chesslop.com

every day i open chess.com and there is a new UI.

i am barely exaggerating.

you open the app. you play a game. you close the app. you come back three hours later and a button has moved. a menu has changed. something is bigger. something is smaller. you loved that widget? here's another one.

that's cool and everything, but sometimes opening chess.com feels like a lottery.

then you play a game and get this, and then this:

why is the username font size changing from one game to another? guys, tell me. i genuinely don't understand.

and there is so much of this tiny thing everywhere.

this is the menu where you choose a time control, and this is the menu where you create a challenge:

3+0 is gone. just gone. why is 3+0, one of the most popular time controls on the planet, hidden under more time controls here?

yes, i know these screens technically do different things. but i am choosing a time control in both of them, man. why does one know what 3+0 is and the other doesn't?

at least lichess got me

at least lichess got me right. they always had the better UI anyway. simple. boring. everything where i expect it to be. look how beautiful it is.

oh wait.

no.

LICHEEEEESSSSSS

hey meethos make our app look like chess.com make no mistakes

okay, i am exaggerating a bit. the new lichess app is cool, and they did a wonderful job, especially considering the whole thing is open source.

but man.

that's when i realized the problem isn't really chess.com.

or lichess.

every app's UI feels like it is slowly becoming the same app: a feed of giant cards, widgets, recommendations, shortcuts, things you might want, things an algorithm thinks you might want, things product thinks you might want, and things you definitely don't want but apparently somebody had a quarterly goal.

loook

ai

first of all, i am not saying chess.com or lichess were vibe coded.

and this is not going to be one of those AI BAD!!!!!! REAL PROGRAMMERS TYPE EVERY CHARACTER BY HAND!!!!!! articles.

i use AI to code. a lot. LIKE A LOOOOT.

AI is fucking incredible for coding.

that's kind of the problem.

something changes when making software becomes this cheap, not necessarily cheap in money, but cheap in effort.

you can have an idea at 10:00.

describe it to claude at 10:02.

have a decent implementation at 10:20.

fix the weird padding at 10:24.

make it responsive at 10:31.

add tests.

ship.

and the result might actually look good (that's the important part: it will look good).

when people talk about "AI slop," they usually imagine a broken website with eleven gradients, six fingers on the logo, and a button that sends your credit card number to localhost.

no, it might even look great.

it just shouldn't exist.

that's the problem. every component can make sense on its own. every new screen can look perfectly good.

then you open the product and none of it makes sense together.

before AI, someone would say:

wouldn't it be cool if we—

and implementing the rest of that sentence required a designer, an engineer, meetings, backend work, QA, two weeks of development, and the spiritual death of everyone involved.

so maybe, eventually, somebody went:

actually, never mind.

beautiful.

natural selection.

now the distance between "wouldn't it be cool if" and production is getting close to zero.

the clanker doesn't get tired. claude doesn't tell you, "this seems kind of unnecessary, man."

claude says absolutely. i'll implement that. (not opus 5 though, that brother thinks he socrates or some)

and i don't think our ability to decide what should exist has improved at the same speed as our ability to make things exist.

that is the part of the AI coding discussion that interests me.

everybody keeps asking:

can AI build this?

yes. it can.

new question:

should we build this?

(i might be slightly biased because i lost ten games in a row, maybe)