to avoid, will make usability sink.

Now, if this was only done by Microsoft, I would not mind. The issue is that this behavior is getting widespread.

Things are becoming increasingly unusable.

I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.

I had the experience too. Working with Azure is already a nightmare, but the copilot tool built in to Azure is completely useless for troubleshooting. I just pasted log output into Claude and got actual answers. Mincrosoft’s first party stuff just seems so half assed and poorly thought out.

I have had great luck with ChatGPT trying to figure out a complex AWS issue with

“I am going to give you the problem I have. I want you to help me work backwards step by step and give me the AWS cli commands to help you troubleshoot. I will give you the output of the command”.

It’s a combination of advice that ChatGPT gives me and my own rubberducking.

"They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way."

And when you try to make it something useful, the response is usually "I can't do that"

that's what happens when everyone is under the guillotine and their lives depend on overselling this shit ASAP instead of playing/experimenting to figure things out

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I think that's partially true. The point is to have the freedom to pursue higher-level goals. And one thing tech doesn't do - and education in general doesn't do either - is give experience of that kind of goal setting.

I'm completely happy to hand over menial side-quest programming goals to an AI. Things like stupid little automation scripts that require a lot of learning from poor docs.

But there's a much bigger issue with tech products - like Facebook, Spotify, and AirBnB - that promise lower friction and more freedom but actually destroy collective and cultural value.

AI is a massive danger to that. It's not just about forgetting how to think, but how to desire - to make original plans and have original ideas that aren't pre-scripted and unconsciously enforced by algorithmic control over motivation, belief systems, and general conformity.

Tech has been immensely destructive to that impulse. Which is why we're in a kind of creative rut where too much of the culture is nostalgic and backward-looking, and there isn't that sense of a fresh and unimagined but inspiring future to work towards.

People want the cookie, but they also want to be healthy. They want to never be bored, but they also want to have developed deep focus. They want instant answers, but they also want to feel competent and capable. Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment. Click-through rates, engagement metrics, conversion funnels: these measure immediate choices. But they don't measure regret, or what people wish they had become, or whether they feel their life is meaningful.

Nobody woke up in 2005 thinking "I wish I could outsource my spatial navigation to a device." They just wanted to not be lost. But now a generation has grown up without developing spatial awareness.

This is perhaps one of the most articulate takes on this I have ever read - thank-you!

And - for myself, it was friction that kickstarted my interest in "tech" - I bought a janky modem, and it had IRQ conflicts with my Windows 3 mouse at the time - so, without internet (or BBS's at that time), I had to troubleshot and test different settings with the 2-page technical manual that came with it.

It was friction that made me learn how to program and read manuals/syntax/language/framework/API references to accomplish things for hobby projects - which then led to paying work. It was friction not having my "own" TV and access to all the visual media I could consume "on-demand" as a child, therefore I had to entertain myself by reading books.

Friction is good.

I don't think I could agree with you more. I think that more in tech and business should think about and read about philosophy, the mind, social interactions, and society.

ED Tech for example I think really seems to neglect the kind of bonds that people form when they go through difficult things together, and the pushing through difficulties is how we improve. Asking a robot xyz does not improve ourselves. AI and LLMs do not know how to teach, they are not Socratic pushing and prodding at our weaknesses and assessing us to improve. The just say how smart we are.

> but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment

You are positing that we are active learners whose goal is clarity of cognition and friction and cognitive-struggle is part of that. Clarity is attempting to understand the "know-how" of things.

Tech and dare I say the natural laziness inherent in us instead wants us to be zombies being fed the "know-that" as that is deemed sufficient. ie the dystopia portrayed in the matrix movie or the rote student regurgitating memes. But know-that is not the same as know-how, and know-how is evolving requiring a continuously learning agent.

In my experience part of the 'frictionless' experience is also to provide minimal information about any issues and no way to troubleshoot. Everything works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you are now at the mercy of the customer support que and getting an agent with the ability to fix your problem.

Looking at it from a slightly different angle, one I find most illuminating, removing "friction" is like removing "difficulty" from a game, and "friction free" as an ideal is like "cheat codes from the start" as an ideal. It's making a game where there's a single button that says "press here to win." The goal isn't the remove "friction", it's the remove a specific type of valueless friction, to replace it with valuable friction.

I don't know. You can be banging your head against the wall to demolish it or you can use manual/mechanical equipment to do so. If the wall is down, it is down. Either way you did it.