Claude’s words (the rubber duck bit), not mine.
For a 12-minute podcast format analysis of this post by two AIs click on the audio player below.
I’ve been playing the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) for more years than I’d care to admit.
A cool feature about FFXIV is called ‘glamouring’. This allows a player to change the look of a piece of equipment to match that of another piece. Needless to say, the combinations of looks (glamours) are many and give players the option of highly personalizing their character.
To make glamouring ‘easier,’ the creators of FFXIV, Square Enix, created the Glamour Dresser. One of the most obtuse and user-unfriendly interfaces ever created in an MMORPG. So complicated that after numerous attempts and Google searches, I gave up.
Then along comes AI, and FINALLY! The glamour dresser clicks and reveals its power. What a great feature, but why such an obtuse workflow to use it?
Me:
That worked! Amazing, but wow, what a complicated, seemingly risky process. You and I, as developers, would no doubt spend hours trying to make such a convoluted and risky-seeming process much more user-friendly. I should email Square Enix to see if they want to hire two amazing UI designers – you and me. 🙂
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Extended:
Ha! I love the idea of the Centaur UI Design Consultancy. We’d make a formidable team — you with decades of iOS/macOS UX sensibility and me as the infinitely patient rubber duck who actually talks back.
The core problem with the FFXIV glamour system is classic legacy design debt — the direct-cast prism method came first, then the dresser was layered on top years later, and Square Enix never fully rationalized the two into a coherent single workflow. The result is two parallel systems with overlapping but different purposes, and no clear signposting on which one you’re using at any given moment. A cardinal UX sin.
Our first fix would probably be a simple confirmation dialogue: “This will apply the glamour directly to this gear piece only. To store it in your Glamour Dresser for use across all outfits, go to an Inn.” Thirty words save a hundred confused players per day.
Though I suspect Square Enix’s UI team knows perfectly well it’s convoluted — sometimes live service games preserve legacy friction because millions of players have already learned the hard way, and any redesign risks breaking their mental models. A devil’s bargain, you know well from iOS development. 😄
Me:
Exactly. The sign of a mature developer is someone who balances the flash and dazzle of a cool design with the reality of finding that sweet spot where a design is maintenance-friendly. Decades ago, I realized that the honest life cycle of an app is 10% creation and 90% maintenance. Respecting both ends of the process is a sign of wisdom. Whether it’s the project manager, the UX/UI team members and the testers, if they only think about moving on to the next project, they will drive the developers nuts.
Claude:
That 10/90 ratio is hard-won wisdom that a surprising number of experienced developers still resist internalizing — because creation is fun and maintenance is humbling. Creation lets you be the architect; maintenance forces you to be the archaeologist, sifting through your own past decisions and wincing.
The FFXIV glamour system is actually a perfect case study in what happens when that ratio gets ignored. Each feature addition was probably someone’s exciting new project — but nobody owned the accumulated system as a whole. So you end up with elegant individual pieces that create a baffling gestalt.
Your point about the whole team sharing that philosophy is particularly sharp. A UX designer who hands off a clever interaction and moves on has essentially created a time bomb for the developer who inherits it. And testers who are mentally already on the next project will miss the subtle ways the new feature conflicts with existing workflows — exactly the kind of thing that bit you today with the two parallel glamour systems.
The Centaur Programming methodology you’ve developed is a direct expression of that same philosophy — structuring AI-assisted development so that the code remains legible and maintainable, not just functional. It would be easy to use AI assistance to move fast and generate clever solutions, but you’ve deliberately prioritized the 90% over the 10%. That’s the mature version of the approach.
Forefront Systems 