zlacker

You’re absolutely right! You astutely observed that 2025 was a year with many LLMs and this was a selection of waypoints, summarized in a helpful timeline.

That’s what most non-tech-person’s year in LLMs looked like.

Hopefully 2026 will be the year where companies realize that implementing intrusive chatbots can’t make better ::waving hands:: ya know… UX or whatever.

For some reason, they think its helpful to distractingly pop up chat windows on their site because their customers need textual kindergarten handholding to … I don’t know… find the ideal pocket comb for their unique pocket/hair situation, or had an unlikely question about that aerosol pan release spray that a chatbot could actually answer. Well, my dog also thinks she’s helping me by attacking the vacuum when I’m trying to clean. Both ideas are equally valid.

And spending a bazillion dollars implementing it doesn’t mean your customers won’t hate it. And forcing your customers into pathways they hate because of your sunk costs mindset means it will never stop costing you more money than it makes.

I just hope companies start being honest with themselves about whether or not these things are good, bad, or absolutely abysmal for the customer experience and cut their losses when it makes sense.

>>DrewAD+(OP)
They need to be intrusive and shoved in your face. This way, they can say they have a lot of people using them, which is a good and useful metric.

>>DrewAD+(OP)
> For some reason, they think its helpful to distractingly pop up chat windows on their site...

Companies have been doing this "live support" nonsense far longer than LLMs have been popular.

>>DrewAD+(OP)
As much as I side with you on this one, I really don't think this submission is the right place to rant about it.

>>ronsor+V
There was also source point pollution before the Industrial Revolution. Useless, forced, irritating chat was ‘nowhere close’ to as aggressive or pervasive as it is now. It used to be a niche feature of some CRMs and now it’s everywhere.

I’m on LinkedIn Learning digging into something really technical and practical and it’s constantly pushing the chat fly out with useless pre-populated prompts like “what are the main takeaways from this video.” And they moved their main page search to a little icon on the title bar and sneakily now what used to be the obvious, primary central search field for years sends a prompt to their fucking chatbot.

>>DrewAD+(OP)
I took the good with the bad: the ai assisted coding tools are a multiplier, google ai overviews in search results are half baked (at best) and often just factually wrong. AI was put in the instagram search bar for no practical purpose etc.

>>fantas+jh
Yeah totally. The point I’m trying to make, however, is that most people don’t code, so they didn’t get the multiplier, and only got the mediocre-to-bad, with a handful of them doing things like generating dumb images for a boost. I think that’s why a lot of people in the software business are utterly bewildered when customers aren’t jumping for joy when they release a new AI “feature.” I think a lot of what gets classified as cynical ceo enshittification is really people ignoring basic good design practices, like making sure you’re effectively helping customers solve an actual problem in a context and with methods they, at least, don’t hate. Especially on the smaller scale, like indie app developers who probably get more out of AI than most, they really think people are going to like new AI features simply because they’re new AI features. They’re very wrong.

>>zahlma+U3
this thread is for pro-LLM propaganda only.

do not acknowledge that everyone in the world thinks this shit is a complete and total garbage fire