I think I have the same perspective. I see it as a flavor of progressive disclosure. Sane defaults and a way to customize if needed. Start with the 80% case and let people customize if they want to. It needs to be optional.

Especially with developer tools I think there's a hesitancy to be opinionated. If you don't know for sure an option is "always correct" it seems safer to ask the user. Developers can be very pedantic. "95% of people probably want it this way, but I should make people pick because that 5% has a valid point". But now you've made it worse for most users.

It's also so much more complicated to support customization, more than I think people realize. It's not just about bugs, every option makes polishing your UX much more difficult. Both because of the testing surface and also because more flexible abstractions are harder to design.

I think configurability depends on how important your tool is to the core job function or role being performed, where it becomes very valuable for helping them directly perform the tasks they and their employer value, vs how much it allows you make problems they don’t value as much get out of the way of the ones they do.

For example, I am a HUGE fan of the way Gusto handles payroll and all the different taxes and form filing for me, because I basically do not even have to think about the problem or fiddle with it at all. But to someone whose job is doing payroll/accounting/taxes or working within giant enterprise HR/legal/finance departments that does more harm than good, because it’s something they have to fight (or less charitably it makes their job too simple).

The other big problem is who is actually making the decision to pay or spend money on a thing, and whether it serves more of a defensive (eg auditability, security, constraints against undesirable behavior) or creative purpose. The creative stuff is sexier but hard to quantify, and end-users won’t actually be willing to pay that much for it relative to how much it helps them or how critical it is to their role.

Getting out of the way is important because people use dozen of tools each day for n and out.

Unfortunately there is still a thing to balance against, which is forcing people to do the right thing.

There always will be bunch of people who nag about being impeded by doing something correctly, because they feel it is waste of time.

it really depends on the framing, some work, especially fun work that develops skills is more valuable than people realize.

From an org perspective the goal is to create the highest curve of performance over the lifetime engagement of the employee or from the employee perspective their career.

And a lot of that depends on teh relationship of the people involved. From my perspective its a net negative when if my movers worked out the day before, their muscles will be sore and they'll do a worse or slower job. From the moving companies perspective its good, they'll be stronger for more jobs. Unless they quit or are fired that day, in which case we're back to bad.

The real evaluation isn't the macro vs the sublime edit. its does the thought process of making them macro improve them in other things, and what were they doing before that. In my experience no one is going use the time they spent writing a macro or a learning vim to do real meaningful work, they're doing that because they're bored or burned out and want to think about something else they find fun at the time.

your problem isn't your employees choose to write random scripts, its that they dont have a sense of urgency or care about their current task.

> make the users fall into a pit of success

I don't have anything else to add but I thought this was a wonderfully evocative phrase.

Some time ago I made an abstraction "hey, most people in our company who use CloudFront don't care about all the implementation details, they just want some paths to be somewhat cached". I explained this idea to a coworker. It took a while, but he understood it. Two months later someone merged a PR that replaced my interface "I want this and this path cached" with a simple passthrough that exposes raw AWS interface. Same thing happened to S3 buckets where I noticed that most people just want "auto-delete files after X days either on or off".

I spent entire year trying to explain to my manager "most devs who create services want a simple deploy button". Instead, we tried to teach devs how our "infrastructure as a code" works so that they'd contribute. The effect was that only one guy engaged with us this way, and he always sent us AI-generated PRs, and every time he saw an error, he just copy-pasted it to ChatGPT without reading and then the answer back to me.

The project eventually shifted towards my original idea, but in an extremely painful way without any design at all. It's just a toolbox of completely random features glued together because one day manager says "no we don't need to support X" and two months later a Jira ticket "add support of X".

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