A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and the wild asides you tend to talk yourself out of still on display.

Yes, there is a widespread belief in tech that 'removing friction' is a good direction to aim for. But you can have too little friction that completely ruins a product and the user experience.

In game design friction very important; remove all friction and you don't even have a game any more. My favourite metaphor for it is sex: there is no sex without friction.

What LLM have done is massively reduce the friction of intellectual effort, completely devaluing most expressions of it.

I think you're right, and I think this principle of friction-is-good-actually applies to a lot more domains than just software, but whether the world will ever accept that is a different question.

Fuben-Eki! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37169679