One company's AI mistake

For years, I have happily used a service called Aweber to send out my email newsletter.

It's great; I am delighted with them, overall.

But this morning I realized they are planning something foolish.

You see, when you use an email messaging platform like Aweber (or one of their competitors like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, etc.), step one is to log into their backend and generate a sign-up form. Like this one.

Aweber has a 'form builder' for this, so you can click buttons on the page to set up that form. Which has more moving parts than you might think. But their web UI is well designed, and makes the complex parts straightforward once you learn how to use it.

They have also created a conversational AI form builder, which is fine...

Except they plan to remove the previous form builder completely, forcing you to create and edit every form by yapping with an LLM.

Imagine Visual Studio Code announced they are removing your ability to edit files directly. So you can ONLY develop by vibe coding.

Or GMail decided you can no longer directly write your own emails. Instead, your only choice is to prompt an LLM to compose it for you.

That's what Aweber is planning here.

It is exactly as foolish as it seems.

Just in case you need ammunition to combat such a thing in your own company, here is the email I sent to them this morning:

The conversational form builder has clear benefits and is nice to have as an option. In particular, it makes it easy to get a 90% solution when requirements are not strict.

If you are really going to remove the previous form builder, and force everyone to use the conversational form builder for creating and editing all forms - respectfully, that would be a mistake.

Its biggest problem is that you must carefully compose a well-thought-out prompt to do anything.

This is cognitively taxing compared to interacting with your previous well-designed form builder. As just one example, a dropdown presenting choices is an affordance that informs what choices are available. A conversational interface makes it harder to know what the choices even are.

Beyond that, conversational interfaces are intrinsically slow due to the need to process every interaction through an LLM, and waiting for the generated response.

It is also imprecise. One must invest substantial thought into how to compose text that will be interpreted correctly by the AI to achieve the desired outcome.

It is also nerve-wracking, in the sense that everyone knows LLMs are nondeterministic and frequently make mistakes. Forcing people to use this will make them associate feelings of anxiety with your brand.

Conversational interfaces make it harder to get a precise result that fully meets all requirements a business may have. Some of those details are extremely important.

Further, key information about the current configuration of the form is unavailable without having a conversation.

This is not about laziness; it is about efficiency, correctness, and verifiability.

There is a learning curve with the normal form builder. But it isn't that hard to learn, and then you are able to create forms with whatever requirements are needed - quickly and with confidence that it is correct. You can also easily edit them.

In contrast, many previously-simple tasks are more difficult in this AI form builder, if you want to ensure important goals are fulfilled.

Please consider maintaining a non-conversational interface to create and edit forms.

So that is the email I sent them today.

Will they listen?

Who knows.

Either way, this forms a cautionary tale, on how we must keep our heads when thinking about how to leverage AI.

And also our coworkers and leaders. So if anyone gets a tad AI-over-zealous, we don't let that energy take control.

A powerful tool for that is writing.

When you learn to write well, so much of your life gets better. Not only can you drive coding agents better. You can actually influence the layers of management above you. You can influence your peers - not just those close to you, but in the wider team or even the entire organization.

Quite valuable, in this age of AI zeal.

Feel free to use, even directly copy-paste, any of my words above, if it helps you nudge (or shove) your team to a better path.

And I recommend you develop your ability to write well. It will only help you, in more ways than you can count.

Boosted Code has a whole course module on how to write well. Made especially for engineers who don't know how to write, but are painfully aware of how important it has become.