unless you work there how would you know this?

It's always possible that in reality they were always a bit less polished behind the scenes though.

Post AI, I think the bar hasn’t been the same.

Pre-AI the attitude was: if we are going to do something, it is going to use up our precious resources, so we should do it well, because our staff are capable and the marginal cost of doing it well vs. doing it at all is negligible.

Post-AI: we can churn out things quickly, we don’t have to worry about resource allocation, churn churn churn!

Ultimately, it is pragmatic for businesses to behave this way, but it is a shame for those who love the craft. I think we took for granted the beautiful ornate hand carved furniture era of software engineering. We are now in the ikea era.

I feel this so much. I thought AI would make it easier to get lots of hand-carved ornate furniture; but right now what we are getting looks like the typical Ikea product line -- a bunch of mismatched pieces by a host of different designers with no common underlying design theme or continuity (I'm talking specifically about the looks and design, not the materials).

I have to assume the most common [insert thing] is going to be bad, because more people are amateurs at [insert thing] than are experts. Right?

I have never expected excellence from chatbot generated anything. I have always expected just good enough.

What's happening right now is more like, we're moving from a hyper-optimized era of just-in-time manufacturing (in software, this is called "Agile", "scrum", "sprints", etc.) to getting our manufacturing outsourced to another country. In software, the "other country" is AI.

If Ikea furniture were lopsided, ugly, not-quite-properly functional and traded their minimalist design for a Frankenstein hodgepodge of redundant parts.

This is the same problem I see with these Stripe tools. This may not actually be a problem for real users at Stripe.

I think by any measure that OS/360 would be "high craft".

This is how I realized we truly are in an AI arms race. Literally every app or website or tool I use now forcibly pushes their "AI features" or "AI assistant" on you instead of just letting you use their products the way it makes sense for you. Stripe just confirmed what OP was saying. Poorly built, poorly thought out software is now the norm not the exception any more.

That is the reality for most (software) businesses.

What is it you think you will "win"?

People are always going to judge based on what seems "surface-level". Stuff like legibility also matters just for data comprehension, the AI tic of constantly repeating key numbers all over a presentation or webpage actively hurts legibility.

Also their documentation was frequently just straight up incorrect (as in the described json schema for a response was violated. keys missing, different field names, etc.).

But it's been over 10 years, has it improved since then? I'm still in my impression of their stack from back then, although they were decently mature by then as well.

No love for Stripe but IMO their documentation feels like a first-class product.

And from a sales perspective, that’s probably not wrong.

I think a new (or newly critical) engineering challenge is how to build in a way that keeps a codebase that’s churning out features from crumbling under the weight.

Possibly not wrong. One scenario that happens over and over again is that we lose a deal because we didn't have feature A. So we build feature A, and we still don't win deals with it. One way this happens is when the competitor has a focus on one part of the market, and we have a focus on another.

Example: We go after SMB, the competitor owns "The Enterprise." Just building A will never break us into the Enterprise part of the market. We have to build an entire strategy around seizing part of the Enterprise market from our competitor. That strategy may or may not include A, but it is definitely more involved than "Build A and customers will come."

if we aren't going to build an entire strategy around "The Enterprise," not only can building A fail to win the business, it may cost us some of our existing SMB business. Every feature our core market doesn't want or need is additional complexity and feature surface area for our customers to absorb. They stop thinking of our product as "tailored for their needs" as it begins to bloat with features they don't need.

And worst of all, the investment in feature A means some other feature—B—that our existing customers have asked for gets punted down-calendar because we're suddenly tearing up our road map and building A because the VP Sales threw a temper tantrum about being unable to close deals without A. This is another way that chasing feature A means sacrificing value for our existing customers who are asking for feature B.

In the case of Stripe, users want one thing, which is to receive correct answers to their questions nearly instantly. And from the sounds of it, that is indeed the case.

> Surface-agnostic APIs: Kai ships with an opinionated web application and a Slack integration, but the main primitive is the underlying API that powers them both. The agent is a service, not an application, and surfaces are simply customized views into it.

I...kinda get that they built an API that the agent polls. And then Slack or the webapp both invoke the agent? If so, the above paragraph is obscuring the point. Also, why isn't there a diagram showing it? There is a diagram below showing "Execution Environment" below, but that one doesn't show the API. And Kai and "Stripe Product Agents" are parallel paths on it. Does it not call out to this API anywhere?

I doubt if most people these days actually try to understand any of this, or just go "Agents? Cool! Here's some product that's vaguely similar that I like or have worked on!".