Don’t Hijack My Mouse Pointer

I wanted to write this blog post for a while, but didn’t find time with all the work I have with my day-job and side projects. But I finally found a few minutes to write it down.

The mouse pointer exists for a reason, a lot of thought has been put throughout the years to make it the way it is. For example, making it slightly tilted because it was easier to draw on old screens. And the pointed shape makes sure you are clicking the right place and not accidentally clicking the wrong button.

Maybe I am wrong on this assumption, but with the help of vibe-coding people are replacing the pointer with fancy effects. The Syntax podcast also highlighted the fact that vibe-coding has made it easier to implement such fancy things (they didn’t talk about the mouse pointer), that were difficult to implement a couple of years ago.

Maybe they look cool to a designer trying to impress their clients, but they give a terrible user experience for people like me who use your website.

I think before vibe-coding it was difficult and time consuming to implement such fancy effects, but now it takes a single prompt and a few hundred tokens, and you have a fancy effect instead of the nice pointer.

For example it can be as simple as this,

to something completely unacceptable as this

If you are a web developer, please don’t replace my mouse pointer with these kinds of fancy designs. It’s not a good user experience and something that would instantly turn me off from using your website and service.