Elegant > Optimized
The race to automate everything feels soulless. This is the return of "Look and Feel."
Ai promises the total automation of anything you can do with a mouse and keyboard, or any web site with connectors and API’s. Here’s what it looks like:
To the business operator, this bowl of spaghetti looks like a dream - eliminating pesky humans and having robots run 24/7. But anyone who knows the state of these tools knows it’s not just “set it and forget it.”
A friend got high on these ideas to automate his entire business, and his email sounded like a meth-induced diatribe to prove it. Here is (part of) my response:
- The agents aren’t bulletproof. They break.
- Prompts can have different answers at different times.
- Extensive testing is required to figure out the edge cases.
- API’s can throttle, no-code platforms go down, or they can time out or do a partial execution. All at 2 in the morning.
- Do you have a backup plan? A sandbox? A simulation mode? Do you have rollbacks for each stage?
Now that anyone can vibe code anything, I believe “look and feel” will be more and more important. Eventually all these tools will become democratized and cheap, so the question then becomes - what apps do you actually enjoy using?
I took that approach to scratch my own itch.
I wanted to mix a to-do list with my calendar, to plug in work when I have spots available. There are a few that already do this but they don’t feel good to me (and I would have to pay).
So instead I took the analog planner I created, as the basis for the digital one:
MomentumPad.com
Here is what I created (using Emergent.sh)
It has the exact look and feel I’m going for, plus a seamless integration with Google calendar.
I’d love for you to try it out: www.MomentumPad.com.
What do you think needs an elegant solution.