Month: July 2026

Euro budget airline UX dark patterns showdown 2026

Posted on by Dan

What is up? It’s hot over here.

I have had the pleasure of flying with three European budget airlines this summer.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Ryanair check-in experience. It was exactly the dark pattern UX hellscape that I dreamed of – a true education and delight.

I’ve now also flown with easyJet and Wizz Air (named after the cheese?) and so I am able to impartially and scientifically present a head-to-head-to-head showdown: who has the worst and most misleading UX?

Ryanair

It’s Ryanair. Ryanair are the worst. Maybe the article would be “better” if I saved the reveal for the end, but, whatever, like there could be any other victor.

Ryanair gets 10 / 10 golden harps for a long, confusing and actively misleading check-in flow. Can the others even get close?

Wizz Air

A disappointingly non-confrontational experience, where you just say no, I don’t want that, and the site just kind of agrees and goes along with it? And then some stuff about who are you, no explosives, thank you, I’ve already eaten, and that’s it.

Wizz Air gets an initial 2 / 10 golden harps for the standard-issue presence of random seat and insurance/hotel/car up-sell features.

They are awarded an additional bonus 2 golden harps, a grand total of 4 / 10 golden harps, for this shocking date selection widget. It’s shown here picking dates for a flight but they use the same one for your date of birth. See how it is impossible to type in a date, and it’s very difficult to discover how to change year without scrolling month-by-month, potentially for decades…

Interlude: the curse of the apostrophe

Anyone with an apostrophe in their name – or names that otherwise do not conform to narrow cultural expectations or that break bad/legacy code/integrations – will understand this.

I booked these trips through booking.com. Overall, a good experience, except I couldn’t get Wizz to recognise my name. I tried to resolve this via both Booking.com and Wizz Air support, and in fairness both did respond quickly with the information I needed, which was to use one of the usual fallbacks of O space SULLIVAN. I did however have to lie to a phone menu to talk to a Wizz Air human, who was clearly evaluated on call time, and couldn’t wait to get rid of me…

EasyJet

EasyJet are similarly un-Ryanair-y and seem to have forgotten to squeeze you hard. The seat / bag stuff isn’t particularly alarmist, with only a small amount of “are you sure?”. There is one interstitial about like buying a sandwich, and the up-sell items are easy to overlook and actually come after check-in is complete.

Both Wizz Air and EasyJet also provide a good-ole PDF boarding pass, which worked fine on my phone without an airline app, unlike Ryanair who have removed this option.

3 / 10 golden harps. Do they actually recognise their customer as a sentient being, deserving of respect, or something? Must try harder.

On check-in strategy

As mentioned last time, I generally try to check-in with “random” seat allocation immediately before the flight, the logic being that if they’ve already given away the “bad” seats they’ll be forced to give you a “good” one.

This time round, I wasn’t able to check-in at the last moment, but in both cases it was on the day of the flight. Wizz did what you expect and gave me a middle seat near the back, boo hoo. EasyJet, on the other hand, gave me an aisle seat in the exit row – one of the best and most expensive seats on the plane.

Of course, if you pay for a middling known-quantity seat, your chance of getting a top one is exactly zero. You can’t win if you don’t play.

Cliches in the age of the LLM

Posted on by Dan

I now spend many hours a day reading LLM generated text. Summaries of systems and interactions, guesses at what caused a bug, implementation plans, pull requests descriptions. Pages and pages of flabby prose, which I skim, and then offer a pointed response, increasingly impatient. “NO don’t cast just use the type”, “why is this needed? seems pointless”, “KEEP IT SIMPLE”.

My productivity has never been higher. I can accomplish things that I would have never attempted before. The foundations can feel insubstantial – like sand moving under my feet – as I resist being led down a mistaken path, as I challenge strange and confident presumptions. But there is no doubt this new, alien tool is powerful, and I enjoy my work as much as ever, maybe more.

Yet something has been gnawing at me for a while. I think it’s all the cliches. I resent having to read this bilge in order to do my job.

You’ve always been exposed to cliches when working in business and tech. Management is famous for its jargon (I will loop back on this) and the software world has its argot of happy paths and yak shaving. But there was an essential limit to the volume that could be produced: an actual person had to spend a moment of their life opening their mouth or tapping at a keyboard. It already felt like a lot, and now there is more.

Since I had this realisation – these cliches are killing me – I started to note them down. Somehow this made me feel better. I shared my quest with colleagues and maybe it helped them too: “I would have said hidden before but I think it’s made me say opaque”.

I’ve apparently been collecting LLM cliches since 15 June, mostly from Claude, although ChatGPT seems to pull from a similar pool. They cluster into a few groups and here is my attempt at a glossary of current LLM cliches:

  • load-bearing. Anything that does anything.
  • backstop, belt and braces, defense in depth. The opposite of load-bearing, anything that does nothing.
  • smoke test, smoking gun. Evidence for something. Both smoke related, I now realise. 
  • keep honest, being honest, honest caveat. These possibly leak from prompt/training attempts to control confabulation?
  • hand-waving. The opposite of being honest, making shit up.
  • instinct, your read, called me out, this flips my lean, reframe, gets to the heart. What the bot says when I apply my professional experience to a problem. I take “instinct” unreasonably personally – lucky guess, meat bag. Read and lean as nouns is annoying.
  • (single) source of truth, canonical. A parting gift from the Jira-cleric class as they drift into the good night.
  • north star. A direction (specifically: north).
  • one wrinkle. A catastrophic problem.
  • in-flight, mechanical, fast follow, big lift, blast radius. Words for doing stuff.
This became a bit of a problem.

Not all of these are awful but, for me, all have grown tiresome from overuse. Some are truly dreadful and “this flips my lean”* is the worst.

This post is largely therapy: “these are my cliches, what are yours?”.

But perhaps the concept of the cliche opens up a deeper point about how LLMs invisibly diminish the breadth of our ideas. The endless repetition of the cliche certainly grates and reduces our own vocabulary (you are what you eat). More generally, though, I believe that the way that LLMs present us with language that emulates finished thought in turn restricts the range of ideas that we even explore.

The “blank sheet of paper” problem is no more. We no longer have to confront an empty document or code window and make something from nothing, in fits and starts, as we think through the puzzle and build up an answer in our minds, inchoate and incoherent at first, slowly solidified by small revelations.

Instead, we offer a vague prompt and get pages of instant babble in return, ending with something like “should I just apply fixes 1-3 or tackle the wider refactor now?”, like these are the only possibilities in the universe. 

* my wife made a comment about what this rhymes with which is unpublishable