20 ms·

If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

• theendisney 2mo ago
  One of my favorite impossible puzzles is to sepparate security and feature updates. Ive made zero progress over many years.
• chermi 2mo ago
  1) no one who wrote software before llms truly believe it's solved right now 2) shit takes time. Was energy solved the instant we discover nuclear energy?
• dsjoerg 2mo ago
  Customers speak with their wallets, and OP doesn't like what they're saying.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Do we really still believe this? There are plenty of ways to get the money of someone who doesn't especially want to give it to you.
• AussieWog93 2mo ago
  I remember noticing the same thing a decade ago. I don't think it has anything to do with AI.
  • rightbyte 2mo ago
    It probably comes down handing over power from the user to capital which is antagonostic in its nature to the users' needs. Running non free software is essentially giving up our freedom. Before internet connectivity the problem wasn't too bad but nowadays there is always the temptation to squeeze the lusers.
• hibikir 2mo ago
  A lot of the product misses come from large product teams where nobody owns anything, and where there's minimal internal goal alignment. I know that, at work, what I am incentivized to do has nothing to do with what I consider the most important work I could do.... and I also know that the maze I would have to cross to be allowed to do the better work is just not worth it. The smaller the org, the better the chances of having only reasonable levels of misalignment... but without taking on high risk, it's just better pat to work on a large, worse org. Frustrating.
  • andreimackenzie 2mo ago
    This is spot on. Also, many orgs build to the needs of the business or whims of stakeholders rather than customer needs. Good product strategy and product discovery remain difficult despite AI.
  • BobbyTables2 2mo ago
    In large orgs, each team spends a ridiculous amount of effort adding the “glue” logic to work around design/architectural issues with the other teams’ products they interface with. Neither one really understands the other’s component. Cooperation is almost impossible since such would derail one project manager’s unrealistic schedule and demean their authority.
• Hugsbox 2mo ago
  Just a little gripe, but near the end of the article he links to a site for something called "Omarchy" which appears to be a Linux distribution. If you click on the link, the only information available is in the form of a video. If you're making a Linux distro, please don't do this. I will not watch your video. I was interested, and now I'm not.
  • deleted 2mo ago
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  • danlitt 2mo ago
    Omarchy is basically just Arch with a bunch of configuration. It's not a particularly useful project, and the author is noted fascist DHH. So probably not worth your time.
    • hypfer 2mo ago
      I think more precise terminology would go a long way here. What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things. As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him. ___ So to fix that: DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them. Starting somewhere late-ish last year, however, he seems to have dropped deep through the alt-right pipeline and started babbling talking points basically copy-pasted as-is from other talking heads. So, in essence, he kinda stopped being opinionated, because that would require having an own opinion, and instead started just being yet another person not doing all too well mentally on the internet. I mean the guy suddenly started talking about "body counts". What's his age again? __ Of course, moral outrage happened but achieved absolutely nothing, because it's not the right tool for the job here.
      • rightbyte 2mo ago
        One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user. Fascist is not just a silly label. The political collapse of neoliberalism made a lot of closet fascists emerge and they seem quite common among what was earlier thought of as "techno libertarians". E.g. the VPN provider owner (forgot which) just lately. If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.
• RugnirViking 2mo ago
  Complexity + a lack of incentives to take time to get things right. Imo we know the tools (social, + technical) to make good software that works. But in the face of massive complexity, people just want the next feature, the next thing sales can use as a win And yeah I agree with the other commenter here - I don't think this is AI. We had terrible software before, even declining quality.
• edifierxuhao 2mo ago
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• deleted 2mo ago
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• Biologist123 2mo ago
  > As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. I work in mediation and have recently seen a few cases where I’ve wondered if the participants were suffering from AI psychosis as related to their claims: where they’d constructed their legal cases hand-in-hand with an LLM and had become absolutely convinced despite a contestable set of facts. People have always been subject to delusion, but in these cases, all documentation submitted was obviously created by chatbots.
• iLoveOncall 2mo ago
  I've also noticed so many pieces of software becoming worse and worse, either with useless features (basically any new thing on Slack in the past year) or with a huge amount of large bugs, over the past year. It's glaringly obvious that poorly checked, AI-written, code is the culprit, I'm just wondering when companies will wake up. Nobody gives a flying fuck about resiliency, good practices, security or any of that now that AI is there. All anyone cares about is pure output of features. Any and all "productivity" gains attributed to AI efficiency are actually due to the complete disregard for any care or standard in the software industry in the past 2 years. Yeah you can output more shit when you don't give a fuck, big surprise, AI doesn't change anything here.
  • pixl97 2mo ago
    At the end of the day it has nothing to do with AI. People have been bitching about bugs in it for a long time. It's companies that give zero shits about releasing bugs. This comes back to the users. As long as they keep buying the shit software why spend money on QA. I mean, you're the problem. Did you stop using slack? Are they taking losses because of it? If not, why change?
• fhd2 2mo ago
  Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience. Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now. Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? Or is support not that key and we should invest into being the most reliable? The most enjoyable to use? One can hope.
  • brazzy 2mo ago
    > Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out. Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost no customer is willing to pay 10 times more for good support.
    • Proofread0592 2mo ago
      Counterpoint: Take a look at consumer cellular. I would say it’s drastically cheaper than verizon, at&t, or t-mobile, but the customer support is better than all 3.
      • ungreased0675 2mo ago
        Ting also has (had?) excellent customer service. Call the 800 number and the first thing you hear is “hello” from an actual human who has the ability to help you. They also didn’t charge a lot, which makes me think great customer service is a choice.
        • inigyou 2mo ago
          The relevant mindset is "we can shrink our way to growth". Managers think by cutting employees and roles the company will get bigger. It won't.
• themgt 2mo ago
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• hypfer 2mo ago
  Those two twitter links with people that got hospitalized might just be people trying to get their 5 seconds of internet fame by (pretending to be) doing something dumb. So taking it at face value is kinda part of the problem here. The only way this can get better is by completely suffocating it off attention. It doesn't exist. It's not real.
• mrkeen 2mo ago
  I agree that software becoming worse (in some sense) but I don't blame AI. My experiences as a user haven't really changed. Streamers fail to cast to TVs. Browsers are devices which reliably and efficiently propagate red console text and 500s from companies to you. I still see bluescreens on public touchscreens. Uncle Bob nailed one reason why the industry isn't getting better: the growth of programmers is exponential, such that half of all programmers have less than n years experience (5?). I offer two additional reasons: Firstly, you hone your skills doing individual algorithms on a single thread, where it's OK to get it wrong and change it as many times as you like. When you get a job, you don't even realise you're in a distributed system and the getter/setter model you practiced on is woefully inadequate for interacting with partner systems, cqrs, event-sourcing, auditability, idempotency or whatever else is required. In short, 10 years of practicing writing for-loops and data-structures will not translate into building a system that customers can access via their phone and multiple tabs of a browser, at the same time as a database schema is being updated. Secondly, while I don't think there is any realistic alternative to agile development, it seems that nontechnical POs have captured the software lifecycle. 'Focus on happy path only, for the MVP' is how you build buggy software. Good developers can learn that this will guarantee the need for a rewrite in the future, but POs never will. It seems like the languages have been increasingly targeting the beginner segment (C++ -> Java -> JS -> Python), while the tasks have been getting more complicated (b2b distributed systems, 24/7 uptime, millions of users, resistance to hackers, machine learning, etc.)
  • bregma 2mo ago
    They made programming so simple any idiot could do it. So they do.
  • willchis 2mo ago
    > 'Focus on happy path only, for the MVP' is how you build buggy software. Good developers can learn that this will guarantee the need for a rewrite in the future, but POs never will. And then when the MVP is done, it magically becomes the shippable product. Then just when the team is getting to grips with how to improve the product, management does a reshuffle and moves teams around. "EXCITING NEWS GUYS, congratulation to Jimmy Whatevs for being promoted to SENIOR Director, he will now head-up the cross-functional-operations team which will be folded under the product-support division."
• dminik 2mo ago
  This is probably going to sound elitist, but it is how I've been seeing this whole LLM thing play out. I don't necessarily believe in 10x devs, but there is a very clear output difference between various developers. During my career I've been both in a position where I was delivering much higher quality code at a similar pace to other coworkers and also mediocre code at a slower pace. Sometimes at the same time. Now, AI itself is a force multiplier. Depending on the task, your setup, your skill level (both as a developer and with LLMs), the weather, the model and so on, it can range anywhere from actively hindering you, to solving the entire thing for you. Let's say that on average you get a 20% productivity boost. If you take a 0.8x developer and give them a 1.2 force multiplier LLM, you get a 0.96x developer. Worse, the axis that has moved is speed, not quality. All this to say that if you let a below average developer vibecode, you get a much higher volume of slop. You can make an agent create good code, but this developer didn't care before so why should they now? *Note that this is from experience. I've started getting feature PRs from our devops team. It's been a very enlightening experience.
• st-keller 2mo ago
  That’s why i‘m using claude to literally write everything for myself! I cannot fix software-problems in my car or my fridge or my heat-pump. But I can start by replacing my own infrastructure!
• Jtarii 2mo ago
  Software quality has been declining for long before AI was a thing. Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is. The incentives are large companies are fundamentally not in align with making high quality software people actually enjoy interacting with.
  • worldthruword 2mo ago
    I think MS devs don't even use their windows OS. How do I know this? Because every week my favourite applications list gets reset. Why would anyone do that?
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Maybe they always test from a fresh image.
  • StilesCrisis 2mo ago
    In fact, I am pretty sure most of the examples he lists predate AI. Mac OS apps stealing focus certainly does. Horrible laggy car infotainment systems--hard to say without any specifics, but I've certainly had the same experience pre-LLMs. I've navigated the LG website pre-LLMs and it was busted then too.
    • throwawayffffas 2mo ago
      The complaint is not the focus stealing the complaint is the lag of the chat application starting. So the problem in this case is electron and all the shit that slack has bolted on on startup because "who cares about start up time, everyone has it on all day."
      • StilesCrisis 2mo ago
        Electron also predates LLMs by a wide margin though!!
      • MiddleEndian 2mo ago
• micoti 2mo ago
  MacOS contstant trolling with tab switching. I regret each day of life I need to use this shitty OS because of corporate. In linux these things will never happen
• gchokov 2mo ago
  It was always like this.
  • Y-bar 2mo ago
    I think the flaws have moved. I remember Mac OS 7-8-9 (”Classic”) fondly and the suite of software I regularly used there. It crashed, and crashed hard, a few times per week. That never happens today, maybe at most once a month. However, what has changed in terms of quality is that there are 1000% more smaller bugs. I never felt that small annoyances or problems were even noticeable or even existent back then. Every feature seemed to actually work. Yet just so far today I have encountered over a dozen small problems in my operating system and apps I use. It’s exhausting in a different way. Two decades ago I felt ”safe” from problems by frequently saving my files. Today I dread having to navigate a UI that keeps giving me a thousand paper cuts of small bugs.
    • rightbyte 2mo ago
      I don't think it fair to compare cooperative multitasking OSs to OSs that requires virtual memory chips on a software quality basis.
      • Y-bar 2mo ago
        It makes a difference to my experience as an end user and that is what I am talking about. I work in development and programming and with all the modern tools and testing frameworks and QA engineers and analytics and modern language we seem to only have achieved less crashes and more non-crashing bugs. It annoys me and I am a bit ashamed at my own profession.
    • pixl97 2mo ago
      How many more features are we asking from our software today? I think it's a two part issue. If you build a software with the same features as a '96 piece of software I can imagine it would be exceptional fast and stable. I also imagine that almost no one would use it as features are what bring in the users.
• elendilm 2mo ago
  <They were congratulating themselves on what an amazing job they had done. I keep thinking about that post every time I have to fight their product.> This is hilarious.
• prologic 2mo ago
  Software has neither gotten worse nor become any better. All you're seeing is the cost of writing code approach near zero. As that happens the speed at which you see defects increases. Software is by its very definition "malleable". It is without (or very few) constraints. So it is very hard to get "prefect". That is why IMO Site Reliability Engineering will be one of the few fields that will remain, because until we build an _actual_ goodness to gracious Intelligent System that can think critically, including how systems can fail (which includes humans), software will be what is hat always been "soft".
• fer 2mo ago
  > I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. I still don't understand how a full focus stealability debounce is not the norm. If I am in the middle of writing, or interacting with one UI bit in any way, no other app should be able to steal focus, full stop. Add an annoying popup if you want, make angry computer noises, flash icons, I don't care. 99.9, if not 100% of the time, it's completely unrelated to what I'm doing and can absolutely wait. While some OSs have something along these lines, they also give the tools to bypass it (I'm looking at you, Cisco AnyConnect! Being connected after clicking on connect is not an emergency!) Imagine you're working in a terminal and an app decides to steal STDIN. Why do we accept that for a GUI?
  • varjag 2mo ago
    You can't really debounce it easily due to how the OS event queue work across processes and windows. One fix could be to not bing the focus to newly open windows (like you could in X11) but that's not what users want.
    • prmoustache 2mo ago
      > but that's not what users want. You don't know that until you ask users. That would be a much more useful question than those boring "tour guide on first login" or "please activate cortana/copilot" or "do you want to sync to onedrive" stuff one gets notified on some major desktops. My preference is focus follow mouse, no focus stealing on new window opening.
      • varjag 2mo ago
        The users are trained on their exposure to behavior in Windows, MacOS and non-ancient Linux distros. Good luck changing the expectations of the world population. I believe the GIMP tried that for a few decades.
      • addandsubtract 2mo ago
• throw84949849 2mo ago
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• frameset 2mo ago
  > I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it when I have to use my work mac or windows computers. See here for docs, under "Focus stealing prevention" - https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehaviour/index.html#focus https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehavi...
  • anonzzzies 2mo ago
    That is definitely needed. On Mac it is really infuriating how stuff (auto update etc) just take focus/pop up crap. I am literally never interested in it and am confused why I cannot just say [x] Force apps to mind their own business. We have f’ing notifications for this; why does it need a dialog window?
    • frameset 2mo ago
      Maybe it's a hazy memory, but from 2007-2011 my main computer was a MacBook Pro. I swear in that era, when an app wanted attention it would bounce in the dock endlessly. That was annoying, but it let you finish doing what you were doing until you were ready to switch focus.
      • jagged-chisel 2mo ago
        I think you’re right - macOS changed this behavior at some point.
        • anonymars 2mo ago
          People say Microsoft has no UI taste, but they used to be decent. They had sensible guidelines and behaviors For example for this case, the taskbar icon would blink three times and then remain highlighted. So it would grab your attention, but not hold it, and then you could still easily see at a glance which app it was At some point, like many other things, it looks like this either was changed or broke/doesn't work consistently. But I thought it was a nice design
• graemep 2mo ago
  > Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler. I think that points do the solution. We should not make stuff more complex than we can the level of complexity at which we can make it reliable.
• luciana1u 2mo ago
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• Imbiss 2mo ago
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• HackerThemAll 2mo ago
  > So why does software keep getting worse across the board? The issue is only partially within those who code. They get directions from those in charge, and they are just making idiotic decisions. And those who code, for some reason don't stand against those idiotic decisions in defense of a common sense and a great UX. A blatant, exaggerated parallel would be: you are designing your kitchen and you've chosen a place for your washing machine such as that it will be unable to open its door. When inviting a professional, you expect them to correct such wrong decisions and explain to you that it won't work. But in programming, those who program, calling themselves "software engineers", would just place this washing machine where they're told, because it's "not my job". It's not a feature of an "engineer". It's being a coder lemming.
• nope1000 2mo ago
  My assumption is that AI-generated code explodes the flaws in your existing codebase. If your architecture is bad or not documented, your docs are out of date or the goal of the feature request is vague, how should the AI (or even a good human developer) develop high quality software?
  • pixl97 2mo ago
    A lot of people miss that everything needs documented, even the things that customers don't see. I've seen a lot of things over the years that were implemented but their limitations were not documented. Tags were one thing in particular. The person that thought up the idea didn't specify out how long or how many tags should be implemented. The developer put some wildly huge field in place and didn't state what the field limitations were. So later when a few users shoved massive amounts of data in there other parts of the software that displayed information broke or had terrible performance.
• smikhanov 2mo ago
  God, those "software is getting worse everywhere" takes are tedious. Let's have a look at a few rarely quoted examples from the last decade, shall we? Just six years ago, a big company rolls out a line of new chips so good that geeks and technology experts all get ecstatic and can't stop churning endless raving reviews. Those chips are fast, small and consume little energy. On top of that, the big company reworks their entire OS (OS!), the whole suite of software it has for it, the developer suite with compilers and SDKs and god knows what else and also ensures that everything ever written for that OS for the old chips continues to work and it indeed does. Then there's another big company that launched a file storage service around 20 years ago. Back then it was reliable and only gotten better over the years. They started offering their storage for a nanocent per gajibyte and twenty years of hard work allowed them to lower that cost to a picocent per gajibyte. They don't lose data, they are highly available, half of the internet stores their data at their servers. And then there's a -- gasp! -- consortium of big companies (fools would reply to this with an XKCD standards strip) that works on improvements to a shared set of standards for 4G, one of the most widely used technology stacks in the world, agrees on it, calls it 5G and rolls it out across the world and the whole spectrum of hardware and software vendors in a manner that resembles replacing a wing of an aircraft mid-flight so that not a single pasta strand falls from the forks of the business class customers. And here we have someone who thinks that a customer support page for his fridge (fridge!) thrown together by a low-paid second-grade developer in a third-world country is indicative of the whole industry decline. "Nothing works", my hairy bum. Get real.
  • jjgreen 2mo ago
    Disagree, but upvote for "my hairy bum"
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    So three things work. Or two and a half. Can you tell me why having a weak 4G signal sometimes doesn't imply being able to send and receive data packets?
• hasbot 2mo ago
  This post and the comments so far reminded me of 1984's two minutes of hate. When is Hate Week?
  • rightbyte 2mo ago
    Big Brother is trying to turn is against modern coorparate software practices or what is your point?
  • Y-bar 2mo ago
    Hate Week is every week I have to use Jira. Or SharePoint. Or Slack. Or Teams. Or Magento.
• purpleflashing 2mo ago
  As a non-technical person compared to the rest of HN, I think this has always been the problem of software made for non-technical audiences. The design was driven by programmers’ heuristics and trends in technology stack (e.g. if a company can hire a lot of JS devs bc JS is trending, they will choose JS even regardless of whether JS is the best choice for the problem). There was a brief stint of UX, ergonomics and HMI getting traction in enterprise, and, imo, the biggest technological achievements in consumer software has been in the realm of UX in twenty first century. But it lost its importance, I suppose, as you don’t need to make good software to make money off consumers. Whatever capabilities AI gives to programmers in terms of speed of development, etc, doesn’t change the fundamental behavior —- commercial software is not developed for humans. It is developed for investors, markets, around operational needs, based on CEOs whims, developers’ personal itches, relying on approximation of human experience that gets regurgitated through layers of commercial processes of product managers, UX researchers (who, if present at all, often don’t get invited to the conversation until there are buttons to move in a GUI of an already existing product). Where human experience is considered, it’s from the perspective of our natural weaknesses with the goal to exploit them to maximize profits. Hence why 21st century tech gave us all the dark patterns, feeds, social media, LLM chatbots, etc. Even when I talk to individual engineers who are committed to creating something good, wholesome, something that they can be proud of -— many think and reason about the problem in a way that sounds like they are trying to engineer human experience the same way one would engineer instructions for machines. It will never get better, IMO. AI only exemplifies what already exists.
  • Yokohiii 2mo ago
    I think the UX and stability related quality will drop at such a bottom low, that some crazy companies will revive the arcane practice of UX and even study it with users. I am not super optimistic that it happens fast, but we will end up in a situation that everything becomes tedious, annoying and broken. Companies who will do it right will inspire the whole ecosystem. It will be satirical to see the full circle happening, but it's inevitable if we want to keep going with digitalization, even if it means to bring back more hardware buttons.
    • 2mo ago
• eviks 2mo ago
  > There’s no denying that these new tools have already revolutionized how we create and use software. They have raised upper management’s expectations for team output. They may have Expectations is neither about creation not use. "May" isn't a revolution outside of the historic calendar, so on both counts it's trivial to deny an ungrounded statement. > So why does software keep getting worse across the board? Because the premise on which the expectation is built is wrong? Also plenty of the issues are prehistoric with all the past meat bag generations to blame, case in point: > Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty So who stopped that huge fruit corpo from doing the very basics of managing user experience in the past few decades minus a few AI years?
• jwr 2mo ago
  I have the same impression when I use things that are around me every day. Everything is broken and seemingly nobody cares. It seems that the teams developing software never use it themselves and do not care about bugs and terrible usability problems. It seems the management does not use any of the products that their businesses produce. And it seems that the ubiquitous breakage is just accepted as the status quo. This extends to any device which has software or firmware: banking websites, banking apps on mobile phones, car firmware, etc. I find it very depressing, especially when I think of the people who design, develop and deploy these apps. We are talking about large companies and teams of people. Entire chains of well-paid people designed, looked at, developed, tested, and then accepted these apps. And yet they break in the most obvious ways, or fail to be usable, instead pestering us with pop-ups and useless drivel and forgetting their state at every point. These problems are not subtle. To take a glaring example from my everyday life, in my car there are buttons for moving windows up and down. Sometimes when you press the button to move the window down, it will actually start moving up. We are talking about a simple button that moves a window. And seemingly everybody thinks this is fine? I don't know what to do about this.
  • sandblast 2mo ago
    What is that car, and could you make a video of it?
    • jwr 2mo ago
      VW ID.4, and it's unlikely I can spare the time for making a video without a really good reason…
• deleted 2mo ago
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• TacticalCoder 2mo ago
  > I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. Back when I was using IRC from Emacs (with erc) I had written a safeguard in elisp against that. Haven't been on IRC in a while but this helped me prevent sending to the "group chat" (the IRC channel) a great many private infos. Same for my real name for example: I had a filter where anything containing my actual name would be blocked. I think a great many software where you "chat" with "groups of people" would benefit from having both default and configurable filters that catch obvious mistakes. Say you probably want a confirmation before attaching a private SSH key, or before sending a password in the clear (which could be filtered by blocking words matching the hash of the password), etc. Not that it solves the fundamental problem TFA is talking about: nothing works. But that is a given: that's why we need safeguards.
• xg15 2mo ago
  > If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse? I mean, he has given the answer in the article: Because "coding has been solved" is from the perspective of upper management, not devs or users - and that cares about software quality and usability (as standalone metrics) about as much as the McDonald's board cares about nutrition value.
• localhost3000 2mo ago
  > This quarter, we won’t be releasing any new features, and we have no plans to redesign anything — we will exclusively focus on fixing bugs. IME this happens more often than people think. If you’re leading a team part of your job is to manage the expectations of those around you and explain your choices. If you do that well you can absolutely have quarters where you only pay down debt, it doesn’t require some huge attitude shift in the industry. Just explain why it’s the right thing and then do it.
• deleted 2mo ago
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• Otterly99 2mo ago
  I agree with the author. I think everybody has strong or at least mixed feeling agent agentic coding and to me, the argument is always focused on the product itself. I come from sciences, where the problem of AI is more linked to AI-generated papers rather than coding. Again, the real underlying problem is the pressure to publish at all cost and the ranking grant system which rewards number of publication rather than quality. I'm sure you could say the same of AI-generated images, sound or video used in advetising, or any field where AI generation offers a shortcut. The problem is always that you need to produce as much results as fast as possible and quality is not the objective. The problem is always the KPI.
• ensemblehq 2mo ago
  While there is increased complexity on top of all the software thats being built today, I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years. When business schools and tech leaders prioritize the idea that we need to be more agile and every sprint needs to be a production release, these are the results we get.
  • steveBK123 2mo ago
    Product managers shipping burndown charts.
  • palmotea 2mo ago
    > I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years. I wonder how much of that is just what management always wanted. Peopleware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...), a VERY GOOD book about software development written in the 80s, talks about managers wanting to sacrifice quality an how corrosive that is. It's just that in the past technology forced them to pursue quality: Software shipped on disk needed to be bug-free, because it made bug-fixes almost impossible. Software written by a human needed a human that understands it, who might have some pride in his work. But now, with the internet and LLMs, we get to live in the slop-world the management has always dreamed of. More tickets, closing faster! Less headcount, less talk! Artificial workers that don't talk back! Who cares about all the rest?
• fragmede 2mo ago
  Use open source everything. If you have the source to something, you can change it. If you can change it, you can fix it. Run Linux and Firefox. Fork every last damn program and have AI fix every papercut that you don't like.
• ricardobayes 2mo ago
  I'm doing the exact opposite: I'm maxing out my PTO and taking long holidays. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be in this field in five years time so why bother. It's time to figure out what other passions I have apart from programming. Programming is going to be like ceramics or pottery: you can grab a nice set of bowls at IKEA for $10. We are doing the artisanal pottery that no one really wants or cares for.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Unlike IKEA pottery, programming has the zero replication cost thing. You can spend years working on a better bowl and still sell it for $10 at IKEA and make money. Heck, if your bowl is so much better, maybe IKEA will hire you as a supplier.
• ricardobayes 2mo ago
  To add to author's point, I did work at an organization that decided to focus on bugfixing for a full release cycle, and the PM was sacked after that.
  • chanux 2mo ago
    I was hoping you saw the nice end of it, with a feint smile on my face. Very rude ending! PS: I laughed outside. Cried inside.
• willchis 2mo ago
  Since upgrading iOS, my iPhone (13) will: - sometimes fail to open the camera - make the bottom half of the screen blank when you do email searches - use more battery - become unusable if you turn on any transparency effects.
• zkmon 2mo ago
  > My banking app requires, on average, three FaceID logins before the 3D Secure confirmation view appears. That's a different, equally big problem. Security mafia at every company will continue to rule everything and everyone. They do not have goals or constraints that are tied to productivity and user experience. We are heading to a situation where the security teams are causing much more damage compared to the possible attack vectors. While this damage is real and certain, the damage due to attack vectors is only hypothetical. Ofcourse, we do need security. But currently no one including CEO can dare to define how much security is needed. On top of that, regulators do their own share of damage, piling up regulations. No one takes any risk. They will ask you to tie yourself down until you can't move. Your mobility is not their problem.
  • cmiller1 2mo ago
    Perhaps its a slight overcorrection but it's better than the past where an online shop I gave my credit card info to would reply to a forgotten password request with an e-mail with my password in it in plaintext. Security used to be awful and people suffered because of it.
    • SoftTalker 2mo ago
      I wonder how many accounts have ever actually been compromised by a MITM reading passwords out of plaintext emails. I would guess it's very, very small.
      • shrikant 2mo ago
        I believe the bigger failure mode in that scenario is the fact that the site was storing user passwords in plaintext (either directly or effectively). Users tend to reuse passwords, so when there's a breach, more than just the user accounts for that site would be compromised.
      • onraglanroad 2mo ago
        No site should be able to give you your password because they should never store it. They store the hash of the password and whatever password you provide is then hashed and compared to the stored hash. That way, when their security is compromised, the attacker doesn't get your password. Any site giving you your password is doing it wrong because they should never know it.
• luciana1u 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• cachius 2mo ago
  Sad cause its true
• steveBK123 2mo ago
  Agree with all of these gripes, they are everywhere and none of this golden age of SWE productivity seems to be making products better. My other biggest pet peeve in this space is the annual iOS updates where Apple arbitrarily moves buttons back and forth between top and bottom of screen. They really like to screw around with the photos app such that "show me my photos most recently taken in time order" is somehow different set of taps year to year. You see flavors of this in most other apps/websites.
• neogodless 2mo ago
  > those bugs affect your ability to focus on driving Name and shame! I'm in the market for a car. Which one should I avoid?
• chid 2mo ago
  yep noticed a major decline in product stability over the last 5 months. I don't think explained by use of vibe coding but who knows.
• schneems 2mo ago
  Reddit on iOS safari has been getting incrementally, nearly unusable worse. It had some sharp edges before but it seems they are moving faster now with the same or greater defect rate and shit is getting bad: - URLs commonly auto-link to the things behind them, even including spaces and words. - Pinch to zoom on the homepage causes the page to reload. Forcing you to lose your place/content. - I sometimes cannot click to play videos on the feed. I can click through the comments and then click play on the player. - Comments pasted from perfectly valid markdown render as whitespace deleted garbage - Clicking "reply" then tapping in the box makes it disappear. I literally cannot see what I'm typing. I have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it. - After typing into the comment box the "comment" button to submit it is not visible - Being a mod: The dropdown for selecting a removal rule will not let me scroll past what shows on the initial dropdown. - Rare but critical interfaces like banning a user (or managing an existing ban). Essentially cannot be used on mobile. - When typing responses to people as a mod, depending on the box sometimes I "lose" the comment button.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    I presume that's in addition to all the intentional enshittification.
  • j_bum 2mo ago
    My conspiracy theory is that Reddit intentionally makes the iOS Safari experience awful to drive people to download the app. I’m sure it works. But for me, it drove me to stop using Reddit on my phone.
  • ajmurmann 2mo ago
    With Reddit I think it's on purpose. They want to drive users to the mobile app. Maybe they aren't introducing bugs on purpose but not addressing them isn't a accident.
    • Thlom 2mo ago
      X/Twitter is getting progressively worse for users not logged in. At this point you need to click away the cookie prompt and a prompt begging you to download the app. When that is done you can read the linked tweeet, but you can not play any videos embedded or click on any pictures or navigate up or down in the thread. In a couiple of months I guess they will only display the first 160 characters and nag you to login if you click on 'read more.
• PaulHoule 2mo ago
  AI might have made things worse in the last few months but there have been a lot of bad trends on the desktop in the last decade, both software and hardware. It is little appreciated how USB has regressed. If you have a full-size top-of-the-line desktop machine with plenty of I/O channels you have a huge number of USB 3 and USB C plugs and will have mostly a "just works" experience -- like you can plug in an external hard drive and not regret it. Try a laptop or a pint size machine (say a Mac Mini or a Dell Optiplex 1.5 l) and you'll discover there is no reliable USB 3 hub on the market Maybe you can plug in your keyboard and mouse, maybe, but plug in a USB DAC and a memory card reader and an external drive... "BONG!" "BONG!" "BONG!" Windows starts screaming that devices are dropping out and reattaching and God forbid there is a filesystem you care about on one of them. (MacOS is too smart for that shit, it just assumes the hub is crap and won't reconnect until you reboot) Plug a cooler master keyboard into you dev workstation and you'll find it overloads the interrupt handling system and causes everything to be janky. Probably the worst thing about Electron is that the #1 applications use it, instead of making a web application, is that they can't stand that you might be able to find the application and start it the way you start a usual application (or web page) or be able to find the window when you are using it or be able to close the application or move the application window like a normal application window or resize the application like a normal application window or that you might be able to see anything in the tray -- so applications like Slack automatically become crapplications by virtue of inhabiting your tray. It makes everything worse. It reminds me of the later 90's when every crapplet for your printer had to have a completely custom widget set and window chrome.
  • volkl48 2mo ago
    USB 3.0 powered hubs that give you more USB 3.0 supporting USB-A ports are pretty easy to find these days. USB-C ones (that actually give you more than 1 additional USB-C port) are still more challenging, but they do at least exist now (after having been virtually non-existent for years). Caldigit, Plugable, Sabrent, and probably others all have models that will go 1 device port to 3-6 USB-C ports now, and are powered with decent power per-port limits. I do agree the landscape is far more confusing than it was a decade ago.
    • 2mo ago
• ghusto 2mo ago
  > Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler. ... The bar for “user experience” has kept rising, but everything has become increasingly fragile. It was simpler, better, more stable, _and_ had better UX. Complexity does not equal quality. In fact, it usually points to poor design. Programs used to be seen as utilities, which enabled the same kind of mentality you have to any specialised machinery: "Here's a thing that can make your life easier. Learn how to use it". Now programs try to be all-singing-all-dancing-all-the-time-changing.
  • pier25 2mo ago
    > It was simpler, better, more stable, _and_ had better UX. It had less features too. Now, I do agree doing more doesn't mean that something is necessarily better... but I think the UX difficulty increases exponentially as more features are added.
    • ghusto 2mo ago
      Absolutely, and in my opinion it's a mistake to keep adding features. My word processor in the 90s did one thing, and it was fine. In fact, there's a niche crowd trying to re-create that experience right now (distraction-free "writerdecks"). All software used to be like that, and I for one was a lot happier with the situation.
• penguin_booze 2mo ago
  A garden needs a gardener. It's the end when people stop caring or when starts chasing superficial metrics and tawdry toys.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    That's a good description of some roles actually. Instead of describing myself as a developer or maintainer of some backend system I might call myself a gardener of it.
• lackoftactics 2mo ago
  rant first: oh, I recently heard about you from a friend working in a company after I mentioned that I also got into photography. Nice work on pixelpeeper.com to the article: Yeah, it's different world out there. We need to filter ideas instead of focusing on more features, as lack of staggering revenue growth suggests it might be that more doesn't equal better. The stability of apps is getting worse lately. I couldn't pair my sony camera and it was stuck on pairing screen :(
  • pchm 2mo ago
    thank you, I didn't expect to see pixelpeeper mentioned here :) feel free to reach out via email - I'm happy to nerd out about photography
  • pixl97 2mo ago
    Why would there be revenue growth when AI should decrease it via competition? I think the revenue growth occurred in the past by companies like Microsoft and Google capturing huge parts of the market, and the market for profits in advertising.
• satisfice 2mo ago
  They got rid of test managers. Then testers. The industry said everyone should be responsible for testing— which means no one is. Now AI tests? Except not really. It claims to perform testing. It’s still up to us to review and remediate.
• KronisLV 2mo ago
  > Until this attitude changes, the great software quality decay will continue. It won’t change cause nobody cares to do anything other than complain, I don’t see developers quitting en masse from companies that refuse to pause feature churn and focus on quality. Why should they? They get a paycheck, everyone ships crap, the world moves on. The people making the frameworks and now even runtimes are of the same cloth, overworked and underfunded. If we cared we’d treat software like real engineering. We don’t and therefore we’re quite cooked. Just be happy that airplanes aren’t as bad as your average CRUD. For someone who does care, look at the SQLite codebase, every project should be like that even if development cycles would be 3–10x longer, but that’s delusional to say out loud. AI just revealed that - with slop being produced at increasing pace and test coverage and verification methods of things working properly across all states and inputs being nowhere to be found.
• noitamroftuo 2mo ago
  check out The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules A lot of this is about bureaucracy
• an0malous 2mo ago
  AI is the private equity of software and digital media, it makes the first 80% way easier and the last 20% way harder so no one bothers with the last 20% anymore. It’s the ultimate enshittification tool.
• LostInTheWoods 2mo ago
  Author seems to be blaming the hammer for the house not getting built right. Software is increasing in complexity, and perhaps is outpacing testing.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    The hammer is Homer Simpson's automated hammer, and it has two claw sides like PHP.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• pif 2mo ago
  > Nothing works It depends on whose perspective you consider the problem. An enterprise produces software for one reason only: make money out of it. And it works great! if you are a paying customer, and if you can choose among a few different solutions, then you will get the good stuff. But for the rest... 1. Free apps? They just need to take ads in front of your eyes. 2. Software embedded in cars? You choose the car based on other merits, the software just needs to not by horrible. 3. Automated customare support? When was the last time you choose a fridge over another because of the quality of its customer support?
• Gud 2mo ago
  "Nothing works" if you're using poorly designed software. XFCE has worked more or less the same for me for the last 20 years. Sure, nothing lasts forever, but XFCE has been rock solid and absolutely works as expected. I've used it successfully on both FreeBSD and various Linux flavors.
• m3kw9 2mo ago
  Someone saying software has been solved, but nobody that takes the drivers seat agrees
• aleph_minus_one 2mo ago
  > If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse? Because the premise that coding has been solved is false. :-)
  • chrisjj 2mo ago
    > the premise that coding has been solved is false. :-) Not a problem. But the belief that coding has been solved...
  • CivBase 2mo ago
    I'd say "coding" has been solved, but that was never the bottleneck. Coding is cheap. It has been for a long time. Ten years ago my company was outsorcing all its coding to the cheapest people they could find in India. But most of these people can't solve problems. They can't even identify problems, much less design solutions. Code is a liability. You want as little as you can to solve the problems you actually have. That takes an engineer. Maybe AI will get there someday, but it certainly isn't today. Engineers can certainly use AI to generate code when they need it... but in my experience I don't need much code to do my job, so AI coding doesn't help me much. My personal experience is that by the time I've reviewed the output and corrected the mistakes, I may as well have written it myself.
    • jason_oster 2mo ago
      Coding is anything but cheap. You speak like someone who has completely forgotten how difficult it was to learn everything you now know by heart.
      • arm32 2mo ago
        > You speak like someone who has completely forgotten how difficult it was to learn everything you now know by heart. Well said.
      • CivBase 2mo ago
        Coding litterally is cheap. We outsource it for wages that you'd expect of a bottom-level fast food employee. We've been doing that for many years. It doesn't take a 4 year education to learn how to use loops, functions, and basic data structures. Most of you could probably code by the end of your fresan year of college. Many probably learned at least some coding before college. I've learned plenty since those days. I can code much faster now than I used to - in the same way an accountant is probably faster at mental math than they once were. But an accountant's value isn't in how fast they can crunch numbers. In the same way, a software engineer's value isn't in how fast they can code.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• paxys 2mo ago
  Weird strawman. Who said coding has been “solved”? Hint: mid-level engineers in tech hubs wouldn’t be getting 500K salaries if that was actually the case.
• grim_io 2mo ago
  I've seen some shit. I'm confident to say that right now, AI already does a better job at turning a well-specified requirement into working code than the average meatbag I've personally encountered. It's still useless at many other things that make a complete Software Developer, but let's be real: Programming (requirements in, code out) is solved for the stuff I'm involved in.
• sornaensis 2mo ago
  The same reason computers keep getting faster but software keeps getting slower.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Which is?
    • prime_ursid 2mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law > What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        Andy and Bill's law is caused by Andy and Bill's law?
• mancerayder 2mo ago
  > We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse. I actually relate to that. It used to be cool and exciting to update to see what new things are coming for free. I was just looking up what Fedora Workstation 45 might bring. Updates on phones, TV's, cars and non-Linux operating systems on PC's/laptops are downright scary to me now. What will they add that I don't want? What more connectivity to the external world are they going to wire in? MacOS lost everyone's trust by ruining the experience, but even before it happened that trying to resize a window makes it feel like life will be at 80 years-old, hunting a tiny invisible border, even before that there wasn't anything exciting. What Microsoft I think did (and I can't prove it), before I moved off of Windows 11, was to bundle all changes in "required security updates." So you have no choice but to update (or go through special settings to turn it off, or just defer it), but when the machine comes back you have a new Welcome prompt to some new connectivity to something nefarious. AI features I never asked for, that's the most recent dark pattern here.
  • thewebguyd 2mo ago
    > was to bundle all changes in "required security updates." Kind of...Cumulative Security Updates on Patch Tuesday still do not contain new OS features, and on pro editions of windows you can at least, last time I used Windows (maybe this changed?), still skip quality updates & feature updates. What Windows does do is tie all the "connected experiences" crap to out of band updates via the store/AppX packages which background update automatically, so when you reboot after a patch windows will run its post update OOBE and push all those features agian/turn them on. So technically not bundled with security updates, but a dark pattern that disrespects users nonetheless.
    • basilikum 2mo ago
      Not exactly the same, but Microsoft shipped the "Backup" or some similar name software that is actually just a OneDrive client in a Windows 10 LTSC update. LTSC is specifically for not getting such feature updates. They also changed the folder icons in the graphical shell at some point.
• shevy-java 2mo ago
  I think the article misses a bit the main focus. For instance: > My LG fridge started making weird sounds, so I tried to file a warranty claim, through a multi-step form with countless fields. It failed with a submission error at the very end. And I only found out because I looked at the JavaScript console. Has that JavaScript code been written by AI? It may be more likely that it was written by humans. Well, the design of JavaScript really sucks, the language is both successful and horrible to use, in my opinion. And we have that issue across the board. Most programming languages really suck. C, for instance - that language is an abomination. But it is even more successful than JavaScript. Today I ran into the issue that I can not compile libpng; I keep on bailing out at it unable to find setjmp. About two months ago compiling it worked fine. I most likely did screw something up on my local system but ... the compiler is an idiot. It really does not tell me WHY it can not compile it anymore. Yes, it shows on the commandline that it assumes setjmp to exist but it can not find it. The error messages are pure and bogus. And the whole design of C cascades this horrible crap downwards. The languages that supposedly try to replace C also suck. Go? Yikes. Rust? Even more verbose. C++? Trying to replace C since decades. There is a ton of inertia. The whole stack is utter gutter trash really. Everything is build up atop layers of complexity that in turn are not really well designed at all. Meanwhile more and more software is added. Now I need python due to meson, and meson is better than what came before. But it adds complexity. And has its own problems too. AI does not really fix anything here, it just AI slop spams on top of this. We kind of lost big at engineering. People are in general also not critical anymore. The design of most programming language shows that - including ruby, but ruby is barely used, so really the issue is mostly about C. The fact that C is so successful makes this even worse, since nothing replaces it. We just keep on adding more and more. Or we go the C++ way - and make it about 50x as complex. Or Rust - that syntax is even worse than C syntax which is also horrible. Of course even with great syntax and a great language, horrible software will be written. Companies want to offer a billion useless features. Many years ago I thought it was cool if my fridge tells me what I should order. Since the day of companies spying on people, I go back to simplicity at all times.
  • pixl97 2mo ago
    Heh, the support form failing want a bug, more like a feature. Look how much money they are saving not providing support. Also, the product is better than ever, nobody is returning them or needing them fixed!
• LAC-Tech 2mo ago
  I think the truth is whether people want to admit it or not is that coding has not been solved, and producing good software is really not any easier. Making legacy code however is now very fast. So fast you can practically ship it straight to production.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    All code is legacy code a millisecond after you write it.
• gyomu 2mo ago
  You can build software fast, but the more time you take the more you can be confident about it being correct. This was true already before AI code generation, but AI code generation means the definition of “fast” has shifted like crazy. An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week. But it (right now) does nothing for the confidence about being correct - you still have to put in the extra time to ensure the software is correct to your desired degree of confidence. Unfortunately for people who like their software to be correct (stable, performant, bug free, etc), it seems like way too many software developers right now are happy to take the gains of the former but ignore the tradeoffs of the latter. (at the same time software quality for mainstream consumer goods like the kind of thing OP complains about in their post has been down the drain for a long time now, and it seems likely many of the examples they give are pre-AI)
  • lelanthran 2mo ago
    > You can build software fast, but the more time you take the more you can be confident about it being correct. > ... > But it (right now) does nothing for the confidence about being correct - you still have to put in the extra time to ensure the software is correct to your desired degree of confidence. You're partially correct - what gives confidence is duration in the field. No matter how long you take to build something, seeing it work in the field for 3 months gives me more confidence. You have to release, early and often.
    • hollowturtle 2mo ago
      And break ux for users often and piss them. There are short reversibile decision that can be taken fast, important decision requires a lot of thinking before changing to often and alienating your users
  • bodge5000 2mo ago
    > An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week. From what I've seen, I don't think so if we're talking about like-for-like quality. Maybe as an absolute best case scenario, but more typically it's more like you can build in an hour with AI whereas without AI it might take you 2 or 3. Even thats highly task dependant, and doesn't scale as you'd expect (eg 1 hour == 2 hours, but 1 month =/= 2 months), and at times even using AI can slow things down, at its worst case more severely than at it'd speed you up at it's best. Now if you're willing to throw like-for-like out the window, that 1h==1w could be achieved easily, maybe even more. But then again, I feel like I could do a lot more in an hour if I didn't care about quality either, not as fast as AI but much faster than I am currently.
• ed_elliott_asc 2mo ago
  I suppose that because we trained llm’s on code with bugs in it will write code with bugs in
  • dcre 2mo ago
    I feel like we need a name for this error. Pretraining fallacy? Coding ability is all about RL.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Remember when they finetuned an LLM to write buggy code and it also started saying humanity should be exterminated and so on? It knows good and evil and is trained to select one.
• edDavila 2mo ago
  I think you are right in being optimistic. Time will separate the wheat from the chaff. An I personally hope that free collaborative privacy first software built from curiosity, discipline and devotion will be the norm. Hopefully...
• lbrito 2mo ago
  >Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric Euphoric, who? Other than techbros and a small group of AI-delirious fanboys, no one is euphoric. Normal people in the industry are between anxious, scared, exhausted, resentful, resigned or just plain sad. People outside our industry? They see the enshittification clearly, and are most certainly the opposite of euphoric.
• Decabytes 2mo ago
  Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been. AI isn’t going to make someone care about writing robust software and that is why we don’t see better software all of a sudden. The market doesn’t rewards apps that don’t break on every update, it doesn’t reward cobbling together multiple independent solutions, as opposed to using Microsoft as a one stop shop. If people could have gotten away with this in the early days of computing they would have, but computers were too low powered, and the knowledge too scarce. There is a saying Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands We found the limits of what it takes to make software stand, and what software paper cuts people are willing to deal with
  • johnnyanmac 2mo ago
    So what's our (literal or metaphorical) breaking point here? How much more does things need to break before people just say "enough" and stop consuming into the declining quality?
    • Decabytes 2mo ago
      I feel like the only real answer is "we just don't know". But in an attempt to actually answer this, I think the breaking point are different for different groups of people. If you are struggling to pay the bills, you probably could care less about software's 'decline', you're just trying to survive. Maybe if something catastrophic happened it would be enough to put you at that limit, but software could stand to get much worse before then. If you are forced to interact with technology a lot everyday, then what might be a paper cut for someone every once in a while, could be literally hundreds a day for you. In that case you are probably very near or at that threshold already. As a society, I don't think we would see cracks until we start to see multiple community scale disasters related to poor software, or small disasters in highly visible areas like healthcare, planes, etc.
  • dimbletimbers 2mo ago
    But maybe that’s bad? Maybe keeping everyone just on the verge of leaving or getting hurt isn’t a good place for society to settle?
• Dwedit 2mo ago
  Pressure is on shipping things fast, not making things lightweight.
• tracerbulletx 2mo ago
  This is a business culture problem not a tech problem.
• saghm 2mo ago
  Taken literally, this question just misunderstands what the point of coding is for most companies. The point was never to maximize quality of software, but to make the most money. Coding being "solved" implies it was a problem, and for companies using this framing, the problem wasn't "my software isn't good enough", but "it takes too much time and/or money for me to make software". Viewed through this lens, the "solution" of removing as much need for expensive humans to make the software is almost entirely unrelated to the quality of the output; if companies with this mindset could have released software cheaper or faster at a reduced quality before AI, they almost certainly would have. None of this is to say that I think this is a good thing, or even that it's necessarily an accurate viewpoint. Considering who decides how much to spend on LLM products in companies that are potential customers for the ones saying "coding has been solved", I do genuinely think this is what they mean though. It's of course nonsense to actual developers, but we're not the ones who they're talking to when they say this.
• Night_Thastus 2mo ago
  LLMs can't parse the entire codebase at once, understand it, and then make decisions based on that understanding. The hard part of programming almost is never how ONE function or ONE class works. It's how they all interact in a much larger picture. You can try to mitigate this, but it's a pretty fundamental concept that software is big and just too large for an LLM context window. Until that's solved, coding has not been 'solved' by '''AI'''. They're useful for greenfield stuff, but new software was always easier to smash out quickly than working on older code. Plus, it's not like they're building understanding like a person does regardless, even if the context window was somehow enormous.
  • chanux 2mo ago
    Obligatory reference to "Software as theory building" by Peter Naur.
• asdfman123 2mo ago
  Because at most companies, software engineers aren't paid to make good software. They're paid to ship flashy features.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    A plumber is paid to install pipes, not to make sure they don't leak. But he still does that, even though it takes longer. Why?
    • pixl97 2mo ago
      Regulations.
    • asdfman123 2mo ago
      Because people don't accept leaky plumbing. It cause damage and disarray. People do accept shitty software.
• bdcravens 2mo ago
  Code is the easy part.
• mmmasterggg 2mo ago
  For me, the problem was never the writing of the code. Building something takes care and rigor. Software development got where it is through years of accumulated practice: habits first, then safeguards, then structures that had actually been proven. Now people set the code aside and just describe their problem, and they have no real sense of what comes back, because nobody can review output produced that fast. Nobody is even keeping up with the systems we built to help us keep up. So we ship without quite knowing what we shipped, and the sloppiness follows from that. Isn't that how it's gone before, though? People used to make beautiful furniture by hand and leave something of themselves in it. Now it comes out of a factory, nobody knows exactly which part they made, they just fit pieces together, and it isn't built to last. Software is at that same point: nobody knows exactly what they've made or how. They describe the problem, assume they've found the solution, ship it, and there is no undoing it. The sloppiness will keep compounding. But that is also the point where people start thinking much harder about how to make it good again. A cycle, I suppose.
  • zer00eyz 2mo ago
    > Nobody is even keeping up with the systems we built to help us keep up. So we ship without quite knowing what we shipped, and the sloppiness follows from that. NPM left-pad incident was a decade ago. Supply chain attacks have been a thing for longer than that (one of the first proposed SBOM's was around that time). Source forge was shoving adware into the software from their site. Asking an AI to write code is not worse than typing in PIP/NPM install (not to slight those tools) if you aren't going to code review either.
    • mmmasterggg 2mo ago
      [flagged]
  • pixl97 2mo ago
    If furniture was still built like it was in the past you'd have about 2 pieces of it unless you were fabulously wealthy. This is pretty true for software, how much have you actually paid for recently? FOSS isn't free either, a massive amount of time and coordination is required to make good software there too and few are willing to give it.
• xorcist 2mo ago
  I call this software "products", and not in a good sense. A product isn't necessarily designed by someone who cares about, or even understands, the problem at hand.
  • fragmede 2mo ago
    What do you call a product that is?
• raincole 2mo ago
  Even non-VC-backed software or open source projects suffer from this. At the end of the day, fixing bugs, especially those bugs only happen in certain environments, is a very tedious and thankless task.
  • pixl97 2mo ago
    Especially when you get outside of environment like phones and consoles the environments people run software in can be wildly different too, and the oddest things can cause weird interactions. In enterprise software you can run into customers that 'use too much' of something odd that the developers don't really think about and QA fails to test right. Things like tags and identifiers that you think "Oh they'll use 5 or 6 max" then you run into someone that uses a thousand tags and report performance explodes.
• hollowturtle 2mo ago
  These tools combined with silicon valley motto of moving fast and breaking stuff fast created the perfect storm > They have raised upper management’s expectations for team output. That is the worse part, it's not great at all dealing with this kind of expectations
• ivanjermakov 2mo ago
  Software will always be as bad as users world allow it to. Applies to every good and service.
• anself 2mo ago
  Who ever said coding is solved??
• alphazard 2mo ago
  The answer, of course, is that the taste-making apparatus inside the typical tech company is now entirely imposters (non-technical, non-power-users), who continue to LARP as visionaries. The people who notice broken or degraded behavior (devs and power users) and conceive of good designs are not in charge of what goes into the product. So you shouldn't expect it to get better, only to continuously change so that the imposters can point to a difference that they were responsible for, knowing that upper management also has no idea whether that difference was actually an improvement. The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. They don't need to do anything other than give their opinions, and use the product every day. Put them in a room with your top engineers, and the software will mysteriously get better. All of this was obvious decades ago, but now everyone wants to have a do-nothing job at a tech company, and to help their friends get one too. The result is imposters everywhere; "imposter syndrome" was brought into the vernacular to normalize a lack of expertise. "No one knows what they are doing, it's okay to not know how to do your job". That's what your (product) manager tells themself in the mirror each morning. Turns out: skill predicts quality, and an org ships quality proportional to the skill of the decision makers.
  • amoorthy 2mo ago
    Mostly agree and would add that product managers should be responsible for the commercial success of their products. That means spending more time deciding what market to be in, how to differentiate, how to price, how to drive adoption. For the most part these are not strengths for devs and power users.
    • therealdrag0 2mo ago
      Are they not? Where I work PMs are closely tied to and own business outcomes.
      • amoorthy 2mo ago
        Sorry, didn't see this reply till now. I think a lot of PMs are judged just on shipping software, not necessarily commercial success, or even just production adoption.
• 20k 2mo ago
  If coding is a solved problem, where are all the high quality, open source PRs is what I want to know. Where's the flood of improvements for Curl? SFML? SDL? Godot? Linux? ImGui? VLC? Firefox? GNU tools? Rust? GCC? LLVM? Why can I find *no* evidence of this? If you look at the open source space and review the contribution of AI in it, you'd think that AI is barely able to create functional code and the people who peddle it are solely slop authors. More than that, you might think it barely exists, because there's simply vanishingly few PRs landing which are AI generated. It seems in open source projects, for some reason, AI is barely able to produce any useful code at all But apparently for closed source proprietary code its like magic and you don't need to write any code anymore and it is a solved problem. Mhm. Totally willing to believe that My suspicion is that a lot of proprietary software engineering has become purely performative. It no longer matters if the resulting product works, or has any quality, because its not about that. The system is being burnt down to extract wealth from it instead, as we create the illusion of software development as these companies are asset stripped. Line Must Go Up. There's no simply incentive to make a real product anymore, when the valuation of our economy and management compensation is built solely on hype instead of results
  • kimjune01 2mo ago
    the bottleneck for these open source repos is maintainer attention. AI seemingly does not yet improve that throughput.
    • 20k 2mo ago
      I'd buy that if lots of high quality PRs were sitting around waiting to be merged, but they don't exist. There's barely any evidence that AI is even real in the open source world, other than the slop of course
      • kimjune01 2mo ago
        for small to medium sized bugs I managed to get a bit more than half of my PRs to get merged. ~90 PRs since May https://june.kim/speedrunning-open-source https://june.kim/speedrunning-open-source Verify yourself: { merged: search(query: "is:pr is:merged author:kimjune01 created:>2026-05-09T00:34:00Z", type: ISSUE) { issueCount } closed: search(query: "is:pr is:closed is:unmerged author:kimjune01 created:>2026-05-09T00:34:00Z", type: ISSUE) { issueCount } allTime: search(query: "is:pr is:merged author:kimjune01 -user:kimjune01", type: ISSUE) { issueCount } }
• stinkbeetle 2mo ago
  Weaving fabric and sewing clothes has been "solved", but there is no shortage of garbage quality shirts.
• jdw64 2mo ago
  The claim that software has regressed is hard to accept. Compared to the past, we now have far more platforms to support and far more things to memorize. And if you actually try using software from 15 years ago, you'll see it had far more critical bugs than today's software. I think most of this is just nostalgia bias. It's just that complexity has skyrocketed compared to the past. The same goes for released software. In the old days, even small software could be competitive, but now the minimum level of complexity required to sell a program is completely different. The best example of this is mobile games. Just look at the structure of early mobile games compared to modern games.
• modeless 2mo ago
  Personally I hope to use a lot less software in the future. Anything I want to know or do online I'll just ask an AI and it can wade through the sea of cookie popups or UI redesigns or whatever to get it done.
• baddash 2mo ago
  I don't get this post. It says software is getting worse, and then... gives a handful of anecdotal evidence. That could have been done at any point in the life of the software industry, including in the pre-agentic era. So the assertion behind the post doesn't really have any weight to it. Is there any actual, respectable evidence that software is actually getting worse? Also, what would worse even mean really? More buggy? Less reliable? Less creative, flexible?
• romx-cell 2mo ago
  We need automatic testing of user experience, that doesn't exist yet
• mvkel 2mo ago
  All of these complaints are about humans making user-hostile decisions, not AI. And software quality is not a reflection of its code quality. Never has been.
• User23 2mo ago
  Imagine you find yourself making TC $1M+ a year owning some beloved piece of software. Do you A) tell your management hey it's absolutely perfect as is, let's just chill, leave it alone and let the money roll in. Or B) tell management about the need for whatever new hotness and you're going to get it implemented ahead of schedule and under budget. And then you do! Oh but the software is objectively worse because it was already perfect. It's pretty clear what the overwhelmingly popular answer is to that question.
• 0manrho 2mo ago
  "Move fast and break things" Everything is a minimum viable product that is constantly in flux these days. The decision makers and money movers are prioritizing rapid results and turnaround over quality product, maintainable codebases, institutional knowledge (debatable), etc The incentive isn't focused on "Good" software, it's on making "profitable" software as fast and cheap as possible.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago
  The issue for me is who controls the software If it's open source and I can review it before compiling and installing, and I can modify it and recompile if I want to remove/change/add something, then I feel like I have some control This is one reason I like relatively smaller software, less code
• pianopatrick 2mo ago
  Personally I think the way to avoid a lot of this buggy new software is to use a LTS Linux distro like Debian as much as possible. Obviously you cannot do that for everything. But any software you get from Debian repos (or similar distros) is at least safe from new bugs from all this new code.
• slackfan 2mo ago
  LLMs are an amplifier. Most software engineers/architects/developers are bad and always have been. We have amplified the bad, and so we have the modern world.
• chasebank 2mo ago
  The answer is money.
• thelastgallon 2mo ago
  Incentives. People get promoted, get bonuses based on some shiny new tool they developed. Every year, they create something 'new', claim lots of features. Their managers/directors/VPs also encourage this because they need some 'winning' and 'automation' slides to brag about. Nothing gets solved. In fact, things get worse. The new tool and old tool and oldest tool all coexist with 20 other tools developed for the exact same thing in a different org. Each org (SVP reporting to CEO) is MASSIVE and everybody wants headcount and success stories. All these things will be happening at the same time. Those who are capable of making the biggest mess get the biggest pay and bonus, they get promoted and they move nearly year 1 - 2 years, within the same company or to another. Repeat. The ICs (individual contributors) who have values and explain why this is a bad idea are usually moved to Support or Ops roles or migration projects from old to new. I've seen perfectly working systems continuously being replaced with worse and worse tools. Most of the new tools require a lot of people from several departments, just a guy who understands business and develops a perfectly working PHP/CRUD is a no-no. It has to be replaced with a complex monster with react, apis, mongo crap. And on kubernetes. Hybrid cloud.
  • thelastgallon 2mo ago
    Coding has been solved, but for who? Only for those cowboys who create POCs and get big bonuses. The 'product' they make is largely irrelevant. Sure, they can make it faster and claim to be masters of AI. Again, bigly bonuses, because now the incentives are driven by mandates from C-suite/VPs who are desperate to claim successfully using AI. There is very very little that can be realistically solved with AI. People have tried and the first thing they do is replace perfectly working internal search tools with AI or AI chatbots. Think about something like your people portal, for a large company, this would be thousands of document. The AI driven search portals are a million times worse than the earlier full-text-search engines that are usually pretty accurate. After that, they will be lots of dashboards generated for executives. Its as if execs have any clue about the business, they know nothing about the business and now they get thousands of dashboards tracking millions of meaningless metrics. AI is an enshittification accelerator. And the enshittifiers (individually as people and collectively as companies run by scumbags) are richly rewarded for this 'success'.
• BobbyTables2 2mo ago
  The issue was never coding. Today, developers assemble a Tower of Babel built of libraries they do not understand. Those libraries were largely built the same way. There is “no value” in a company maintaining their own purpose-optimized HTTP client, database, GUI framework, or anything else. Each layer adds features but subtle crappiness in the details not understood. I shudder to think how many string libraries end up in a modern system… “Practical” solutions like “this WXYZ fails 5%” of the time, let’s add a retry loop. Of course, this the next layer sees random failures that are hard to reproduce, so they add the same. At some point our modern supercomputers are repeating millions of operations because of a stupid bug. The user just sees a sluggish app and gets annoyed. We could write simple, understandable, efficient software that is a joy to ship and use. Unfortunately that doesn’t add value so we are extremely careful to never waste resources on such!
  • sebmellen 2mo ago
    While I empathize with this view in principle, I believe that all organic systems eventually devolve into deep and rather chaotic complexity as they become more advanced. Biology is in many ways extremely inefficient, but it is also very error-tolerant because it has so many retry and error-correcting mechanisms. And humans possess nowhere near as gifted a talent as God or natural selection or whatever you believe drives the natural world. So it’s to be expected that the systems we produce will be much more buggy than biology! It’s kind of futile to imagine it could happen any other way… we are just not that good.
• greenlimetea 2mo ago
  As crazy as it sounds, code quality != software quality. It turns out that the lower the barrier to creating "high quality" code is, the worse the software is on average. Who remembers the Photoshop lens flare? It's not that the effect sucked - it did lens flare perfectly. But who used it sucked. Instagram and the Nashville filter - "we're all photographers now" Code quality not equaling software quality gets at the fun part of the modern AI-labor debate. Where does talent and efficacy really reside in terms of software? Surely not in the (apparently unworthy?) mind of a human? Surely it can be extracted, distilled, automated – liberated! - unto a reactive web interface for some middle manager to invoke (at some expense to some account this folk loses zero sleep over), because it is after all this flimsy, transferrable - not worthless! Not worthless! I have a stock portfolio to maintain for God's sake. But mine. Nonetheless. Code quality doesn't equal software quality.
  • wodenokoto 2mo ago
    I think it’s an excellent observation! Code quality is really about readability and organization of code. The thinking is, if the humans reading, writing and editing the code can’t read and comprehend it, they can’t develop it in meaningful ways. But it is not a requisite that great software stands on top of great code
• mohamedkoubaa 2mo ago
  We have better shovels now, why are the holes we are digging ourselves into getting deeper????
• impulser_ 2mo ago
  I think people just think it getting worst because you use software for literally everything in your life now compare to before and this means you will most likely run into bugs more often. On top of that software has to be build with more users in mind so you are often going to get bloated software. That why enterprise software is often horrible because they have to support multiple industries that all need different types of workflows and UI. I have been using software for decades and there has always been horrible software. Like I'm mind blown that people think human always wrote good code, and that AI is somehow worst than human code. AI writes better code then the vast majority of programmers that's a fact. Yes, including you. Yes there are certain areas of programming that it sucks at but 99% of programmer aren't writing that code.
• tedggh 2mo ago
  I don’t think we can objectively say software is getting worse. I don’t expect an appliance website, a car infotainment system and a banking app to be the beacons of software quality and user experience. All those things would probably suck at any point in time.
  • nektro 2mo ago
    no, all three of those softwares should be exceptional and help me do exactly what i'm trying to do with no distractions or bugs
• sharathr 2mo ago
  we found that using a stable AI-SDLC process like: https://github.com/highflame-ai/ai-factory https://github.com/highflame-ai/ai-factory improves code agent assisted development dramatically specially when going from 1-100.
• RazorBucksICO 2mo ago
  You could have made exactly the same critique in 2021. Microsoft has been selling the same OS since the 90s and it just gets worse.
• jonathanberger 2mo ago
  It’s not getting worse. We are just getting older.
• InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
  Commercial software has been getting worse for at least a decade now, and the reasons are multifaceted and difficult to solve. They include the switch to subscription pricing, misaligned incentives at companies that make most revenue from "services" or, even worse, ads, the constant need to reinvent solutions to problems that were solved twenty years ago in order to show "progress", companies that build elaborate management systems to attempt to ensure that employees are replaceable, high turnover and a lack of institutional knowledge, and so on. The ability to generate a lot of code will not solve any of these issues.
  • sublinear 2mo ago
    Commercial services have always been a thinly-veiled bureaucracy long before we even had computers. The move to the web just made them more powerful. From that perspective, LLMs are a weapon meant to disrupt their power and shake out the businesses that are too weak to resist or too dumb to see the threat. It's not about "solving" code, but weakening the competition enough that they sell out or go away. The code is still as valuable as any other proprietary information, operations, plans, etc.
• gutomec 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• archargelod 2mo ago
  Large companies are on the path of replacing people who are bad at coding, with systems that are emulating humans who are bad at coding. Coding has been solved in the sense that, per dollar spent, companies can get 10x or even 100x the amount of code of roughly the same terrible quality.
• diddid 2mo ago
  Coding has been solved in the same way that writing has been solved. Putting the sentences together is now easier, but having something interesting to say? That’s a lot harder. With the barrier to entry lower there is a lot of things that look good at the surface, but when you dig deeper, aren’t quite right. The nouns are in the right place and it has all the things school taught you a paragraph should have, but it’s just not an interesting story. That’s where all this software stuff is right now. It removed a barrier, but just like visual programming doesn’t solve it, AI can’t solve it either. It lowers the barrier but doesn’t solve the essence (is that a silver bullet reference? I’m not sure). AI can extrapolate and interpolate what’s already been done in fascinating ways but I need to see something new to really believe. Asking it to rewrite something it trained on (like SQLite or a browser) into a language that it was also trained on (rust or go) isn’t all that interesting from a software advancement perspective. I want to see imagination and so far I haven’t. But I have my required ai ticket like everyone else and maybe one day I’ll look out the window and be satisfied.
  • dataAI 2mo ago
    This 100%. Same goes with music: because of yt/tiktok, today it's easier to learn to play an instrument. Or even faster to use music software or an AI tool, but it's still almost as impossible like ever to make a great song.
• unsungNovelty 2mo ago
  We are not using LLMs to solve the issues. We are using LLMs for speed. Like we were using VC funded speedruns for "speed". Quality was never even in the picture. We just added LLMs to the current setup for speed. Neither the structures, architectures or decision makings changed. We just added another thing. I keep thinking about another thing as well. Software development might be the only place were stability is punished. If your software works swellingly well, there is less people needed. You'll lose your job when the software is stable. So you either need a new project or the software needs to be crappy enough. And the companies don't give a damn about you. Keep in mind we did have WhatsApp created with just 32 engineers until facebook bought it. Lichess.org has 2 people working on it serving to the number of people it does (millions?). It's the way we are making it. "Move fast and break things"is the shittiest way to make software. All of the above works when the desired outcome is money. Not when it is quality of the product.
• devin 2mo ago
  We need new companies that market their products as enduring and reliable. The market wants it.
  • chanux 2mo ago
    Hold on just a sec. Will do after throwing everything at the AI wave.
• TZubiri 2mo ago
  maybe once software in a certain category is solved, it no longer has incentive to improve User eXperience, but to improve the Asset Owner eXperience.
• alliao 2mo ago
  if coding is free, the number 1 issue that need to be resolved is separating features so people can roll back any part they don't like and the magic would be resolving all the gory consequences of such action well enough
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• casey2 2mo ago
  "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." - Adam Smith on overspecialization. These products are bad because noone who works on them understands the whole system infact "The only trades which it seems possible for a joint-stock company to carry on successfully... are those of which all the operations are capable of being reduced to what is called a Routine, or to such a Uniformity of method as admits but little or no variation." - Adam Smith CPUs, dams, can be designed with software. Plenty of programs can be designed with software but most useful, interesting, valuable ones cannot. Plenty of programs are designed with software, or more generally a routine, and they are incomprehensible as a result, and clearly their programmers are the most stupid and ignorant people around.
• SlightlyLeftPad 2mo ago
  It’s because the incentives of writing software practically reward making software architecture as complex as possible. Complex software architecture therefore secures the inventor forever job security.
• bluegatty 2mo ago
  Part of that is bad systems design, not really software, and part of that is social organization and bureaucracy. Part of it is incumbancy - much of the Mac OS level stuff is 30 years old and is not going to change. But the real concern is that even new-builds are not particularly great - and its because we dont have the abstractions in place to help us scale complexity
• AtlasBarfed 2mo ago
  There were a lot of amoral programmers. I'm not saying programmers as a whole are morally untouchable. But I would say the engineering barrier and the nerd barrier did provide some amount of sociopathic resistance in the world. Llms are going to enable the absolutely immoral business people to do whatever they want. And that's going to mean enshittification on a massive scale
• Jaspreet_Nahal 2mo ago
  Coding hasn't being 'solved' but its being taught to models which makes coding partially automated making people believe its 'solved'. No model can replace human intelligence and thinking as of now which makes coding still a human job which can be best done by humans, with the increase in vibe coded projects the quality of the software will eventually decline
• bluecalm 2mo ago
  One recent case in point: Google Finance redesign. How anyone signed that off, especially senior engineers supposedly behind it is beyond me. Basic functionality like sorting by column is gone. To add/remove positions you have to talk to the chat box which is very slow and unreliable. No way to just add 200 shares of company X anymore. News/calendar displayed is no longer relevant to your watchlists. Layout is terrible with unremovable AI chatbox and graph that doesn't work (shows wrong amounts) take big part of the screen. If anything it shows that people exposed to LLMs for the longest lost the most IQ. Googlers had access to Bart preview before LLMs were public so that checks out. I just hope those people don't get to redesign other tools as otherwise we will all need to talk to the chat box to use a calculator or a spreadsheet soon.
• belZaah 2mo ago
  Mac user for 20+ years now. Helped my mother with two Windows laptops. One would not allow her to reset her pin. Nothing allowed me to do a safe boot, the option to enter the password was just not there. The other wouldn’t connect to her wifi. Switched to an admin account and, after login, am greeted with a black screen, a cursor and nothing else. Yesterday OneDrive just randomly would not sync a specific file. Just wouldn’t. I could go on. That’s the network effect for you. The only reason I ever touch MS (or Meta or whatever) software is because someone I’m connected to cannot switch. And they can’t switch because others are in the same situation. At some point you don’t have to care any more. There’s no money in working software compared to igniting a massive feedback loop that just can’t stop regardless of if and what you do.
• puchatek 2mo ago
  Good models can't fix bad incentives.
• Magnesium0226 2mo ago
  who plays anything other than GTNH for 1.7.10 anyway
• aryehof 2mo ago
  Lines of code, functions and modules, are insufficient for producing quality representational systems i.e. those that model external systems. There is a lack of sufficient abstractions. Unlike transformational software that can use mathematics as a conceptual framework, representational systems have no such thing. Yet it is complex representational systems that allow the operation of our modern world. Human coding effort without such a framework is problematic, and that is just exacerbated with AI generated code. Should we be surprised that for this type of software AI makes thing worse?
• ninalanyon 2mo ago
  Coding itself is not the problem and mostly never was. The problem is conflicting requirements, lack of resources, haste, the desire to be first with a feature, etc. And the lack of backlash from anyone with real influence when software fails. That is software is bad because organizations make it so not because the coders are incompetent.
• bouncycastle 2mo ago
  I have a TV in my Google Home that I cannot remove. It says it's offline and when I try to remove if it says "communication error". Yes, I know, I stopped using that TV 5 years ago! Normally, I haven't seen such bugs from Google, but lately it's been getting worse.
• dataAI 2mo ago
  There are no banger best selling books either. Generic WikipediaEsque slop sold on Amazon.
• baist0 2mo ago
  For 20 years now, the top priority has been development speed, not product quality. The days of spending a whole week on a single feature are over. AI is precisely what is needed for high speed of coding.
• whateverboat 2mo ago
  Coding is not solved. Who said coding is solved? Coding is incredibly complex. What is coding? It is writing down specifications. Imagine a simple computer with just a 1920x1080 pixel screen, a 104 key keyboard and 3 button mouse. That is 2^107 inputs and 2^(1920x1080) outputs. The scale of specification of this (now over time) is already not handle able. So, we invent concepts like taskbars, windows, shortcuts, and so each spec is different. People think they are writing down code, when they are actually just making a lot of decisions.
• vitally3643 2mo ago
  Simple: it is economic suicide to sell a product once and let it be a finished and complete thing that lasts a lifetime. Thanks capitalism, for ruining literally everything yet again
• rurban 2mo ago
  Coding is solved, but the next step is getting rid of the PM's causing all the trouble.
• jason1cho 2mo ago
  If AI is so good at coding, why can't it be good at politics? We will elect AI in our next presidential election.
• bluebic 2mo ago
  If software was so good at making software LLMs should just produce binaries and minified bundles. But in our software we actually want language - high level expressive declarations and descriptions of process (which actually automate work). Code is like a recipe that is also a poem. If it wasn’t, we’d not invent higher level more dynamic languages over time. Expression is power. You want the dual function so it’s both descriptive (documentation and digestible knowledge) and yet has productive power as an instrument. Higher-ups can’t think of code like that - like writing. One reason I think corporations still need to evolve to become more technical and made up of more creative people. Run it like an editor at the local paper.
• colinb 2mo ago
  I have to say I’m really enjoying the Eternal September of Software comments here. They make me wonder about the vintage of the authors. Was Windows 7 the first stable OS they used? Some crustifarian Debian? I don’t actually recall if the Multicians I knew thought New Jersey software was rubbish. I know I still miss the solidity and useful abstractions of VAXcluster. Kubernetes would be funny by comparison if it weren’t so tragic. It was always better in the past. The capitalists always ruined it in the past. Only I am the true bearer of the artisanal software flame. /s
• BirAdam 2mo ago
  I see all these comments about Linux not having this issue, but Linux has a similar issue. Canonical’s uutils being forced before being ready, Wayland adoption initially before it was ready, KDE4, GNOME3, PulseAudio, Avahi, Bluetooth support, etc. Linux systems do tend to get better overtime, but Linux systems also tend to release without sufficient testing. So, while you can expect things to be great after several patch releases, everything may break initially.
• freddealmeida 2mo ago
  coding is not understanding, nor is it architecture. And debt is always there. No matter who writes it. But I think it can be better.
• ruicraveiro 2mo ago
  While I agree with a big part of the article, I need to pick on this sentence: "They may have upgraded the average skill set of software teams in a way we have not seen before." Well, no, not really. On one hand, it is true that AI makes it easier for experienced software developers to find information outside their existing knowledge boundaries. (i.e. when I need to use a language I've used before, but am not so proficient, it is faster with AI to get started). At the same time, it creates an apparent upgraded skill set. But, on the other hand, the more we rely on AI, and worse, the more we rely on AI and only on AI, the less skills we end having ourselves (we become skill renters, not skill owners). By this, we risk getting to the point where we don't really understand the code that AI generated. This is a very dangerous aspect and it might be a contributing fact to the lack of quality the author diagnosed.
• effnorwood 2mo ago
  Bad drivers and middle management inventions like scrum. Is why.
• duxup 2mo ago
  I don’t really dread or notice macOS updates like windows updates. I will say that in my experience with AI my code and that of my employer has greatly improved. So maybe there’s a split between big companies and small as far as quality gap?
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• MetroWind 2mo ago
  Because most engineers nowadays have the fundamentally wrong idea about how their software should utilize the user's hardware: they treat user's CPU and RAM as their playground and being infinite, and therefore act as a platform to make their life easier instead of their user's. Yes, coding is solved, for the developers, not for the users.
• QuantumNoodle 2mo ago
  For my team to re-work fragile, complex parts of the system we need to push back at product from shipping "features." Product does not see reliability as a feature they can advertise -- it's expected. And frankly I can't be bothered to keep taking side quests to fix things that increase my workload, I will burn out again. I want to fix things. But our planning revolves around implementing features customers are waiting for (aka compete in the market.) I am responsible with AI tools but not everyone I work with are. Even though responsible AI users are in the majority, our system is only as stable as the weakest link.
• janilowski 2mo ago
  Lower barrier to entry = more crap flooding the market
• conartist6 2mo ago
  ...because coding hasn't been solved
• Guvante 2mo ago
  The firing people because of AI thing is similar to the RTO thing, assuming everyone saying they are doing X because Y is falling for the simplest form of deception. Firing people to bet against a downturn is self fulfilling. Firing people to bet for a thing everyone says is good isn't.
• sporkland 2mo ago
  A few reasons I'd say: 1. Our incentive structure in software has always been to a large extent driven by more features [1]. Agent driven development has poured gasoline on that fire. 2. Despite all the effort we put into quality assurance by engineering teams, it's still hard to full de-risk releases across a broad set of configurations use cases, etc. Especially as most agents and even the test hierarchy itself tends to favor unit or module tests and these issues tend to pop up at integration points or hard to test non functional requirements. So I think what we're seeing is people are rapidly adopting agent lead development due to #1 but the risk reduction pipelines haven't caught up with #2. I think they eventually will but we're definitely in for a rough road for a bit. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/
• gt0 2mo ago
  I think there has probably always been gaps between what marketing wants to sell, what management wants to prioritise, what programmers want to make, what customers say they want, and what customers actually want. Those gaps are getting bigger all over the place, technical users generally just want all the bullshit to go away and just have a reliable and simple system, but no mainstream software companies want to sell it.