Why Developers Don’t Sit Next to Users (and Why That’s Killing AI Adoption)

There’s a universal truth in software development: the further a developer sits from the user, the worse the product gets.

Developers love to say they’re “user-focused,” but drop them next to an actual user for an hour and suddenly they’d rather refactor the database for the third time this week. It’s not that we don’t care about users — it’s that we don’t understand them. We live in our world of logic, frameworks, and clean architecture. They live in Excel, copy-paste, and “I forgot my password again.”

The result? A product that technically works but functionally sucks. We optimize for elegant code; users optimize for “can I finish my job before lunch?”

And this is exactly why AI adoption is crawling at the speed of a government Wi-Fi connection.

Everyone’s talking about AI, building models, automating stuff, generating code, writing papers — but most of it never leaves the lab. Why? Because techies don’t actually know what non-techies do all day. We’re automating the wrong pain points. We’re solving the visible problems, not the real ones — because the real ones only appear when you’re sitting next to someone trying to make their broken workflow work.

If you’ve ever tried to “AI-ify” a process and watched it flop, you know what I mean. It’s not because the model was bad. It’s because you optimized for data, not for humans.

The irony? The same developers who can debug a race condition in a distributed system somehow can’t understand that “downloading a CSV” is an actual, daily human task that eats hours.

Here’s the brutal truth:

1. The best developers I’ve ever met know how to shut up and watch a user work.
2. The worst ones assume they already know.

Until developers stop building from their own perspective and start learning what users actually do — not what they say they do — AI will keep being a buzzword rather than a business tool.

Want to accelerate AI adoption? Don’t start with a model. Start with a chair next to a user.

Because until you understand how humans think, you’ll never teach machines to help them.