"t was at this juncture that I realized that Trello—my Trello, my beloved $10/month app, my tool to track when exactly DHL is going to deliver my package—is the best encapsulation of our current moment in tech. We are in a time of tech giants foisting updates on a public that hasn’t asked for them. Google, Microsoft, and Meta get the most attention for doing that with A.I. products. But I think it’s Trello, a much tinier service, that tells the most concise story of how technology companies are now looking at their users.
Microsoft has forced its 365 customers to pay more and accept access to its “Copilot” assistant, which does roughly the same document cleanup and email summary that its peers do. Meta installed a janky and privacy-corrupting A.I. search tool to Instagram. Apple began putting its underwhelming-to-many “Apple Intelligence” tool on phones by default, prompting a small industry of stories and forum posts about how to disable it. Tech companies across the board have interrupted the user experience for people who don’t want A.I. upsells. The concept of “force-feeding” and A.I. have become intertwined.
The new Trello does have a large language model component, of the extracting-info-from-emails variety. But what has chapped the angry user base seems to be not the A.I. but the unintelligible changes to the platform’s user interface. In this way, Trello is more representative of a tech trend that predates the industry’s infatuation with LLMs. Massive user experience changes without opt-outs have been the order of the day for at least the better part of a decade now. (Was the 2012 redesign of Windows 8 the starting point? Reasonable people could debate this.) The self-inflicted plight of Trello is a good reminder that A.I. didn’t push tech companies to behave this way, but more general, long-standing profit motivations did."
https://slate.com/technology/2025/08/trello-app-update-big-tech-ai-google-microsoft-apple.html
Pages, Keynote, Numbers, HWP formats
CET 
in the