Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

truthbe

This will sound rude, but.. Obviously

lkbm

I think software has always been terribly buggy. Back in the day, things would crash (including your entire OS in many cases) all the time. These days, it's more often smaller, stupid UX issues, but that's been the situation for a few years. I've seen no difference over the past six months.

jameskilton

If you're ever asking "Is it just me?", the answer is "no".

JohnFen

You're not going crazy. This has been the trend for a long time now.

trio8453

We've always had bugs. Good chance that it's largely confirmation bias - you're familiar with how software development has changed in the past 6 months, and especially if you don't like it, any time you see a bug or a problem, you'll attribute it to that.

karmakurtisaani

I had one encounter with an obviously vibe coded website last year. Everything looked great, but nothing worked. Had to deal with the company over email. Things might be better now, but that was a clear warning of what future may hold.

scrapcode

I think this is the natural path of things...

lackoftactics

Not only buggier, but less usable overall. We can not blame everything on AI. For example events discovery platforms and ticket platforms were way better decade ago, you could search by popularity, friends going to the same event and there wasn’t as much fragmentation. That part you could blame on Cambridge Analytica scandal and late capitalism love of algorithmic feeds

MrBuddyCasino

Google Ai studio: pegs a core Opencode: pegs a core Paypal: pegs a core Chatgpt: pegs a core

jabroni_salad

Sure, but I would have agreed with you 10 years ago too. We were in the throes of making really fat assets that weak computers couldn't load quickly.

IAmGraydon

iOS is definitely buggier. It used to be a silky smooth experience but it's degraded significantly in the last year or so. Safari on iOS, in particular, is very bad. Lots of problems in Adobe Creative Cloud on Win 11 (primarily Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator) in recent months too.

lordofgibbons

It's similar to the ElectronJS desktop app problem. Sure the desktop apps use a lot more system resources, but it's doubtful those apps would have been created in the first place if it wasn't for the speedup of development allowed by ElectronJS. In this case, sure software is buggier, but there's also a ton more software+features that wouldn't have existed before AI coding tools.

laci37

I mostly feel this on Microsoft stuff. O365 browser stuff was always buggy, but last month I had to fight to zoom in on something in PowerPoint. Pagination in Azure ML randomly broke, it took them a month to fix it. Atlassian is also a bug factory, but I did not expect anything better of them. Each UI update they did to Confluence and Jira just made everything more confusing in the last 10 years.

javier123454321

I would say yes, but not particularly more in the last 6 months.

solumunus

Honestly no, I have not noticed this.

graemep

Websites and mobile apps, definitely. Every time a typical proprietary mobile app updates I wonder what they will break. They always do break something or remove a feature I want. Desktop apps, not in general. Some work better, like KDE's DE has fixed some irritants.

CM30

It's definitely been buggier for a while now. It's already been an issue for a decade or so due to the "release minimum viable product, fix problems with patches/updates model" (especially in the world of video games), but the rise of AI has only made the issue more apparent. Microsoft is the biggest example here (with Windows 11 seemingly screwing up something massive in every update), but other companies like Google and Meta haven't been as reliable either.

david927

I thought about writing a comedy, set in the far future, where everything looks beautiful but nothing works right and it's just accepted (almost unnoticed) as a running gag throughout the film. Now I wonder how prescient that would be.

Hasz

feature velocity >> feature stability. Core libs/software have never been better, eg I have had much better luck with stuff like ffmpeg and virsh than ever before. If it has a UI and targeted at consumers though? Bug city.