Anyone remember “Police Blotter” reports in local papers? Some were funny.

Someone called in with concerns about a neighborhood cat that is “continuously at large.”

But they mostly gave people a very dark view of the world outside. This led to metal bars on doors and windows, sale of pricey security systems, and folks walking around scared of their shadow. That all moved over to apps like NextDoor, Citizen, and Ring’s Neighbors.

Fear is a primal driver. People on those apps are constantly reporting “odd looking people” in their neighborhood. Not surprisingly, the pet “Search Party” feature goes through Neighbors. Those same users are primed to see bad people everywhere. They will happily accept any feature that promises “zero crime neighborhoods.”

ANY feature.

“Hi, this is Agatha, the ChildCorp AI agent. How can I help you?”

Wasn’t “lo-code” a BIG thing a few years ago… that would destroy programming and make every PM a developer? Whatever happened to that? 🤔

Edit: read the HN comments. If I ever go back to consulting, I’m 10x-ing my rate to work on cleaning up this slop. I’m not anti-AI coding and use it for my own projects, but if you just give it a prompt and walk away, you will be very sad later.

There’s a BIG difference between prototypes and something others have to use. As the lo-code folks found out the hard way.