You're only flying blind if you make decisions not looking and thinking. Analytics isn't the only way to figure out "what your users actually care about", you can also try the old school way, commonly referred to as "Talking with people", then after taking notes, you think about it, maybe discuss with others. Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience, and you'll make even better product decisions than the people who are only making "data driven decisions" all the time.

> The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

And the difference between what they do and what they want is equally shocking. If what they want isn’t in your app, they can’t do it and it won’t show up in your data.

Quantitative data doesn’t tell you what your users want or care about. It tells you only what they are doing. You can get similar data without spying on your users.

I don’t necessarily think all data gathering is equivalent to spying, but if it’s not entirely opt-in, I think it is effectively spying no matter what you’re collecting, varying only along a dimension of invasiveness.

> If you dont have analytics you are flying blind.

We... we are talking about a CLI tool. A CLI tool that directly uses the API. A tool which already identifies itself with a User-Agent[0].

A tool which obviously knows who is using it. What information are you gathering by running telemetry on my machine that couldn't.. just. be. a. database. query?

Reading the justification the main thing they seem to want to know is if gh is being driven by a human or an agent... Which, F off with your creepy nonsense.

Please don't just use generic "but ma analytics!" when this obviously doesn't apply here?

[0]: https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/3ad29588b8bf9f2390be652f46ee...

Wow, it really is sad how literally unthinkable it is to you and so much of the industry that you could actually talk to your users and customers like human beings instead of just data points.

And you know what happens when you reach out to talk to your customers like human beings instead of spying on them like animals? They like you more and they raise issues that your telemetry would never even think to measure.

It's called user research and client relationship management.

The totality of Microsoft's products is proof that this is false. If telemetry and analytics actually mattered for usability, every product Microsoft puts out wouldn't be good instead of garbage.

Analytics is wrong. I never click any ads, but they keep showing it. I avoid registering or enter fake emails, but they keep showing full screen popups asking for email. I always reject cookies but they still ask me to accept them. And youtube keeps pushing those vertical videos for alternately gifted kids despite me never watching them. What's the point of this garbage analytics. It seems that their only goal is to annoy people.

> If you dont have analytics you are flying blind

More like flying based on your knowledge as a pilot and not by the whims of your passengers.

For many CLIs and developer tooling, principled decisions need to reign. Accepting the unquantifiability of usage in a principled product is often difficult for those that are not the target demographic, but for developer tools specifically (be they programming languages, CLIs, APIs, SDKs, etc), cohesion and common sense are usually enough. It also seems real hard for product teams to accept the value of the status quo with these existing, heavily used tools.

It makes me think, what `gh` features don't generate some activity in the github API that could as easily guide feature development without adding extra telemetry?

> If you dont have analytics you are flying blind

If you have too much emphasis on (invasive) analytics you might end up flying empty i.e. without customers.

You can "optimize a successful user journey" by making the software easy to use, making it load so fast people are surprised by it, and talking to your customers. Telemetry doesn't help you do any of that, but it does help you squeeze more money out of them, or find out where you can pop an interstitial ad to goose your ad revenue, and what features you can move up a tier level to increase revenue without providing any additional value.

Game developers benefit tremendously from streams where they get to see peoples webcams _and_ screens as they use their software.

This would be _absolutely insane_ telemetry to request from a user for any other piece of software, but it would be fantastically useful in identifying where people get frustrated and why.

That said, I do not trust Microsoft with any telemetry, I am not invested in helping them improve their product, and I am happy not to rely on the GitHub CLI.

I'm pretty ok with the github cli tool team flying blind. The tool isn't exactly a necessary part of any workflow. You don't need telemetry to glean that

It's not like they don't own API's that those cli's are hitting. They have all the stats they need.

I agree with you in that regard. That said, knowing that this is Microsoft, the data will be used to extract value from the customers, not provide them with one.

This got me thinking: Are there prominent examples of open source projects that 1. collect telemetry, 2. without a way to opt-out (or obfuscating / making it difficult to opt-out)? This practice seems to be specific to corporate software development.

Why is it that startups and commercial software developers seem to be the only ones obsessed with telemetry? Why do they need it to "optimize user journeys" but open source projects do just fine while flying blind?

You could, I don't know, do user interviews with the various customer segments that use your product.

How did GitHub ever survive without this telemetry? Was it a web application buried in obscurity?

I think there's room for a distinction between "not using metrics" and "not using data".

Unthinkingly leaning on metrics is likely to help you build a faster, stronger horse, while at the same time avoiding building a car, a bus or a tractor.

Teams that do this need to just dogfood internally. Once you start collecting telemetry on external users defaulted to opt-in you're not a good faith actor in the ecosystem.

You have all info you need on server side, I don’t believe that you’re totally blind without client tracking

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