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

AussieWog93

I remember noticing the same thing a decade ago. I don't think it has anything to do with AI.

hibikir

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.

Hugsbox

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.

RugnirViking

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.

Biologist123

> 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

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.

fhd2

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.

hypfer

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

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.)

dminik

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

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

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.

micoti

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

It was always like this.

elendilm

<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

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

> 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?

frameset

> 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/windowbehavi...

graemep

> 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

turns out the bottleneck was never doing things faster, it was doing things correctly, and we optimized away the people who knew the difference