Comment by epistasis

Comment by epistasis 2 days ago

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Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going to work at all.

Every few years I would try to use it for a few days, then quit in frustration at how useless it was. Accidentally activating Siri is a major frustration point of using Apple products for me.

thatjoeoverthr 2 days ago

In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures.

All chat bots suffer this flaw.

GUIs solve it.

CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.

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  • QuercusMax 2 days ago

    For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs.

    And furthermore - aren't there shells that will give you the --help if you try to tab-complete certain commands? Obviously there's the issue of a lack of standardization for how command-line switches work, but broadly speaking it's not difficult to have a list of common (or even uncommon) commands and how their args work.

    (spends a few minutes researching...)

    This project evidently exists, and I think it's even fairly well supported in e.g. Debian-based systems: https://github.com/scop/bash-completion.

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    • bangonkeyboard 2 days ago

      > For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs.

      "Hunt the verb" means that the user doesn't know which commands (verbs) exist. Which a neophyte at a blank console will not. This absolutely is a problem with CLIs.

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      • npunt 2 days ago

        Discoverability is quite literally the textbook problem with CLIs, in that many textbooks on UI & human factors research over the last 50 years discuss the problem.

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      • lossyalgo a day ago

        "Hunt the verb" can be alleviated to some degree for programs that require parameters by just showing the manpage when invalid or missing parameters are specified. It's highly frustrating when programs require you to go through every possible help parameter until you get lucky.

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      • dididn284d 2 days ago

        I think this is a naming problem. CLI is usually the name for the interface to an application. A Shell is the interface to the OS. Nonetheless agree with your post but this might be part of the difficulty in the discussion

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      • mingus88 2 days ago

        Per the thread OP, nobody pretends that CLIs do not need a manual.

        Many users like myself enjoy a good manual and will lean into a CLI at every opportunity. This is absolutely counter to the value proposition of a natural language assistant.

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      • bnjms a day ago

        Yes. But I think the point is a good one. With CLI there is a recognition that there must be a method of learning what the verbs are. And there are many traditions which give us expectations and defaults. That doesn’t exist in the chat format.

        Every time I try to interact with one of these llm gatekeepers I just say what I want and hope it figures out to send me to a person. The rest of the time I’m trying to convince the Taco Bell to record a customer complaint about how its existence itself is dystopian.

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    • nextaccountic a day ago

      > And manpages exist.

      For older tools, sure. Newer tools eschew man pages and just offer some help flag, even though there are excellent libraries that generate manpages like https://crates.io/crates/clap_mangen or https://crates.io/crates/mandown (for Rust, but I am sure most languages have one) without requiring you to learn troff.

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      • OJFord a day ago

        Newer in maturity though, I'd say, no not like 'modern' tools vs. only vintage tools have them. It's just not something people tend to consider early on I think, but popular stuff gets there. (For one thing, at some point someone points it out in the issue tracker!)

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    • thatjoeoverthr a day ago

      All of this is true. “Invitation to guess” is the key phrase in my comment. CLIs present as cryptic, which is a UX _advantage_ over chat wrappers because the implied call to action is “go do some reading before you touch this”.

      An AI wrapper typically has few actual capabilities, concealed behind a skeuomorphic “fake person” UX. It may have a private list of capabilities but it otherwise doesn’t know if it knows something or not and will just say stuff.

      It really needs to be 100% before it’s useful and not just frustrating.

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    • [removed] a day ago
      [deleted]
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    • dhussoe 2 days ago

      the comment you're replying to said:

      > but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual

      which is basically what you're saying too? the problem with voice UIs and some LLM tools is that it's unclear which options and tools exist and there's no documentation of it.

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      • nneonneo a day ago

        Siri does have documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/ipha48873ed6/io.... This list (recursively) contains more things than probably 95% of users ever do with Siri. The problem really boils down to the fact that a CLI is imposing enough that someone will need a manual (or a teacher), whereas a natural language interface looks like it should support "basically any query" but in practice does not (and cannot) due to fundamental limitations. Those limitations are not obvious, especially to lay users, making it impossible in practice to know what can and cannot be done.

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  • PunchyHamster 2 days ago

    CLI + small LLM (I am aware of the oxymoron) trained on docs could be fun

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    • bmandale a day ago

      If you like deleting all your files, sure. LLMs, especially small ones, have far too high a propensity for consequential mistakes to risk them on something like that.

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      • PunchyHamster a day ago

        I was thinking more in context of interactive help that will just find and display relevant manual info (to get around the problem of "it remembered wrong") rather than vibe coder favourite of "just run what you hallucinated immediately"

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  • xnx a day ago

    The lack of an advertised set of capabilities is intentional so that data can be gathered on what users want the system to do (even if it can't). Unfortunately, this is a terrible experience for the user as they are frustrated over and over again.

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    • setr a day ago

      Given that they made no apparent use of such information in practice, the unfortunate thing is that they had the idea to begin with.

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      • eitland a day ago

        This is a problem all over our industry:

        - almost every search field (when an end user modifies the search instead of clicking one of the results for the second time that should be a clear signal that something is off.)

        - almost every chat bot (Don't even get me started about the Fisher Price toy level of interactions provided by most of them. And worse: I know they can be great, one company I interact with now has a great one and a previous company I worked for had another great one. It just seems people throw chatbots at the page like it is a checkbox that needs to be checked.)

        - almost all server logs (what pages are people linking to that now return 404?)

        - referer headers (you product is being discussed in an open forum and no one cares to even read it?)

        We collect so much data and then we don't use it for anything that could actually delight our users. Either it is thrown away or worse it is fed back into "targeted" advertising that besides being an ugly idea also seems to be a stupid idea in many cases: years go by betweeen each time I see a "targeted" ad that actually makes me want to buy something, much less actually buy something.

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  • sakesun 2 days ago

    That's explain why there is a limited set of recommended verbs in PowerShell.

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  • pxtail 2 days ago

    Very well written, I'm wondering when current "cli haxxxor assistant" FAD will fade away and focus will move into proper, well thought out and adjusted to changed paradigm IDEs instead of wasting resources. Well, maybe not completely wasting as this is probably still part of discovery process.

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  • pixl97 a day ago

    >GUIs solve it.

    Very charitable, but rarely true.

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  • bane a day ago

    A lot of AI models also suffer this flaw.

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highwaylights 2 days ago

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.

I’m looking at you, Photos sync.

EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right (https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losi...)

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  • joecool1029 2 days ago

    > The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.

    I literally just experienced this with RCS failing to activate. No failure message, dug into logs, says userinteractionrequired. Front page of HN, nobody knows, apple corp response, 'thats interesting no you cant talk to engineering'.

    Read the RCS spec definition document to fall asleep to after the board swap and the call saying they won't work on it since issue resolved, answers exactly what that meant, Apple never implemented handling for it, my followup post: https://wt.gd/working-rcs-messaging

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  • anon7000 a day ago

    Bingo. My wife’s phone failed to backup to iCloud. To be fair, there’s an error message. However, the list of what takes up space does not show what’s actually taking up space. Such as videos texted to or from you (can easily be multiple gigs as they add up over a year or two)

    The list didn’t show the god damn GoPro app, which was taking up 20GB of space from downloaded videos. I guessed it was the problem because it showed up in the device storage list, but literally not reported when you look at the list of data to backup.

    iMessage is another great example of a failure. I changed my iMessage email and didn’t receive messages in a family group chat until I noticed — I had to text the chat before stuff started coning through. Previously sent messages were never delivered. And they all have my phone number, which has been my primary iMessage for LITERALLY over a decade. iMessage’s identity system is seriously messed up on a fundamental level. (I’ve had numerous other issues with it, but I’ll digress.)

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    • fingerlocks a day ago

      It’s messed up, but it can be fixed by turning off iMessage and MMS in settings.app and then turning it back on. It’s an old bug. Since it hasn’t been fixed, I’m guessing the solution introduces more problems than it a solves for whatever reason.

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  • epistasis a day ago

    I don't even use Photos, except in extreme situation. It was such a major UX downgrade from iPhoto that I could never get it to work without lots of mystery meat guessing, and every interaction with it was so unpleasant because of that.

    Knowing that a company had competent product designers that made a good product, but then shitcanned the working product for a bunch of amateur output from people that don't understand dry very basics of UI, from the one company that made good UI its primary feature for decades... well it just felt like full on betrayal. The same thing happened with absolutely shitty Apple Music, which I never, ever use, because it's so painful to remember what could have been with iTunes...

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    • AlexandrB a day ago

      My biggest pet peeve with macOS Music is that you can't go back a track in the "infinite play" mode. Not only can you not go back to the previous track, but you can't even go back to the beginning of the song - the button is just greyed out. It's a purely arbitrary limitation because the same functionality works fine in iOS.

      I don't know why it bugs me so much, but I'm at the point of moving my library into a self-hosted Navidrome instance so I can stop using Music.

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  • FireBeyond 2 days ago

    Photos is horrific for this. No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality.

    Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.

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    • nunez a day ago

      Agree that new Photos is abysmal compared to what it was before. And that's before the macOS only features that you don't know are macOS only features (like naming photos! Seriously!)

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    • skylurk a day ago

      There's a lot of arcane lore about how to get it to sync. Closing all applications, restarting, then starting photos, then hiding the photos main window, then waiting, was how I got it to work last time. It worked twice, YMMV. If there's a cli alternative, please tell me.

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rdiddly 2 days ago

Ironically this manages to break all four of Apple's famous UI principles from Bruce Tognazzini: discoverability, transparency, feedback and recovery

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npunt 2 days ago

Yeah, it's a classic CLI v GUI blunder. If you don't know exactly what the commands are, the interface is not going to be particularly usable.

I've found I appreciate having Siri for a few things, but it's not good enough to make it something I reach for frequently. Once burned, twice shy.

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gwd a day ago

Siri does have a "Ask me some things I can do" feature, but the problem is it's way too big; most of the things are things I don't care about ("Ask me for a joke", "Ask me who won the Superbowl last night"); and a lot of times even forx things I can do, its comprehension is just poor. "Hey Siri, play me Ein Klein Nachtmusik by Mozart". "OK, here's Gonna Pump Big by Diddy Q[1]". "Hey Siri, tell Paul I'm on my way". "OK, calling Mike smith".

[1] Made up title

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stavros 2 days ago

This is just the conversational interface issue. You need the system to be able to do most of the things you would expect a human to be able to do (e.g. if you're talking to your phone, you'd expect it to be able to do most phone things). If the conversational system can only do a small subset of those, then it just becomes a game of "discover the magical incantation that will be in the set of possibilities", and becomes an exercise in frustration.

This is why LLMs are the first conversational interface to actually have a chance of working, once you give them enough tools.

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TYPE_FASTER a day ago

I didn’t know for years that you can ask it to do things remotely over SSH.

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