I don't think you're disagreeing, in fact, I think you're agreeing. Ironically with the fact of either you or I being wrong demonstrating the difficulty of chat based UI communication. I believe yarekt would be in agreement with me that

> you can't even know the answer until you're part way in.

Which it seems you do too. But for clarity, there's a big difference between building the /wrong/ thing and /not the right thing/. The underlying point of my comment is that not only is communication difficult, but the overall goals are ambiguous. That a lot of time should be dedicated to getting this right. Yes, that involves finding out what things are wrong and that is the sentiment behind the original meaning of "fail fast" but I think that term has come to mean something a bit different now. Moreover, I believe that there's just people not looking at details.

It is really hard to figure out what the right thing is. We humans don't do this just through chat. We experiment, discuss, argue, draw, and there's tons of inference and reliance upon shared understandings. There's a lot of associated context. You're right that a dysfunctional organization (not uncommon) is worse, but these things are still quite common in highly functioning organizations. Your explicit statement about management having even less of an idea of what the right solution is, is explicitly what we're pushing back against. Saying that that is a large part of a developer's job. I would argue that the main reason we have a better idea is due to our technical skills, our depth of knowledge, our experience. A compression machine (LLM) will get some of this, but there's a big gap when trying to get to the end point. Pareto is a bitch. We all know there is a huge difference between a demonstrating prototype and an actual product. That the amount of effort and resources are exponentially different. ML systems specifically struggle with detail and nuance, but this is the root of those resource differences.

I'll give an example for clarity. Considering the iPad, the existence of third party note taking apps can be interpreted of nothing short of Apple's failure. I mean for the love of god, you got the pencil and you can't pull up notes and interact with it like it is a piece of paper? It's how the damned thing is advertised! A third party note taking app should be interpreted by Apple as showing their weak points. But you can't even zoom on the notes app?! Sure, you can turn on the accessibility setting and zoom with triple tap (significantly diverging from the standard pinching gesture used literally everywhere else) but if you do this (assuming full screen) you are just zooming in on the portion of the actual screen and not zooming in the notes. So you get stupid results like not having access to your pen's settings. Which is extra important here given that the likely reason someone would zoom is to adjust details and certainly you're going to want to adjust the eraser size. What I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of low hanging fruit here that should be incredibly obvious were you to actually use the application, dog-fooding. Instead, Apple is dedicating time into hand writing recognition and equation solving, which in practice (at least in my experience) end up creating a more jarring experience and cause more editing. Though it is cool when it does work. I'd say that here, Apple is not building the right thing. They are completely out of touch with the actual goals and experiences of the users. It's not that they didn't build a perfect app, it is that they fail to build basic functionality.

But of course, Apple probably doesn't care. Because they significantly prioritize profits over building a quality product. These are orthogonal aspects and they can be simultaneously optimized. One should not need pick one over another and the truth is that our economics should ensure alignment, that quality begets profits and that one can't "hack" the metrics.

Apple is far from alone here though. I'd say this "low hanging infuriating bullshit" is actually quite common. In fact, I think it is becoming more common. I have argued here before about the need for more "grumpy developers." I think if you're not grumpy, you should be concerned. Our job is to find problems, break them down into a way that can be addressed, and to resolve them. The "grumpiness" here is a dissatisfaction with the state of things. Given that nothing is perfect, there should always be reason to be "grumpy." A good developer should be able to identify and fix problems without being asked. But I do think there's a worrying decline of (lack of!) "grumpy" types, and I have no doubt this is connected to the rapid rise of vaporware and shitty products.

Also, I notice you play Devil's advocate a lot. While I think it can be useful, I think it can be overused. It needs to drive home the key limitations to an argument, especially when they are uncomfortable. Though I think in our case, I'm the one making the argument that diverges from the norm.