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"?
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.