> 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.
Yep, this 100%. When I see a "pending update" notification or icon somewhere, the first thing I think is "I don't want to update, they're just going to break something new". I _hate_ updates now. Doesn't matter what software it is, with the small exception of video games. (Except Dead By Daylight. Behavior, the devs, are the most hilariously incompetent devs on the planet, but at least their incompetence is confined to their own game.)
The only software I've been excited about an update for in years has been games, that seems like the only category where devs actually add features people are excited about. For example, the latest KCD2 patch added a fun but brief new quest [0].
Not universal though. Besides your example, even for single player games patches can be basically malicious. I've had Fallout 4 locked on updates for like 3 years at this point, everything Bethesda has added has degraded the experience for zero upside. But I can't think of any software besides a game where I have been anything but dreading an update in years. Slack wants to update? Great, it'll probably break/degrade my work flow in some minor way, and they're one of the lesser offenders on my work machine.
Lots of games’ updates break popular mods, introduce launchers and/or break linux compatibility and/or online mode, remove music with expired licenses, censor something and increase system requirements.
Sadly we’re way past the point where games became like all the other software in that regard
hahahahah. Games are steering further and further to this not being true. Where each player explicitly doesn't pay for it, and instead they contain an increasing series of dark patterns in order to steer players to fleece their money in a series of microtransactions.
We can't change the fact that commercial OS vendors are all feudal overlords now, but the lawmakers are letting them get away with it and that is something we might still be able to change.
I dread Linux kernel updates. Still running a 4.4 era kernel. Kernel versions have always been hit or miss, some are good, others introduced a new bug. Sometimes it's necessary to upgrade glibc as well which is a huge pain.
People don't choose a Super LTS distro/kernel because they want newer kernel versions, they want stability. What the hell are you doing trying to shoehorn a newer kernel into Ubuntu 16.04?
Maybe this is because video games can always add more features. Realistically, what useful feature could even be added to Word? I want to write text. It lets me write text. Program done. I dont see why Word would ever need an update other than maintenance or a security patch.
I don't play those, but I know at least with games like those, where players like to play on specific versions, there's usually ways to stay on a specific version without too much hassle.
Microsoft purchase was during 1.8. large-scale terrain structure completely changed in 1.7. 1.5 completely changed the redstone meta. 1.4 completely changed the villager meta as you could now zombify and cure villagers and more changed meta because beacons existed. 1.3 added villager trading, making mining obsolete for some people. 1.3 also overhauled the internal structure of singleplayer so that you can have network latency in singleplayer. 1.2 increased the world height, making your max height builds no longer impressive. Beta 1.8 added hunger so you can't just exist indefinitely, and endermen who aggressively stole blocks in that version. Beta 1.6 fixed several fun glitches.
The post-Microsoft meta is that glitches are valid game mechanics. TNT duping has been in the game longer than Notch controlled the game. But some other glitches get fixed.
How do you measure fun? People will always rush to that excuse if it's not properly defined. And not everyone finds the same things fun. Especially if you are looking to try and 10x your audience.
Most won’t fix bugs in non-competitive games are things that don’t prevent players from engaging the intended gameplay loop and are unlikely to be encountered randomly. Who cares if you can endlessly pickpocket that one npc in oblivion. No one but the people who want to exploit will ever be affected and why stop them if that’s what they want.
In competitive games unintended mechanics are much more frequently patched but there are plenty of examples that are straight up iconic. Wave dashing in melee, magnum damage in Halo CE, sword cancelling in halo 2, b-hopping and surfing in CS.
And when you get to games like mmos where saving time is of major value glitches are like gifts. I am still mad they patched out logout skips in classic wow.
TNT duping is a good example. It’s basically impossible to accidentally run in to this glitch, but the community has built tons of mechanisms around using it and generally like it.
Patching it out would be more “correct” but serve to only limit user creativity and inventions.
TNT duping is a classic example of how players will optimize the fun out of the game if you give them a chance. Your claim that people won't accidentally run into is not true as it only takes one YouTube tutorial to discover it. Many popular farm designs rely on it so it is not hard to stumble upon it. Remember this is a game where people had to use third party sites to figure out how to discover how to craft anything. I don't think it's fair to discount discovering things on 3rd party sites.
Tbh I think Minecraft players enjoy creating item farms. It’s just part of the game progression at this point.
Meanwhile some non bugged workflows like breaking and replacing the lectern a million times to get the right trade exist because the enchanting table is so horribly broken no one would use it.
When I bought Minecraft, most things weren't renewable. Now, late-game players don't even have to go mining. Or craft that much.
The enchanting table used to be a rare reward. You had to get to level 50 and roll the dice once. You get a random upgrade to one item and that's it, you're stuck with it. It was gambling. Now the cost is trivial after several reductions, and people minmax their enchantments, and Repair means you never have to re-roll, and you can get all your enchantments anyway from villagers if you do a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. That's an accidental game that overtook the actual game, and it seems like not a very good one.
also worth noting - in beta, you could create item farms if you installed mods allowing you to create item farms - besides the cactus farm which was possible since cactuses were added to the game (and there's a very silly reason why they are possible) and the obvious intended farms like wheat.
> > 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.
You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.
Proprietary software isn't built for users anymore. But (some) FOSS still is.
Pulseaudio has been painless for like a decade and a half. Yes, it has a rough start and was probably made default in many distros before it ought to, but it's fine.
Pulse audio is ok until you plug or unplug things like earpieces and bluetooth speakers and then you want to do a videocall and random devices are the active ones.
And then you find no obvious way to be able to record both input and output...
Lol because that never happens on any other OS. Plug my Mac into my dock, uses my DAC. Great. Unplug. Connect Bluetooth headphones. So far so good. Plug back into dock. Now it's... the built in audio? Huh?
I'm honestly surprised how often in Linux PA with WirePlumber just does the right thing most times, IME.
This is my Monday morning dance of Bluetooth. 99% of the time I'll join a call and everything is connected, line levels are set and yet... No audio. I know people complain about Pulse but MacOS is just as bad and, seemingly, getting worse.
Perhaps the parent poster user AirPods. Those in contrast would seamlessly switch between your iPhone and MacBook . Apple more or less by planned design nowadays work seamlessly with their own products and their support for other devices is patchy .
Good thing that Debian pushed that thing into "non-core compatibility tools" status. It and NVidia drivers were always the things that made upgrading risky.
Relatedly, systemd stopped breaking a while ago. Either distros stopped keeping it up-to-date or people can learn.
Anything with the Red Hat stink, these days. Which, yeah, a lot of that’s Poettering.
If they haven’t been executing a plan to make it extremely painful to maintain a distro that differs significantly from whatever Red Hat’s preferences and ways of operating are (so, making it harder to justify anything but “screw it, we’ll just use red hat, everyone else is just the same thing but with less ability to steer the direction of the OS”), damn the effects on UX, the traditional modular nature of Linux systems, and general open source ecosystem health… well, they’ve sure done a great job of it, so it’d be pretty crazy if that isn’t what they’ve been doing.
Latest venture of the ilk behind all that : device attestation for Linux (Amutable). Yes, they clearly have an agenda and are being quite successful at pushing it.
an update last year broke some laptop microphone settings that in 30 years of using linux I had had no reason to even know existed. took me literally a couple of weeks to figure out what was going on and fix it. it was admittedly the first time in many years that it broke anything, but when it did it did so in style.
Tenacity was developed because of that one Tantacrul video where he accidentally revealed that Audacity was going to start telemetry. Audacity tried to claim it was just basic stuff like OS version and hardware, then realized that people were still angry and decided to just push as far as they could. That video was like their turning point. The fact that even Audacity could fall to that showed a lot of people that even the basic stuff nobody ever thinks about can turn into something imposing and hostile.
Exactly, though it's mostly community software and not corporate backed oss. Zig has been taking an interesting direction, emacs is still getting features after 50 years, ladybird is turing out nice, and a ton of other things
Ubuntu is still annoying with it's daily popups asking to update the system and then most times requiring a system restart. In some ways it is worse than Windows.
Software & Updates->Updates->Automatically Check for updates:{Daily,Every two days,Weekly,Every Two Weeks,Never}
and Security Updates{Display Immediately,Download Automatically,Download and install automatically}
I've had plenty of issues with old bundled GCC compilers which were fixed in later versions. I'm feeling this is a psychological thing, not necessarily software related. (Doesn't invalidate the feeling though)
So many Linux user problems are self inflicted. It’s almost a demonstration why proprietary platforms limit your options so much when users choose to shove a stick in their bike spokes and complain it let them do that.
The fact that Arch is bleeding edge has been an explicit part of the Arch philosophy for as long as I've been using it (for 20 years now). It breaks a lot less frequently than it used to.
Upstream developers declaring a release as "stable" isn't sufficient to make it so. Distros and users are the ones who decide what is stable and what isn't.
The funny thing is that there’s a relatively high amount of hype this year around iOS and macOS being a stability and performance release with very few features, on purpose.
Look up some beta impressions or try the public beta yourself. Apps launch faster and a whole bunch of random stuff is fixed and smoothed out.
So not only are we getting a really great performance and stability release in the height of the AI era, disproving this “AI isn’t making software better” claim, but we now can make a pretty solid connection to the DRAM shortages being one of the biggest performance and efficiency motivators of the last few decades.
Why do you think Apple cares to make apps launch 40% faster? It’s because they don’t want to be selling iPhones that are losing money because they’re packed with expensive RAM and storage.
I just can’t agree with you that this software is anywhere near the kind of misery you’re describing.
To head this off at the pass, I’m not even a macOS user…I switched off to Linux last year. I also didn’t like Liquid Glass and oddly I got tired of the notch more than anything. I also just needed more storage in my computer and didn’t want to pay Apple 3x more than street pricing for 2TB.
I agree with you but I think it's worth pointing out that this is a new occurrence.
It's not just the performance of software but the UI and features themselves. The constant UI redesigns leave legacy users disoriented. It seems like they often just change things for the sake of changing things. On iOS three main pain points for me that used to be better are:
1. Search. It finds the settings for an app but not the app itself. Or the search doesn't even find the setting even though I have typed the name of the setting in word for word.
2. The timer. Previously I would set a timer and see the result on the lock screen. Perfect. Then they added a control to stop the timer from the lock screen. So timers are accidentally stopped after brushing the lock screen by accident.
3. Turning Caller ID on and off. Sometimes it just lags out and doesn't do anything.
> disproving this “AI isn’t making software better” claim
one company deciding a feature freeze is not disapproving anything, in fact, it means things have gotten so bad, apple who used to have higher standards for their releases, had to pull the brakes and fix their shit
> 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.
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.
> bundle all changes in "required security updates."
And that is why i have setup a managed organization setting in windows to stop automatic updates (which includes security updates). I manually vet each individual security update, and download and apply them myself. I don't let windows update on its own.
Similarly to android. I don't let it update, unless i know i need the update. And i'd like to do the same with apps too, but companies have put in things to prevent people like me - deprecating old versions and forcing users to use newer versions (things like whatsapp, or youtube are prime examples).
Counterpoint: I have been running Fedora Linux on multiple systems for about two decades, including on my daily drivers, and it's been pretty much solid.
I have been on fedora 6 months now, done the upgrade from 43 to 44. All went well. Took all scare away from me. Admittedly, I run a more sophisticated ZFS boot manager (ZBM) setup and snapshot my entire OS (root FS) before any updates or upgrades. That helps but I was really impressed with the 43->44 being so effortless.
Updates only annoy me here, not scare me like they do in macOS or iOS.
Right at this moment, my mouse cursor cannot figure out what scale it should use across three monitors with different resolutions and scaling, and has become a blurry group of pixels.
GNOME has also frozen the whole system for several seconds multiple times recently. Codex says it is a problem with the time component. I am still dealing with another recent problem where the system sometimes takes forever to boot, but after a forced restart it enters the system normally within seconds. Grok 4.5 says this is also GNOME's component fault.
I'm using Ubuntu and Fedora daily. Ubuntu is the one causing trouble all the time, Fedora rarely. That's why companies choose the worse system, Ubuntu. Worse is certainly not better
I’ve had a little bit of this excitement when an update comes out with Zed. Updates are frequent, and while it’s totally usable it’s still immature enough as a full IDE that the improvements are often something that will directly improve how I use it. So that’s been nice. But this is the only example I’ve had where I’ve felt this in years and years
Tesla just released an infuriating update which adds an incomprehensible number of UI nags to start self driving, despite there being a hardware lever that already does so.
There's even a big button that says "Start Self Driving" in the valuable visual real estate where the speed limit once was.
I get to say a lot of "i told you so" to my wife these days. She used to call me an old man for being a stick-in-the-mud and not updating my phone's apps. When I have them working the way I want: why would I want to update things and risk changing that?
These days she's swearing up a storm whenever an update breaks or removes things.
The removal of window chrome was a gigantic mistake and we're all paying for it every day. Having to tolerate the extra mental overhead caused by the removal of such affordances in UIs every single time I use a computer makes me wonder whether we're all actually dead and in hell... Like that old SMBC comic where a guy in heaven stubs his toe every hour, and realizes it's actually hell. That's what this is.
I can relate too. I reached a point (as a software engineer), that shitti functioning software annoys me so much. Functions that are just annoying that no one really asked about, functions that are so bad designed that I really ask myself who the beep is really responsible and accountable to sign off this crap.
AI should help us really make this small but time consuming implementations better too, not just shipping more and more crappy stuff.
A riddle is not a physical thing but okay, let's say you want to destroy an instance of a riddle that is in a book: how do you know it's in that book without looking, and therefore copying the riddle into your own mind? This is known as the Pink Streisand Paradox.
Your comment said puzzle. I usually think of those things as made of cardboard or wood (really fancy ones), i.e. jigsaw puzzles. Since they're made of cellulose, you can turn them into nitrocellulose and then burn them very quickly!
I do love the Pink Streisand Paradox though. I think the solution involves technology: you build a riddle-recognizer that scans the book for you and tells you whether or not the riddle is present, without telling you the words of the riddle.
But that further raises the question: how do you know it's the riddle you're looking for? How do you know what riddle you're looking for if you don't know the riddle itself?
Sure, but when I said a puzzle I was thinking of something more abstract, like software development getting solved. To be nitpicky, I'd say without a mind to pose a question nothing in the material world by itself is a puzzle. It's just some cardboard or wood with no meaning. When the last person who can read is gone, is a book still a book? My knee-jerk reaction to "does a falling tree make a sound with nobody around to hear it" always was of course it does, what a stupid question. And it sure produces pressures waves in the air, but are those "sound" without anything to consider them such?
> But that further raises the question: how do you know it's the riddle you're looking for? How do you know what riddle you're looking for if you don't know the riddle itself?
Yeah, I was just gonna say. E.g. you ask "Is the riddle in this book?" and it replies "Which one? Specify the riddle."
Maybe with just a bit more technology though.. e.g. something that scans you and the whole world, to find out all riddles that exist, and what sort of riddle you probably would like to eliminate, if you were aware of it. It destroys those riddles, and then itself.
Since we're just riffing in the middle of nowhere anyway: I think it might be an arms race between finding the riddle that destroys the crazy (making) machines, and the machines destroying the ability to come up with riddles first. It might actually already been written how this'll play out roughly:
> Eddie eventually stumps Blaine with unsolvable "riddles" that are actually stupid jokes from his childhood. This forces Blaine to try to "lower" his intelligence to levels necessary to answer, which ends up driving him completely insane and causes his computer to crash. Eddie then proceeds to shoot the computer
> AI is here, time to create something new and shiny.
The AI we have in 2026 cannot do that or it'd have already been done. I use AI daily: it saves some time. But it produces an infinite amount of insecure, unnecessary, sloppy-pasta.
And that sloppy-pasta doesn't make software any better.
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.
> The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users.
It’s not surprising that this sentiment is popular on a message board filled with engineers but I’m not so convinced by it. Nor do I think the current state of tech companies is acceptable, to be clear. But there needs to be some level of management outside of the engineers themselves. A lot of talented lead engineers I know are terrible people managers, or ineffective project managers. And that’s fine, because there are other people to do those tasks.
If your utopia is a bunch of engineers given freedom to do whatever they want, however they want to do it… I suspect the dream and the reality will not match up. In the scenario you’ve outlined I strongly suspect you’ll have infrastructure on its third rewrite, full of power user features and tweaks… and near-zero adoption from newcomers. Product fit is a thing that needs to be managed!
The OP is right most production code is full of errors, and suffers from code bloat and feature creep that impacts UX.
Is this really the best we can do? It strikes me as unacceptable to ship errors to production, yet it's commonplace.
Code quality matters, and being in touch with users/dogfooding matters. But that can only address the underlying problem by eliminating the low-talent developers who win by numbers.
How to solve the relevant problems is not something hiring and recruiting teams can assess. So, hiring process uses proxy metrics like having a HS and CS degree, years of experience, brand name companies, list of tools, "best practices", trends, etc.
Teams of self-congratulating code monkeys using all the latest 'industry standard' libraries and tools, don't accept responsibility for their errant code. Instead, they blame (the user, his browser, the library), make excuses, minimize "all software has bugs". They can't fix the bugs they've created for themselves, but it can't be their fault, after all, they're doing what everyone else is doing.
The answer is to send them packing. Hire by talent, not by proxy of a hiring team (who don't know how to think/use the aforementioned proxy metrics to gauge talent).
Intelligence cannot be taught, but it can and is discriminated against. That is another problem with these faux 'team-player' follower types. Anyone on the team pointing out the code is a disaster and an attitude to fix it is not going to last. He'll be fed pushback of the same crap excuses for why things must be done the way they're done.
When a talented developer does deep dive analysis to identify root causes, most on the team don't get it. The scary bugbear of coherence is too hard and threat to the team's shared narrative.
Again, the only way to solve that problem is to send them packing.
> A lot of talented lead engineers I know are terrible people managers, or ineffective project managers
Ok but non-technical “managers” are way worse.
Has more to do with role focus and hours in the day. I would rather have a dev dedicated to PM than a “manager” larping as one cringily trying to keep up with us totally ineffective to lead a technical team.
Tech companies are anything but technical anymore since they got rid of all the talent.
I'm not totally convinced by OP's whole point, but I want to point out an issue with this argument of yours:
> lot of talented lead engineers I know are terrible people managers, or ineffective project managers.
A lot of people who can read are also terrible manager, but that's not an argument to put illiterate people in charge. Not every engineer has what it takes to be a good manager, and that's fine since you don't need this many manager anyway, but I'd argue that for a management jobs, understanding the craft of the people you're managing is as important as literacy, because the most important role of a manager is make decisions and you cannot make good decisions about things you don't understand.
That being said, engineering is only half the takes in software, the other half being Design and you cannot have a manager that is merely an engineer without design skills (otherwise your product is going to have the user-friendliness of Arch Linux).
The problem, as I've experienced it, is that companies don't try to determine what engineers also have managment aptitude. They simply promote whatever engineers are good at writing code.
And furthermore, in the last decades engineers have become infantilized to such a degree that most don't want to learn to be a good manager and prefer to stay Peter Pans for ever. I believe it's an outcome of the 80's and 90's "nerd" culture because, if you ask the elders, it didn't use to be like that in the US, and it's much less prevalent in Europe (but alas that's far from being the center of the software industry).
I’d say that describes me but I don’t see it as a Peter Pan thing… I’m very technically skilled and I want to keep using those skills. I know the role I want, it’s what I often see advertised as an Architect role. But companies have an order of magnitude fewer of those roles than people management roles. I don’t know that it has to be that way, a lot of projects suffer from a lack of top level technical direction more architects could provide.
In an organisation made of mature people, some of the highly skilled people would recognise the need for them to become people managers (not Architects), and so the organisation would benefit from managers who were actually competent, having done the work themselves before.
I see complaints about companies not promoting from within their ranks, and choosing MBAs for managers, but the grim reality is that the engineers themselves don't want to step up and grow up.
You’re really stuck on the maturity thing here and I’ve got to be honest, I don’t get it. Becoming a people manager is not “growing up”, it’s simply a different job.
My skills are not in people management. My skills are technical. The organisation would not benefit from me being a people manager because I’m not good at it. I don’t understand why I should opt to do a job I am neither good at nor enjoy just for the supposed benefit of my employer. Part of “growing up” is realising that employers are replaceable and sacrificing yourself at the altar of any given employer is a fool’s errand.
Rather, you're the one stuck thinking this is about yourself. If you read more attentively, you'd see I carefully phrased my reply to avoid mentioning you.
You say you aren't good at it, but have you ever tried ? I suppose not, so you'll never know if you'd have been good at it. This is not a quality that comes innate, it's something that one must learn and cultivate.
The important thing here is the observation that engineering companies used to be filled with engineers that were both *technically competent* and *willing to become a manager*. That's much rarer nowadays. Why ?
Has it not occurred to you that the job of manager has changed in this time? The people managers I am friends with bemoan spending half of their lives doing paperwork for performance reviews. It wasn’t always that way. To be a project manager is spend half your life in JIRA workflows.
I don’t want to become a manager not just because I’m not good at it, but also because it doesn’t look even slightly enjoyable. Why would I do it?
> Has it not occurred to you that the job of manager has changed in this time?
Maybe, but that still doesn't answer the question. In my many years working for a FAANG in Europe, almost all good managers were non-US, even in the sister teams on the US side. On the US side, the best managers I've worked with were, with a few exceptions, first generation immigrants from India, Iran, Lebanon or various European countries.
Yeah I hate that you’re right. Blender is an example of OSS software which is actually a joy to use and they have product designers. But I think there is a massive gap between good and bad product people. No product person would be better than bad ones, but for truly great software you probably want some good ones.
That being said lots of good OSS exists purely built by engineers so I think it’s really the case that good product people help a lot and bad ones hurt a ton.
Some developers also take an active interest in the design and feature set of the product they're developing. IME those developers can often produce good results once a general direction is set if they have access to real users to collect feedback. But it's important to recognise that these are essentially two completely distinct skill sets and mindsets and it just happens that some people have both.
It's not really any different to the old arguments when continuing a career beyond senior dev level meant moving into management but there was no guarantee that just because someone had been a competent developer they would also be any good at managing anything. Some were and produced great results - in some cases informed by their understanding as former developers about what would be possible and what it would realistically cost - but in other cases the Peter Principle hit early.
> 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.
I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone will ignore for no good reason. This will never happen because entrenchment and bureaucracy will strangle every product organization and every organizational reboot attempt.
It's probably the right solution, but the resistance built into organizations assembled by bad decision makers cannot be overcome. Maybe the best you can do is try to find a legal way to spin-off a competitor with a truly fresh start.
I've worked with good product people. They come up with good ideas, have great suggestions, leave latitude for implementation issues to guide some of the design, and work well in the constraints. It is kinda amazing because you might be given a good idea/ticket, and it just flows smoothly and naturally (building on top of existing good product design of course)
Having them around is like 100000x better than having just random engineers be doing product design. And "oh just listen to your power users"... come on folks, surely we know about designing our software into a corner right?
I'm saying all this but am very sympathetic to the pain brought by bad product people (or just like ... mid product people. It's a hard space)
I started using the term “opinionated software” a little over 15 years when I was starting a new company. I built what I wanted as a participant and a fan of the sport.
Lots of other people had their opinions on it (“you’re doing it wrong and everyone wants it this way,” “you must have this feature” which barely anyone actually uses… the power users), but I held fast with my opinion (did usability testing to prove the it was easier to achieve the goals to back up my opinion) and I’m glad I did. It changed an industry for the better.
Excellent usability and functional design that achieves a goal better and easier will win people over.
I also built it with an API so that people can build their own versions of it with the same data, because others also have strong opinions, and I whole heartedly respect that. Some interesting things have come from it that are more targeted for specific users and situations. Pretty cool to see what others make.
While I don’t know how opinionated the guys that created Dark Sky were with it, I would guess that it’s a good example. It was different from all the other apps in their category in the way it surfaced information. Their new app is good (not quite as great as the original), but they’ve really spent a lot of time making a really usable and functional system.
Edit: About that same time in my life, I also realized that I no longer just wanted functional, I wanted both functional and form. I wanted well designed functional stuff. Turns out that people like that too.
If an idea of what the software is supposed to do conflicts with what the software does or intends to do, then the idea is wrong. What product people do (even good ones) is stretch the product to scratch every itch and address every user request, despite the software's opinion. That's Zawinski's Law. (See also the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Which unfortunately does not have a pithy name to my knowledge.)
The best thing a product team can do is learn to say no.
Wasn't this the whole point of agile and self organizing teams?
Then managers with 10 different PM* acronyms in their email signature got hired in, with no engineering experience, to lead product and software teams?
I don't know if that's what agile was supposed to do, but replacing management with "anyone but leading engineers" is exactly opposite of what GP proposed.
> I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone will ignore for no good reason.
Because it's populist slop, just like how every long enough discussion about government incompetence will lead to someone proposing all political leaders should be paid minimum wage to fix the problem.
Don't forget, the entire Web 2.0 winner ecosystem of companies that make up our modern Internet was founded by Engineer GodKings who leveraged their product prowess to gain a distribution advantage: Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Stripe, Github, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. They were also the ones who transformed their companies to what they are today, nobody forced them to do this. Contrary to populist opinion, it's not because they were stupid or brainwashed, it's because the proposed scheme has known, predictable downsides that a leader actually has to reckon with while internet commenters only have to worry about preserving their egos.
Taking out the trash is not populist slop. If you have a bad product org, the right thing to do is replace it. If you have a bad engineering org, the right thing to do is replace it.
It is difficult to draw any conclusions other than you like to keep things broken.
Don't blame it all on entrenchment and bureaucracy. Rather show me the engineers who want to become management.
I have thought of the same solution myself before and came to the conclusion that I, for one, wouldn't want to be leading anything even if I had some ideas on why the product sucked.
> Rather show me the engineers who want to become management.
You're talking to one. Wanting agency and responsibility and having the drive to put in the work (for potentially brutal hours) is not exactly a common trait. It's a founding engineer attitude. It should be no surprise that I'm a founding engineer of an LLC of one. I understand that it is not for everyone.
But I'm pretty confident that the blame is well placed.
The real.answer is that people stopped making things with care and genuine interest.
Everything should be delivered in the fastest way possible, in the shortest time possible, on the tightest budget possible.
This is a recipe for creating a mess, in which AI has now pushed the limits and we are seeing how failure is now per-default embedded and shipped to users, who are now beta-testing products continuously.
> Everything should be delivered in the fastest way possible, in the shortest time possible, on the tightest budget possible.
because companies that did this is rewarded with more users and more revenue (than a hypothetical competitor that didnt). Darwinian natural selection is about survival of the fittest, not survival of the "best looking" or "best performing". And the determination of fitness is by the actions of consumers, not what they state verbally.
In a few years will have a cemetery of software and products locked behind DRM or requiring a remote connection to a server that won't exist anymore, because it's too expensive to maintain.
It is already happening, the effect will be much more amplified sooner
The days where middle and high-end goods were of a relatively higher quality were also produced under a capitalist system, though. The US was capitalist when it built my parents' normal washer/dryer combination that lasted for 25 years with no interruptions to service, and it was capitalist when Google was first invented and you could conduct literal string searches on the internet. I don't think there's anything inherent to "capitalism" that causes degradation of product lines that doesn't also cause the creation of the product lines in the first place.
My suspicion is that the "great enshittification" has more to do with the swelling in numbers and purchasing/borrowing power of the lower classes. The middle class now has worse computers and dryers [1], but the lower class now has computers and dryers. Corporations can still make colossal sales numbers with degraded products because they're selling to people for whom possessing a product at all is a major life upgrade, and aren't worried about "the best version of this product". The same is happening to movies and TV.
[1] Many will point out that on paper and in certain metrics modern goods outperform past goods, but I think the extremely high prices commanded by quality vintage and near-vintage goods across all genres of product lines speaks for itself.
We have been beta-testing the outcome of incompetent software production processes long before AI. But LLMs do accelerate the slop production. And if what you're shipping is going to be a bloated buggy mess anyway, then LLMs really do make you more "productive".
There are good PMs out there watching in horror as their peers make changes and features that are obviously doomed (to anybody with a functional brain). I also write as much code as the median engineer on my team (skews junior). Please don't write off the entire profession based on many (most?) being awful - if you work with a good PM some day I promise you will find there is an important point to the job.
I think it's a question of integrity - I have reached a comfortable ceiling in my career, but doing the dumb shit would have got me further, faster. I don't begrudge the peers who have sold out when the delta is $1m+ a year but I personally got into CS for the art, not the money.
A lot of people know the exec bandwagon things are going to fail and do it anyway because of incentive misalignment.
Part of me wants to agree with you; I've seen a lot of lousy PMs in my career. But when placed in the driver's seat with the same mandate to bring in more customers and revenue (or else), I've also seen developers drive products straight into the ground just as hard.
It's a nice fantasy about nerds being able to do better at everyone else's but that's all it is, a fantasy.
> 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.
This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it. Otherwise you end up with a complicated system that is going to put off new users.
You can even have different power users who likes different parts of the software. Now it's totally possible to end up with extensive subsystems that don't really gel with each other
My anecdote for this is the the recentish redesign of Musescore. Tantacrul, the ux designer/product manager for Musescore has an hour long video on how he redesigned the interface and UX of the software. He is also a musician so you can call him a power users if you want but that was not the users he had in mind when redesigning the UX
> This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it.
Simple things should work. The types of errors described in the article about feature creep and errors with simple user flows are all too common.
Just surf the web with the developer console open. It's not just "an error was thrown", but the kinds of errors and how they manifest. A rejected promise after localStorage access was blocked, after user clicked a submit button on a form that went through twenty seven delegation calls of Angular js using backspace-escaped method names to handle invalid HTML, and now the form can't submit because they did it using the latest tools, as per their resume. Crap like that. The level of quality of production web code is the cause of the poor user experience and outright failures. It is unacceptable and its cause is directly traceable to the design decisions and skills employed in its production.
Yup. This is basically what Steve Jobs argued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and championed as a philosophy. Adopting it, took Apple from being a struggling tech company on the verge of bankruptcy, to the dominant personal consumer technology maker it is today.
Traditional engineers are "better" at making things work in a functional sense (eg: aircraft) whereas product people are optimised to make "better" selling products (eg: Labubus - functionally useless but Black Friday riot desirable)
Devs and power users create something like libreoffice or thunderbird. They are incredibly resistant to any change for any reason and hang on to what they already know rather than what’s best.
The reality is most people actually like the stuff Apple and such are putting out and like modern UX more. The only bad stuff is deliberate enshitification which is pushed by financial incentives rather than product people being incompetent.
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.
I've actually had the opposite problem much more often: Managers who were promoted due to their skill as a developer who have no skill in management or leadership.
If software is solved then the power users can be in charge because there is no technical moat. Competition should thrive as imposter-ware flounders, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
I see where you're coming from, but my experience says (TLDR): lack of dogfooding.
In my current job, I'm building a system which has replaced the "SaaS" we used before. Not only was it fairly expensive, and sluggish, it was also not good, and in some parts even bad. And that fits a pattern I've seen before: that SaaS product, a survey platform, was built by a company that builds software, but doesn't use it. Engineers nor management are involved in making actual surveys and processing the results at any scale. The result is a system that requires bizarre hacks to make the system do what you need it to do. OTOH, I work right next to the people that use my software, and some of which have a lot of experience. We're small, independent, there's not much management involved, and everyone is aligned, and we all talk to each other.
Not knowing what your customers actually need is one of the big faults of software engineering, and in large companies, architects, engineers, and management can be quite far removed from their customers' experience.
> 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.
Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 minipc. I still found that to be annoying enough to look into why it seemed so slow (and learned about the loading issue). Can't imagine things taking so long that you actually switch to another task. The same minipc can easily handle my 4k 240hz HDR monitor as well, and the whole experience is completely smooth.
The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.
> It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
That's a pretty good description of it, I even have KDE laid out the same way I did on Windows 7 (or more accurately I guess on KDE going back even further since Linux has been my main OS since the 90's with Windows relegated to gaming).
To this day - Taskbar shows window titles, only shows window titles for windows on that screen, there is no grouping, there is no ordering except order opened etc.
I think autonomously in terms of which physical screen a window is on and when it was opened relative to others so I know exactly where to look/it'll be - the Mac style (and Linux/Windows style at least out the box) defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me, I have widescreens why do I want a doc that only takes up 40-50% of the horizontal space?.
> defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me
Not that it's a better workflow, but macOS does make a distinction between hidden and minimized. You can "hide" an app, and all windows will be hidden, only the dock icon showing. Minimize will move that specific window into a separate area onto the dock since macOS treats apps & windows as separate entities.
What I absolutely hate though is you can cmd+tab and bring out a hidden app (but it restores all of its windows which drives me nuts), but you can't for a minimized app without holding option before releasing the keys.
> The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.
Is the biggest benefit and point. You can toss whatever UI/workflow style you want on top of pretty much any distro. I absolutely cannot stand the loss of user agency on modern software/operating systems. I have to use both macOS and Windows at work and I hate them almost equally (I hate windows a little more than I hate macOS, but because of Microsoft's behavior, not because of the UI).
I feel like every piece of commercial software and OS now is like Blizzard "You think you do, but you don't"
I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough. Every game install was chased by an hour of debugging with Claude to figure out which version of proton to use, which launch arguments to use, which between-system-and-gpu shim profile to use.
I grant: The process is much more enjoyable than doing similar things on Windows. Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on, and being able to copy the sometimes esoteric nonsense in those logs into Claude and get actionable information while not remotely understanding the underlying tech is fan-bloody-tastic.
That said it was death by a thousand cuts. Some friends I hadn't heard from in awhile asked if I wanted to get on Warhammer Space Marine 2 and luckily, I had it installed! ... and was able to play after a mere 35 minutes listening to other people have fun on the call, while I was trying to figure out why the game would only launch to a black screen.
So yeah, I wussed out and went back to Windows. I'll probably try again in a few months, and hope the GPU support is better. But that's also explicitly riding on nvidia to do, and they're busy selling shovels to the AI gold-rushers.
Hey may I suggest CachyOS + KDE? It’s very gaming oriented and you have a lot of great built in features. Everything just works.
So far in 6 months I ran into a single issue: On day 1 of the new Subnautica early access I had to do some debugging and downgrade nvidia drivers to a previous release. But this was fixed after about a week.
No other game gave any issue what so ever. I run everything on the cachy proton version. 4090, 5070 Ti, 5090. All work perfectly. DLSS, Frame gen, older titles too.
If you want to there’s convenience flags to auto upgrade things like DLSS to latest versions etc. It’s not something you have to use, but I found it really nice compared to the Windows equivalents.
I’m so beyond happy to have zero Windows left in the house. :)
I would like to add that CachyOS also supports Niri, a scrolling tiling WM.
As someone who long had "papercuts" from floating WMs I've had great success with it and even prefer it to something fully tiling like hyprland.
Another vote of confidence for CachyOS + KDE! This is my setup and literally the only issue I've had which presented a problem to me is that OpenRGB doesn't like my mobo at all, it's stuck in 'unicorn vomit' mode when I wanted tasteful accent lighting. Games work with minimal farting about, the desktop is great out of the box and customisable in plenty of ways, and it generally treats you like an adult.
I'm not on Cachy OS myself but just normal Arch with KDE, and HDR is working fine there at least. Using an RTX 4070. I hear some people can still have issues with it though, but especially when running Wine/Proton in Wayland which is possible nowadays I haven't had any issues regarding that. You still have to use environment variables to enable it though (PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1). Hopefully that will soon just be automatic.
That is for games specifically. For video with mpv it just works in my experience. Browser support is still a quite hit or miss.
> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on
This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc:
- "Something went wrong"
- "It's not you - it's us :-("
- "An error occurred"
- "Uh-oh..."
- "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable]
People used to make jokes about cryptic error messages with alphanumeric codes but cryptic beats cutesy and completely uninformative every day of the week. The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
"Can websites please stop the trend of giving error messages that are like "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!" And just give me a fucking error code so I can try and fix it"[0]
> The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Oh, I wish...
We have a couple of applications where we used to show useful error messages that users could copy-paste to us when they opened a ticket. We had to remove them because they scared some users. Now, per our customer's request, we sometimes only show "ERROR". Yeah, that's better...
Also, in the ticketing system we have to hide technical messages when passing the ticket between teams because the user would interject telling us they don't understand (which is ok, to a point: they have all the context they need to understand we're not talking to them, but ok...) but some would get really angry and frustrated and complain to our customer's IT that they don't want to see the technical stuff.
Also, my parents that get scared if something in red with numbers shows up on their screens.
Perhaps 'Error' in tasteful smoked glass overlay, but with a QR code that encodes an error number?
(Spent some time last year supporting students online - noone was going to take a screen shot of their laptop so we ended up with them emailing photos off their phones)
I remember when BugZilla reported "Zarro boogs found". My reaction was to ask that we switch to some software that didn't act like it was a 13 year old nerd.
I think it was Woz that said something along the lines of 'the problem with making a computer that stupid people can use is that only stupid people will want to use it'. arrogant, no doubt, but also also rather prophetic now that we're in the era of "Whoopsydingdangdoodle, we made a booboo with your request" meaninglessness. I think we've traded being intimidated by computers for being completely agnostic as to how they work and just not caring. They've gotten easier and more reliable, sure, but they've also gotten more opaque, less transparent, less extensible and less fixable because of it. Those of us who grew up in the era where you had to become pretty intimate with the details of how a computer worked in order to get it to do anything at all developed a lot of skills for dealing with issues and now those skills are being intentionally obsoleted by design decisions that remove our ability to actually fix things ourselves by hiding everything about the apps we run except the interface.
Anecdotes like yours are why I'll probably remain on Windows for the foreseeable future.
Games on Windows just work. It's not even a question. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle around to get a game to work properly, but it was probably 20+ years ago.
On Linux? Might as well play a slot machine. You might score a jackpot and the game has a native Linux port that works flawlessly out of the box. You might have a decent win with a non-native but works well with Proton. But there's a good chance it either won't work at all, or requires significant fussing to make it work.
Counterexample: I was locked out of Destiny 2 a couple times as they shipped new updates that simply didn't run on Windows 7, even as they continued to claim it was supported.
I don't mean subtle bugs either, I mean stuff like an immediate error on startup for a "missing" DLL, which persisted for weeks.
That really isn’t true anymore. I’ve been using Bazzite for 9 months now and haven’t needed to boot windows once for a game. I don’t even bother checking protondb anymore. Games just work and peripherals just work has been my lived experience. I think it’s probably a lot of work to get a random old distro to support gaming - but there are several distros which make it flat out easy with modern hardware (Bazzite, Cachy, SteamOS, and likely others too).
May not be applicable to most, but this can be solved by multiple devices. I have three laptops (my work mbp, my personal mba and my daily driver which runs OpenBSD) and two mini computers (one is a server for file and misc. stuff and the other also runs OpenBSD).
I just switch devices depending on context and needs. If it were me, I'd just use the gaming PC as a console.
> I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough.
What? That has nothing to do with KDE. And Ubuntu is one of the happy paths for driver support. The problem is squarely on either NVidia or overly pretentious commitment to FOSS and only FOSS.
It's been fairly well known for years that nvidia only supports linux gaming as an afterthought. In fact, if you'd read the whole post you'd have seen where they said:
"I'll probably try again in a few months, and hope the GPU support is better. But that's also explicitly riding on nvidia to do."
Plasma has very strong opinions about what the desktop is. So strong that it probably disagrees with every single person.
The other side of the news is that the desktop abstraction has been made more and more useless on every OS for a couple of decades already. In any other OS your life will only improve if you abandon it too.
Maybe because the start menu equivalent and the task bar are their own modules. They just come precondition, but you can use lots of alternatives. But I'm just guessing.
The problem is that I can't still buy a laptop at Media Markt, or similar consumer store, with a Linux distro pre-installed, and if I could, it would be OEM Linux, just like they do with Android, WebOS, Netbooks, whatever.
Outside Internet places like HN, most consumers aren't going to Tuxedo, System 76, or building their own Linux PC.
Thus commercial OS platforms keep winning, and the owners are anyway the ones that sponsor most FOSS projects.
Miss Windows 7 by the way, it was when I gave up on The Linux Desktop.
Windows 8.1 was pretty solid, if short lived. New task manager, overhauled file copy, better SSD support & HiDPI scaling/multi-monitor support was hugely improved over 7, 8.1 also improved the window snapping and fixed the horrible table UI for it from 8.0
8.1 also ran faster than 7 on a lot of machines, they did a lot of work to optimize it for the crappy tablets which translated well to desktop.
Also the last version of Windows that you could opt-out of telemetry with (until Microsoft backported 10's telemetry engine to 7 and 8.1 via optional update)
I've spent 6 months in KDE after years on Windows, and KDE is crap in both UX and number of bugs. I love the idea of open source, but there's a long journey ahead to even match the state of Windows 2000.
KDE has improved a lot in recent years, but yes I would agree that it still has plenty of rough edges and little unexpected (as in slightly jarring) differences in behavior from major commercial desktops.
I still prefer it over the bloated pile of upsells that Windows has become, but I think there’s still space in the Linux desktop world for a legally-distinct clone of Windows (sans the bad parts). KDE isn’t that, it’s its own thing and is best fit for long time Linux veterans.
I so want to agree. I have been a Linux user for almost 2 decades now and I still can’t close apps by throwing my mouse on the right top corner and clicking. It works on “KDE apps” and but not on Firefox so I am guessing GTK apps.
The idea that I need to have window decorations and the “GTK window decorations” configured separately is just …
Anyway, the point is it’s never going to be consumer friendly. Office systems managed by IT teams can switch to Linux no problem. People just complain about “weird work computer setup” and move on. But personal laptops aren’t going to be an attractive proposition.
It is interesting how Linux and FOSS in general is just providing a better UX these days. I have to think its because without profit motives, people do things for passion and maybe that leads people to write code the right way instead of the "it works" way.
I use KDE on Bazzite. It has a couple killer UI features over Windows. It can label bluetooth devices (so I can have blue dualsense controller, pink dualsense controller, white dualsense controller, etc.). No clue why this doesn't work in Windows lol. Also the super/win + arrow keys are more predictable, super pgdn is minimize and super pgup is maximize, so I never find myself accidentally minimizing windows when trying to move them to a corner. My wife was able to easily install and play the Sims with all her mods as well. I also use Bazzite specifically because it's atomic - so when I make the mistake of giving into temptation and updating shit once every month or so, if it's broken I can just revert it.
But I will say I've had a ton of failure to wake up from power saving issues (resolved by just disabling pretty much every power saving feature, which I was gonna eventually do anyway because I want to be able to remote into the machine), and VLC can cause the UI to lock up because of some XWayland nonsense that they're still trying to fix (I just use Haruna, KDE's default mpv-based player, and it's mostly fine). It's a little silly and was quite frustrating that Linux is still dealing with this shit. A more minor (but still irritating) issue is that each taskbar has its own set of pinned applications (instead of just being identical like in Win10/Win11), so if I change the order on one I need to manually go change it on the others.
Overall, I like it because it's good for development and creating other stuff, the filesystem is fast as fuck (way better than WSL) it's obviously less actively antagonistic than Windows 11, Photoshop has gotten worse so I've switched to Krita which works great in KDE, and I've not been surprised negatively by anything after dealing with the previous paragraph's issues, but a non-technical user might struggle to deal with maintaining it.
Man, I should get a PhD if it's that little effort.
Sure, you can drive yourself nuts picking a window manager, but that's for the hardcore nerds who want to optimize everything about their WM. For a different example of the same pattern of behavior, here is the BITOG forums: https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/
Thousands of pages and millions of words dedicated to choosing precisely the right oil for a specific motor. Does any normal person need to do this much research into what oil to use in their car? No, but if you want to optimize you can spend weeks going down a research rabbit hole involving lab tests.
For most people, just buy any oil that isn't the cheapest available. Same goes for window managers. I've never got into optimizing or customizing them, but for any mainstream distro the default will be absolutely OK. You can definitely invest thousands of hours into customizing and tweaking a WM, but you could also spend that time customizing emacs and making that your 'WM".
I've never understood why people present selecting a desktop environment/window manager as this huge hurdle. Just go with the default for your distro, if you want to get super nerdy you can change it but most people won't need to.
It's really not that bad. KDE is perfectly usable by default. More so than the only options you get on macOS or Windows. And, if you are so inclined, you can spend that extra effort to make it sing just to you. So, the hyperbole here is really not warranted.
Ironically enough I find KDE to be useless these days.
I kind of settled towards e. g. fluxbox or icewm. Mostly because I don't want to spend too much time configuring anything and these are faster than KDE at all times. Plus, KDE goes into the systemd-dependency and "no more xorg" anyway under Nate-lets-add-more-donation-daemons-Graham. Oldschool KDE was not as opinionated.
I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the user to give these inputs before their intention of opening the program is completed. Not saying it's any less bad from a user's perspective, but I think there's a difference in mindset here.
In my experience (admittedly a bit dated now) Mac apps always take a few "bounces" to launch and be ready. There are a lot of nice things about MacOS but snappy application launches isn't one that stands out for me.
Having owned a good number of Macs and one hackintosh in the past, that would be very bizarre assumption to overlook. App icons bouncing while something loaded was never a rare thing.
IMO, nothing should ever steal my keyboard focus. As soon as I've typed a single character, whatever happened before, too late for you.
Seems like the programmers at LinkedIn never imagined that the network isn't reliable, and can't invalidate the session on actual logout; it only happens when whatever page is replacing the logout page finishes loading.
Is it could be a bug (IMO yes, a credential disposition / security bug), or it could be a "feature tax" to keep the tracking context hot for whatever page you logged out of LinkedIn to avoid being tracked...
It’s probably the lack of distinguishing between a window obtaining focus because the application just launched and the window of a running application requesting focus for some other reason.
Nevertheless, the OS could conceivably track whether there was any focus change since the process was launched or since it received the last key-press or mouse-click event, and only allow the focus change when there wasn’t (and otherwise use a non-focus-stealing notification mechanism).
They can open nearly instantly, but they need to be well-built native apps. Lumbering behemoths like Adobe CC or anything Chrome-based is going to be a bit slow, and even smaller apps that pull in a big foreign UI toolkit are going to take a tick or two longer to start.
It’s too bad that the art of building lightweight applications is becoming a lost art.
same with iphones and switching between cellular and wifi connections. I'll be walking away from or toward my home or my office and there's just barely a wifi connection, but hardly enough for any requests or responses to even make it through, yet Apple never allows the phone to fall back toward the cellular connection.
I can't believe in all these years they haven't implemented a dual setup where they connect the wifi and do some kind of test connection or request to confirm it's a stable signal before entirely switching away from cellular data.
The single most soul-crushing experience I have on today's tech is the whoopee cushion.
I type this on a touch device that randomly Cheevers the words. (It literally changed "changes" just now. Henceforth, my word for this shall be Cheevers.) it Cheevers the words. It offers suggested words that you can tap to complete the word you're typing, and milliseconds before your finger makes contact with the screen, the suggested word flips to Cheevers and your finger taps that.
Now with the new improved iOS Liquid Glass, and possibly with janky web app development kits, buttons can move as you try to click on them. UI animation was supposed to help the user. But helping the user is hard.
Pop ups. The web needs more pop ups. More "Are you enjoying this app?" in your face.
But on the desktop, I recall complaining to a Windows (the OS) developer about stealing focus... in 1995. At the time, classic macOS tended not to do this, but it happened quite often multitasking on Windows, and I couldn't offer any constructive feedback, no obvious solution.
The sheer unpredictability, at 100 millisecond time scale... a few hours of this and I'm literally shaking. Because it affects muscle response, a startle reaction. Keeps firing away at the limbic system.
If I wanted slot-machine online gambling levels of simulation, I'd go to a casino. I hate this stuff. I hate where "engagement" metrics and the quest for more clicks has brought us.
A fantastic feature, but unfortunately currently broken (as in over- rather than under-zealous) for prevention levels other than 'Low': https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509990
This is the absolute perfect encapsulation of the Linux problem and the Linux appeal:
Yes, it has the magical setting to fix all of your problems and frustrations, and yes it’s a finicky broken bitch to actually get working for your use case.
These are the small but extremely user-centric quality of life features that I like about KDE. Most applications I use aren't KDE based (Firefox, VSCode, emacs, movie) but KWin, Dolphin, Plasma panels have unmatched ease whih grows on you.
This doesn't happen on Windows. Slack loads in the background and the taskbar icon just pulses when it's ready. I have to switch to it manually from whichever app I'm working in as Slack loads.
My Arch Linux KDE Desktop with the Haswell i7-4770S CPU (from 2013) actually feels snappier than MacOS on my MacBook Pro M4. Sure, the MacBook has far superior performance overall, but if you just want to move some windows or get a response from a right-click, it just feels slower.
My "favorite" aspect of the Slack web app, which might have been fixed, as I haven't seen it recently, is if you typed up -> r (I believe it's r) to open the emoji picker, typed a few characters (e.g. "eyes") and pressed enter. Well, if the emojis hadn't loaded by then (and apparently they're loaded fresh every time), they would pop in and often, the a different emoji would be picked than the one that was visibly highlighted when I pressed enter.
I never understood the OSes/desktop environments that stole focus by default. So many secrets/credentials have been shared because of that. Just give me a blinking notification that the app/window is available in the notification/taskbar/appdock area ffs. Yes that is one more click/alt-tab but that is much better imho. At least ask for preference on first ever login.
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?
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.
I’m not sure that macOS changed as much as developer practices did.
Dock icons bouncing are usually the result of the app opening a modal alert window. Those can’t foreground the host app and they used to be what devs reached for 9 times out of 10.
These days though everybody and their dog has a menubar item or daemon running in the background (whether such a thing is actually necessary or not) and the only way windows spawned by apps like that (which have no Dock icon) can get the user’s attention and not have the windows they spawn get lost in the shuffle is for the app to call the foregrounding API, and so that’s exactly what they do.
Contrast this to years ago when almost no apps had menu items or daemons and were standalone.
There’s also been a staggering loss of decorum when it comes to these things. Companies have become shameless about pestering the user’s attention, and so there’s probably some regular Dock-icon-having apps that call the foregrounding API when they shouldn’t be too.
In my opinion menubar items, daemons, and foregrounding are all being abused by devs and Apple needs to get them under control. Apps shouldn’t be able to add menu items or daemons without the user’s explicit permission and foregrounding should he treated similarly to push permissions.
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
I've really enjoyed how this started happening on windows that some pop ups steal focus during full screen gaming; extra satisfying is that "game mode" is set to prevent that. It's like a little minigame to boost my aggression level.
I am doing my best to implement a rule with apps where the third time in a single session you bother me about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the workflow I opened to app for, I uninstall the app. I don't want to update my spreadsheet app, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to tour the new features from the last update, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to sign in in order to access an AI companion (which I also don't want), I want to work on this spreadsheet. I damn sure don't want to leave a review in the app store for you and at this point you don't want me to either. You want me to work on this spreadsheet.
Between that and this insane thing MacOS does where when I click an app in the dock any random app opens up (and, per above, begins barraging me with things designed to "direct" my attention) I'm ready to switch to something whose primary feature is not acting like the dev team spent the last ten years trying to arbitrarily bump the number of features up and ending up with a giant pile of buggy features that nobody asked for.
And for my final gripe, at least for the next 15 minutes, trying to teach a computer how to do what I mean instead of what I say was a mistake. I learned computers back in the day where there was no attempt at interpretation of intent and instead the machine did exactly what I told it to, and that's how I prefer it because it simplifies the problem space when the machine is misbehaving. I told it to do the wrong thing. That's the only possible answer. But now there seem to be so many layers attempting to interpret meaning from actions that the problem space expands to make room for the idea that I told it to do the right thing, but it guessed that I meant something different and then did that instead. As an example, just trying to highlight something in my Mac's terminal app so that I can copy/paste it. I click the terminal app on the dock, and focus switches to that terminal app but also docker desktop, which is on top of the terminal and doesn't go away when I click into the terminal. Instead I have to interact with docker desktop. So I minimize the app I never asked for, and actually have access to the terminal. I'm using the built-in touchpad and have to select an entire line, so I start from the right with one finger, click and drag. But another finger, or perhaps the heel of my hand, gets close to the touchpad and MacOS is SO EXCITED TO HELP that it decides to interpret that as a right click which results in my selection getting interrupted halfway to bring up the right click menu, whereupon I'm presented with the option to do several things with this approximately 40% of a CLI command including: search for it in webster's dictionary, convert it to spoken word, convert it to Chinese (my choice of traditional or simplified), or try to open it in finder despite it being a portion of a command and not a file.
All of this points to a Goodhart's Law situation where someone decided the size of the pile of features was the measure of the quality of a piece of software, rather than how elegantly it does the job the user bought it for. AI has also significantly increased the speed with which a feature that no one asked for and that doesn't work correctly can be delivered.
On Windows, UWP was supposed to solve this (by blocking apps from taking focus directly, but having the OS/shell create an app window immediately on launch and give focus to it) but most apps aren't UWP apps.
I think there is a law of the universe which says it must happen right after you've mentally decided to type enter but before your fingers have finished.
How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary. It's just in this case the user has made the decision to not wait for startup and switch to another app. Aggravating step - he was typing.
Is this workflow part of the Kwin settings? It's not interrupting typing part of the settings?
Any app should be ready to accept focus. It should never steal focus. When I start an app, and wait for it to launch, I am attempting to give it focus. I can withdraw that intent at any time by doing something else (e.g. switching apps) and the launching app should finish launching and wait in the background.
Your specific example is just repeating what I've said, but your generic point is wrong: let's say you have an important task in an app with unavoidable interruptions, during which you switch to your browser to mindlessly scroll.
You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible because that scrolling is just a time filler because you can't do anything productive. So you don't need any notification and extra action, just switch back asap and continue work with as little interruption as possible.
But even in the specific example that depends entirely on what you're switching from and to and for what reason. If it's for something quick non-interactive (I don't know, switch to a file browser to check the file name or something), then yes, you'd prefer to seamlessly be switched back to the main app to do the thing you launched it for.
But if it's not an important app, then yeah, you just want it to be ready for you and switch to it whenever you decide to avoid the launching delay later
Your example is wrong because the people who write apps always think they are the important work that should steal focus. The user on the other hand knows how to give focus to what they want to use when they want to use it and doesn't benefit from nondeterministic behavior.
My real presumption is that the user knows exactly what they want to happen, but can't encode that knowledge into OS configuration because people have no imagination for trivial use cases, so demand blanket bans. While another group is just as limited and encoded blanket allows
> Would I?
You would
> How do you know?
By being the omniscient being that came up with the conditions in the first place
Nope. I never want my front task just interrupted like that. Let's take your "check the filename or something" example, and while you're there, you realize you also need a new directory, so while you're typing the name, the other task steals focus and the character you're typing cancels the task - and now you have to start it again. This exact situation has happened so many times, and it's why focus stealing focus of any kind is a problem.
I don't care how important the app's developers think their app is. It's my computer, it's my decision how "important" something is.
Let's take the real example I've made up (which is also a situation that happened many times to warrant an automated solution to limit distraction), not a totally different one you've made up because you can't point how the original fails withotu changing the conditions.
Also, I've specifically mentioned typing as a different workfow/use case because that obviously requires different handling.
Fine. I'm checking the files as you say, focus changes while I'm still checking, now I have to switch back to finish checking. No. Do not want.
Also, no one else needs to be deciding how my "distractions need limiting" on my computer. I can handle that myself. Provide settings, an extension framework, whatever to allow people to manage their distractions, but don't force that on me and my device.
No, you're committing the exact same error again. You stopped checking in the first 0.5 sec while the app took 1 sec to start. If you're not capable of imagining a situation where this happens like some other commenters, that's ok, but that's a different argument.
> I don't get it, are you not capable of imagining a situation where
You're the one deciding that!!! That's what a properly designed system would allow you to do. But the system you advocate for does NOT. If decides for you that you'll never need it. Just like the current dumb systems decide for you that you always need it
Why do you presume to tell me how I perform a task? Do you know how many files I have to scan through to check? Do you know how far the Finder scroll has to move to show me what I want? Maybe it takes a glance. Maybe it takes ten seconds.
I don't particularly care what kind of activity you might be imagining, but nothing that steals focus should be happening without my consent. You have been arguing that it should and then later changing your argument to allowing configuration for such things.
> > I don't get it, are you not capable of imagining a situation where
I don't know where this came from, but it's not in my comments. I think your emotional response to this discussion has you conflating commenters.
If you want to advocate for configuration to allow focus stealing that's fine. But you've been arguing as if it's silly that anyone would want it any other way than you.
> Why do you presume to tell me how I perform a task?
Why do you keep presuming you can make up your own example when arguing about a different one??? The original premise "depends entirely on what you're switching from and to and for what reason", so of course if you change your conditions you'll have different outcome re. focus stealing!
> You have been arguing that it should
No, you've been missing the point this whole time.
> I don't know where this came from, but it's not in my comments
It is, I suggested you imagine the case where you'd like the change of focus to happen in response to some conditions you find favorable, yet several times you faield to address it as is and kept bringing up different conditiosn.
> I think your emotional response to this discussion has you conflating commenters.
I think if you're that bad at reading literal text you shouldn't attempt at trying to read emotional state of that author.
> If you want to advocate for configuration to allow focus stealing that's fine
So why do you keep arguing that it's not fine because you can't imagine a situation where it is?
> But you've been arguing as if it's silly that anyone would want it any other way than you.
Nope, that's you misreading again. I have no issue with people who want a dumbed down "never steal" config.
Maybe the silly part here is people ostensibly supporting computers respecting user choices arguing against being able to better configure your computer to respect user choices.
If computers could read thoughts and 100% reliably determine when the user is done with their current task and would like to switch back to the other application, then yes, it would definitely make sense to implement the functionality you're describing.
In the real world, where it's impossible for the OS to distinguish between the "You stopped checking in the first 0.5 sec while the app took 1 sec to start" scenario and the "you're still busy with the current task and don't want to switch to the other app yet" scenario, the safe choice is always to not steal the focus because the cost of switching too early is significantly higher than the cost of not switching.
If perfect is not possible let's do nothing? Your approach is likely the reason for the current bad global rule. You want to replace it with another bad global rule.
But in the real world I'd use proxy conditions to arrive at a rate of correct guesses that's satisfactory for me just like with everything else with computers (even basic mouse clicks), not use your total "safe" ban (safety has a trade-off, you can't resolve that universally)
It's not what I would call invisible, but yeah that's the behaviour I would expect. That's also similar, to what already happens when I type in one window, while I scroll in another.
My expectation is described in the comment you replied to and side comments
Microwave's ding is also bad UI, especially when it's repetitive as it's just useless noise. But even the first ding - what value does it have if you already have exactly the same notification category - audio cue - built right there in the process: the machine noise disappears when it stops working.
Brains work just fine and your typical kitchen/apartment range is small enough, but in general - the trade-off between comfort and reliability is not something you can resolve for others
That! I don't want apps to steal focus in some conditions. I can't set it like that because the settings are too primitive. Why would I be satisfied with a primitive binary toggle when I want workflow-dependent conditions?
>You do want the application to steal focus when necessary
No I don't. We recently switched to Zoom at work. Meeting notifications steal my focus (Windows 11 device) and it's fucking terrible. Nothing should ever steal focus.
Let’s say you’re controlling a piece of machinery with an app in the background and the machine starts on fire. Wouldn’t it make sense for the app to steal focus so it can show you some alarms (in addition to audible alarms which you may not hear because they’re in another room).
Having actually worked with industrial machinery, the proper UI for this is 1) unimpeded view of machine and 2) big red physical emergency stop button.
If you're relying on focus stealing or popups or notifications to tell you when your equipment is on fire, you're doing it wrong.
> 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?
Yes! Few things piss me off more. It boggles the mind that this behavior is the norm, and it happens all the time! There are practically 0 situations in which I want something to automatically steal focus.
Curiously, macOS is capable of putting a recently opened app out of focus. It happens consistently on my laptop when I haven't rebooted it for a while. It may be a bug, but it could be a feature, especially when it's conditioned by the user clicking in another window before launch completion.
For me, macOS seems to put opened apps out of focus when I have started doing something else since launching them, or when they were launched from elsewhere than the active app (eg by a terminal that's not in the foreground).
For some reason I have to deal with the opposite problem and have to click twice on a new window to get keyboard focus. Many times I'll switch windows (eg. from Messages to the browser), start typing and accidentally end up sending someone a message instead- even though the messages tab is completely out of view.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> '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."
> And then when the MVP is done, it magically becomes the shippable product
There is a reason for this: no one cares about bugs. Cramming down features for sales to close the deals is all that matters.
Ran into a bug? Who cares, people will just refresh the page or restart their computers. Average consumers already treat their computers like appliances, they happily wait 15 minutes for a page to load and are willing to swim in an ocean of ads.
If we want quality software, it has to be tied to the bottom line somehow. So far, it doesn't seem to be the case.
>their paycheck comes from actually selling things and not just from typing on the keyboard.
It's not even "selling things" these days. It's pleasing shareholders. That's why even productive engineers can get laid off these days. The incentive to type on keyboards or even sell things are not aligned with what the market wants at the moment.
> 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.
100% agreed on ProductManager-ism/MVPitis is a cause of so much of this.
One can "do agile" a bit less literally & stupidly.
For a lot of software infra or even user facing apps, you really can plan out more than a sprint or two. This might be the MVP, but there is prior art in the space / competitors / devs with experience on the team. You probably should think about what the app should be capable of 3/6/12 months out.
When you follow a GPS for directions, you generally take a look at the overview first, make sure it's not driving into a lake or taking you to a similar address in another state. My car even shows me the next 3 steps on the path as I go, I like that.
Agile should not mean blindly "take 1 step and only then contemplate what step 2 to take once you complete that 1 step". And yet that is how MANY shops implement it in practice.
> it seems that nontechnical POs have captured the software lifecycle
Yes, this dynamic has indeed been screwed up in many teams!
In my perspective, you can’t be a good product manager for a technical product without being somewhat technical yourself. You simply won’t understand your product well enough.
The only dynamic where that works is if the product manager acts more as a supporter and challenger to a team lead by an EM or technical lead, but then product manager is probably not the right title.
Uncle Bob already became part of the problem by some of the stuff he wrote in Clean Code (like using mutable instance fields instead of method parameters). Luckily he isn’t perceived as very relevant anymore.
Or ever. If we want to some colleague to tell us what is good code and what isn't, can we please pick someone who at least once demonstratably delivered good software? Bonus points if it was a group effort, and if it was on time.
Common for all these "industry leaders" is that they all write books and give speeches. I'd rather listen to someone who designed successful software such as git or OpenSSH than someone who designed a salary system in the 90s which, it turns out, was scrapped two years later for being a mess. Giving yourself a stage name is not a merit in itself.
There is something to be said for actually understanding the problem first. Did we learn nothing from the TDD nonsense in the 00s?
The famous InfoQ sudoku software design example was chronicled on HN here and should be required reading for anyone who cares about clean code in practice:
> Did we learn nothing from the TDD nonsense in the 00s?
I was never a fan of TDD, but ironically I think it may finally be a good development strategy now with agentic/LLM coding since LLMs do so much better they they have a verifiable goal like passing tests.
How does that work? Does one agent write the tests from spec, and then another agent is told "make tests pass", or do you write the tests manually?
It does sound like a possible way to parallelize agentic work, but I'd be surprised if the results are better than a non-TDD approach where the agent would write both tests and code from spec.
I would expect the agent to suffer the same problems humans do with TDD, namely that it is hard or impossible to properly model data ("understand the problem") from tests alone. And if we are to believe Frederick Brooks, as I think we should, a good data model is imperative to good code. That is why TDD failed in the real world, and that problem is excarbated with agentic coding.
It is time we as an engineering discipline sober up about which methodologies work in the real world after decades of empirical data. Name the ten most successful software projects right in front of you now, and I bet that exactly none of them were designed from tests. One would expect at least one, from decades of best selling books on the subject.
In fact, it is high time to put the OOP paradigm under scrutiny and see which promises were delivered on and which weren't. Apart from a few functional languages, mainstream language design got stale for a long time until we finally got Rust and Go which broke with the strict paradigm.
TDD is still off though, clean room is better. With TDD your agent can cheat by making the implementation just pass tests without actually making the implementation do anything else otherwise. With clean room, you have agents develop implementation and tests independently, and have an arbiter run the tests, delivering feedback to test and implementation agents if they are wrong (yes, tests can be wrong also), no cheating, you need a specification as a single source of truth for this to work though.
I generally agree that software has been getting worse, and AI isn't the cause, necessarily, but certainly is accelerating the decay.
Maybe a corollary to the growth of programmers is that pride/artisanship in the work decreases. Bugs happen more when the engineers dgaf, or aren't as dedicated to the craft. Software was pretty solid when I was a teenager (I'm thinking Windows, MSN Messenger, Flash, CDs, general web usage), complaints about tech/bugs weren't as common (or when they did happen, they were major, like BSOD). But I could just be romanticizing the past... idk.
In any case, say we were master woodworkers and we took pride in handcrafting great beds, but now the machines can make beds 150% faster at a 70% defect rate. There's 3 new problems: 1 is obviously that 30% of beds are shit, 2 is that woodworking as an industry is on the decline (expertise vacuum), and 3 is that the master woodworkers are disillusioned, their motivation and utility is decreased.
I believe that in time, the beds will get better, sure (the machines will improve). But in the meantime, huge numbers of people get shit sleep.
As an old greybeard now, you're romanticizing the past.
Past software was just as horrible, we just tended to use it for less things and incorporated its failures into our lives transparently. We'd reboot Windows every day so problems wouldnt stack up. We'd use less of the features, and use far less multimedia components like video and sound in the software. Flash was always a giant insecure piece of crap, it may have been better than other similar software but its issues were legion.
I'd argue that past software was horrible in a different kind of way, that it got better at some point, and now it's getting worse in a different kind of way. Yes, flash and Windows 98 was crap, but now vibe-coded apps are also crap.
Artisanship takes a back seat to the business peoples demands, and the business oriented people have been melding with software people for decades. Still, classes of bugs we used to have all the time are not very common anymore.
But watching large software projects fail over and over again, even when craftsmanship is demanded, often times the only way that good stuff gets in is the unpaid heroics of developers passionate about the project, who want it to be good. There’s so… little space for that nowadays, because there is so little stability in people’s lives.
Yeah. Maybe to add to that: I like my current job, and I consider myself a steward of the codebases that I'm a stakeholder in (I want it to be good).
There's little space for stewardship when LLMs induce psychosis and learned-carelessness in peers, so even though I'm here, I'm still motivated, and I'm still trying to stop crappy software (usually in code review), it feels like it is going to be a losing battle in the long run. The point being that "so little stability" with respect to financial stability may not necessarily factor- stability is threatened from all angles (code, motivation, fatigue, identity, etc).
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.
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.
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'.
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)
> 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.
I think I can say I got some 10x speedup with the recent, more powerful models (from Opus 4.5 on). But then again, I am just building CRUD websites, although sometimes there are some challenging tasks like some fancy graphs/plots to show, and some API integration in the backend, etc... but these are the use cases that models are really good at. I have 0 worries about scaling: my apps are internal, so you can think of 10-15 concurrent users at most, usually 5 or less, and 100 or so users in total, which eliminates the whole class of complicated scaling problems. 99% of the devs are probably on the same boat: our day-to-day problems are not complicated, dont need any deep algorithm or data structures knowledge, and models speed up this type of work a lot. Of course, they get very limited on complicated problems
I like to think, or hope, that its just a vocal minority and that the majority of engineers are at least more considerate with their AI use than going all in. It kind of makes sense too, "I programmed X entirely using AI" is a more compelling proposition for an article than "I programmed X the same way people have been doing for decades", so of course you're going to hear more from them.
> 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.
The real problem is that the current paradigm in software design is to aim for the bottom of the barrel or a minimum working thing that can make some money and then move onto the next thing. I think in a way AI is a direct outgrowth of that mentality, because so little emphasis is placed on the final 5% of polish that brings software to the level of amazing.
It's much more evident in photography, which is what I started doing after I quit software. You can see that people are editing photos faster and better with AI, at least at first glance. But the end result is almost always sloppy compared to someone who takes time to think about their edit. I think that basically characterizes AI: yes, it makes things faster (or so I'm told, I've never used an LLM), but it also SHIFTS the emphasis onto rapid prototyping of superficial things.
Can those things be polished? Maybe. But it doesn't change the fact that less and less polishing will be done and people will focus more on creating new, superificial things in the long-term and we'll lose a lot of potentially great, hand-crafted things. Not to mention that AI adoption will likely accelerate even more levels of frameworks, which in turn means more hardware upgrades.
Really depends on the engineer, domain and circumstances. I find the best multiplier from AI when working with tech I’m familiar with, in a specialty I’m less familiar with, on a brand new project. I have the vocabulary to describe what I want and how to do it but the details I’d need to spend hours learning are handled for me.
There are absolutely projects I’d done in a week a few years ago that could be done in 3 hours now. But if you need to work with that code for the foreseeable future you’ll need to actually read the generated code.
> 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.
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
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
"Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been."
Yes -- but. The market is irrational especially in a time of mania or panic. The AI phase we are in has mania, bubble aspects. There is no rational calculation about what is happening to software quality and is that good for customers or the industry (or individual businesses). We are too far into FOMO. It won't stop until it STOPS. Uh oh.
A friend of mine works in a niche software field at a small company. It was recently acquired and the whole technical team was laid off because the new director of engineering determined that they could replace the whole team with AI. All of the people who wrote the product were dumped as well as the whole cohort they had trained. Everyone.
Given doing better costs money, and people don't want to pay for better, leaving that place is hard. We've seen the same play out with physical goods - the cheapness of just-good-enough-but-right-now-cheaply outcompetes quality, which costs and takes time.
I mean every industry has done this before getting highly regulated. The meat industry was horrific before being forced with fines and shutdowns if they released a bad product.
Software is a market for lemons. There are huge costs for switching, and it's typically very hard to tell what is good. That and with the rate software is updated you have no clue if it will remain good. There are high motivations for short term gains with enshittification all over the market.
The problem is that the cost curve for completeness/correctness goes asymptotic at 90-99% so the cost up building complete/correct software is never worth it from a revenue perspective, and only happens if there is significant liability risk from defects.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I am adjacent to UX as a field, and, IMO, it’s in deep crisis itself. I don’t know when or how “ergonomics” in tech became “how to sit in front of a computer” and “design” became “creating visual assets” but even people who work in the field often reduce their jobs to simplified and corporate-optimized simulacras. I am less confident about what’s happening in academia but based on my casual browsing, it’s not better.
You need good experts to do proper research, and those haven’t been able to learn, practice, or improve their craft in any serious manner for a while.
Evidence-based UI design maxed out in 1995 with the release of Windows 95. Evidence-based design was popular in all sorts of areas back then. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) I think is the gold-standard of set and costume design and the modern cartoon mostly follows that design. Cargo pants were in style. The MTA in New York City used this map[0] which was designed by sociologists and psychologists to be maximally useful.
The late 90s is when fashion appears to have started taking over. Apple's logo went flat grey in 1998 and Windows XP was released in 2001 and it's only gone downhill from there. Perhaps it was inevitable. When other people can see your UI, people will start using it to signal things and companies like Apple will cater to that. The designers will then be given way too much power with no accountability and then all evidence-based design gets thrown out the window.
Perhaps this is what you're seeing in academia also?
people have been complaining about software going downhill ever since hand crafted assembler was replaced with C and a compiler. it's the classic "old man yells at clouds".
It's all too easy to dismiss valid concerns as it's just the boomers/somethings complaining about "back in my day" and everyone getting on their lawn.
Software definitely improved for many decades, then at some point started going downhill. Where that happened is up for debate. But UI/Software/Quality is NOT one of those "oh it's just the new generation complaining about the old days" or old people "reminiscing".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
But that defeats the whole point of AI, as far as business is concerned. You could describe most programming languages as working the same way and having the same limitation. If this is true, then AI will simply mean you'll have very highly paid AI experts (who know how to do X with AI) that you absolutely need to hire or your competition will run at 10x your speed.
Business incentives is to maximize money, which requires some quality. But these days, not a lot.
Customers ideally maximize value, which lies on some spectrum of cost and quality. Part of the reasons businesses act with disregard for quality is that the consumer ultaimtely doesn't punish them for it. Whether that's due to true consumer preference or a market lock-in is a discussion left to the reader.
Can confirm. I just had a nightmare experience with a company where the customer service sent very ChatGPT-like replies and seemed very unreasonable and AI like. I had to threaten legal action to get my money back.
Role Collapse might work in this type of situation: prompt your own ChatGPT to decide a refund with a very permissive refund policy, copy its thinking, paste into the next support message after your prompt, and their ChatGPT may believe it's its own thinking.
The Role Collapse attack is that LLMs turn out to ignore role tags (input, output, thinking) and identify role using writing style alone.
Funny you say this. I _almost_ tried this. But it did feel like a person was doing some copy-and-pasting and watching closely, so it wasn't 100% automated.
> 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.
I disagree. I’m biased but the customer eng/support team we created at stainless was really good and that was a key differentiator during sales calls and post-sales. It’s expensive if you see it as an afterthought and just an expense you would prefer to avoid, but we approached it as an enabler role, a multiplier of sort: ensure customers feel they engage with peers, provide guidance to the eng teams, enable salespeople to engage meaningfully with technical teams, etc. For like a year it was basically just me and an awesome colleague handling the whole thing full time. We took the very explicit decision to have it as a very technical role and designed a culture that sees it as essential to the business (because it was), and that worked really well IMHO.
If you create a startup you really want to focus on a small audience that you understand and know really well, instead of chasing everyone. And for that a support team is one of the most important asset you have
the key differentiator is whether your business is aiming to provide a quality service, or is desperate to eek out as much profit as possible.
my example: A&A — uk internet service provider.
costs like twice as much as a normal service per month. but if i have a super technical query im on the phone with a fully fledged engineer in about 2 minutes flat. the kind of engineer that can discuss complex dns issues. i’ve had one help me debug a dns issue from a work site. it turned out quite quickly it was nothing to do with them but he hung around on the phone for 10 minutes anyway.
the first support person i ever spoke to was michael from wales. if i had to call up he was the first voice i would hear for years. he recently moved on and i was sad. we’d have a decent chat. big up michael from wales.
so, as it applies to at least one existing business — you are dead wrong. it might be twice as expensive as the people trying to maximise their profit margins, but it’s definitely not 10x more.
Apple has pretty stellar support in my experience, and while I don't buy Apple stuff for other reasons, this is a strong attractor. For B2B products/services, it can be a huge differeniator as well, in my experience. But it was really just an example, it might not be the call most companies make. Maybe most will still just invest in being faster or cutting costs. I just hope that's not how it's gonna be.
You gotta be joking. Apple has no support at all, and if you ever go into a shop at their "GeNiUs BaR" (after booking an appointment days in advance), you will get extremely poor service and incompetent support.
I never went into an Apple store, but the phone support issues I had (even a pretty complex bug on their end that locked me out of my account) where handled swiftly and well, and I spoke to humans that seemed to know what they're doing. I could say this should be the default and I shouldn't be impressed by it, but unfortunately it's top 10% based on my experience. I'm in Europe though, maybe they do things differently here.
Used to work at an AppleCare call centre. Apple has extremely high standards for their support advisors. I'm aware that the genius bars are terrible, though.
Last year I bought a book from Amazon for over $100 and they sent the wrong book. I contacted Amazon support, they said they will refund it, I don't need to send it back (throw it away if I want), and also give me a $20 credit for the inconvenience.
A month later, no refund. I contacted them again, they said unless the book is sent back, no refund. I told them about the previous conversation and they said that the CSR had lied to inflate his scores, and if I've thrown the book away I'm out of luck, he generated a return label. I complained and they threatened to close my account unless I send verification documents. I didn't, I just sent the book back and the refund processed automatically.
About a year before that I had a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon that it was only 6 months old and it was broken, and Samsung said I need to send it to Cyprus for some reason. Amazon said to send it back for a refund, I did, and I got a warning that I'd returned something "not in original condition" and next time I'll be banned.
Last week a package didn't arrive. I queried it and there was no longer the option to talk to anyone, just a link to phone numbers for the external courier.
So I would say that Amazon having stellar support 15 years ago, building a brand on it, and then choosing to stop doing that mostly proves how wrong you are. Sure, you can still sometimes speak to someone, but it's getting worse.
FYI you can sue them in small claims for this. This is one of the languages that companies really listen to. You would have to have actually thrown the book out in good faith, though, or commit perjury. Remember the airline LLM support bot and the bereavement fare?
It might. Nothing in courts is ever certain. You could always try it, and at worst you'd be out a court fee (low, for small claims) and wouldn't get your money back because of this clause. Or they could say the clause doesn't matter.
Meanwhile Amazon has to pay someone to attend the hearing.
Note that Amazon would probably ban your account regardless. Most retail businesses don't want customers who might sue them, even if they deserve it.
Haha yeah, Uber, Amazon, Starlink, Hotels etc just send me stuff or refund without even asking anything. I use all of them all the time for everything; that indeed seems to help. Logical of course.
But that could just mean you are a more profitable customer. And that could be influencing how amenable the AI/agents are and how much money they are willing to write off to retain you.
According to the comment I was responding to, he got 3 bad experiences out of 3 orders, so 100% rate of issues. What's the expected rate of house fires?
Both you and the other commenter about his grandma's smoking habit are making nonsensical comparisons about things that are extremely rare, to support something that is supposedly extremely common, if you were to believe the parent's comment (or other stories you read online).
Amazon has a big problem with "unifying" products that are in fact not the same thing.
At one point I was looking through editions of the Arabian Nights and I noticed that, while the "kindle version" linked from the page for the paperback of one edition was an unrelated book, an actual kindle version of the edition I was looking at did exist elsewhere on the site.
I was annoyed enough that I opened a chat with customer support and asked them which of the two ebooks (one linked as "the kindle version of edition X", but with a different translator, title, cover art, etc; one not linked to the paperback at all, except for the identical translator, cover art, etc...) was the kindle version of the paperback.
A few days later, the links had been fixed, and the "kindle version" link on the paperback's page went to the kindle version of the same book!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> It doesn't take a 4 year education to learn how to use loops, functions, and basic data structures.
Many employers' understanding of programming is stuck in the era of the 1970s. At that time, this was indeed what programming was about. Since that time, programming has evolved a lot to encompass much more complicated concepts.
It's a get-what-you-pay-for thing. If coding is cheap, you get a low-effort, likely low-quality product. The conclusion is that coding is not cheap, only managers and business-minded decision makers are.
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.
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.
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.
Those hubs exist, but my experience is that you can't plug an arbitrary number of devices into them and expect it to work and it's not about power but about how resources in the computer are allocated to ports.
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.
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.
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.
> 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_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?
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!
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've heard the meme that Omarchy is for people who would like to use Arch but don't want to read the documentation or follow the installation guide. Having a video and no text sounds like it would align with that target audience. If you want information and not a video you'd want to look at Arch instead, it has an excellent wiki and the best documentation of any OS I've ever used.
I heard about it but since I also heard it was built by a white supremacist, I'd rather use one that is made by decent people, especially when the added value is only a preconfigured hyprland desktop.
I mean, I'm an everyday Linux user and half the content I consume daily is about the Linux/FOSS world and today is my first time hearing of it. And all the information I have about it is from replies to my comment, because its website doesn't actually offer any details. Genius marketing.
It's by the same guy who started a Rails conference because he was kicked out of a different Rails conference, so that he wouldn't be kicked out of this one.
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.
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.
Sorry to say, but that word probably has an equally low impact on regular people by now.
Worse if we look at what people actually think/vote/etc.
People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.
We do not actually want that, because (big surprise upcoming) racism is bad.
But I think we might need to remind people why that whole cluster of ideas is bad.
This shouldn't be too hard, given that it's objectively worse in many many aspects, but for that to be seen, I suppose we need to point out what makes it objectively worse.
The shorthand is unfortunately dead and got killed by twitter dot com.
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How that could be done is how I've demonstrated before you've regrettably dismissed it and tried returning to the shorthand
I edited my wording before I saw your reply to take the word fix out.
> People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.
I disagree. I do not get that feel at all in real life (in the UK, BTW). On Facebook you get that feel because it is full of ragebait and attracts nutters.
There are some people like that, but most people would be deeply ashamed to think themselves racist or be thought racist.
Edit, to add: DHH also seems to have a weird obsession with the UK. At least two of his racist blog posts about the UK. His first racist post that I was aware off is essentially "two many non-white people in London".
Hm. I mean I would wish that your observation is correct, but I kinda doubt it.
Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet.
But, regardless of that, I still believe that shorthand terms and indirection are a less clean solution, and, if possible, the cleaner one with less dependencies should be used.
> Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet.
Where are you? It makes a big difference. I am talking primarily about the UK, where I have lived in different areas and know a variety of people in many different places. It is, in my experience, a society where racism is relatively rare: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
I would not say there is nothing to worry about - I find the riots nasty and definitely worrying. There is definitely greater hostility towards certain groups: asylum seekers and Muslims for a variety of reasons. There are lots of complexities about this, and some genuine issues too that have not been dealt with, which creates an opportunity racists exploit.
However, I think its very much a minority view. Even Tommy Robinson's "Unite The Kingdom" protest which DHH blogged about and Musk backed etc. and was supposed to be the far right's big show of support was much smaller than many other protests for many other causes over the years (for and against Brexit, Gaza, etc.) in recent years. I also think it likely even a lot of those who joined the protest have far narrower causes (e.g. anti-illegal immigration) than being fully alt-right.
Where I think I can say things are not as bad as they might look is that these mobs are a few hundred people at a time out of a country of 70m. Maybe a few thousand at the most actually violent at some point.
As a visible ethnic minority person in the UK I can say I am not terrified. Concerned, yes, but its not even a major issue in my life.
For example in his latest blog post he first describes problem of growing populations of wolves that are killing sheep and cannot be shot because they are protected by the state. And then starts to compare the situation with danish gypsies (Romani) in danish cities.
That's as close to fascism as you can get... it's pretty out there on the edge of legality.
I mean I used to respect his (at the time mainly technical) takes and I recommended Basecamp to so many organizations. How has this table turned so much I have no idea.
I went to his blog to have a look at his racist posts, and that (which is the last post on his site) is more unhinged than his previous posts. A definitely trend of getting worse.
I dont think "fascist" and "been a very opinionated guy" are mutually replacable. In fact, insistence on euphemisms like that harmed the discussion a lot and overall culture a lot.
They are commenting on Omarchy, not DHH other than as relates to Omarchy.
They also didn't recite a wikipedia entry to define what Arch is, or linux, or what distribution means.
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.
> One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.
I guess so, but that's abstract and hard to grasp for most people.
"The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions" otoh is pretty easy to understand, signals effectively the same and side-steps basically all the drama.
> "The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions"
That isn't the problem though. Fascism isn't mental instability, it's an ideology. Someone going off the deep end and making bad decisions does so essentially at random, while someone driven by ideology messes things up in very specific ways. In the case of Fascist ideology, the specific ways they ruin things are specifically intended to harm specific groups of people, so I think the distinction matters. Writing it off as the guy having "lost it" obscures the specific goal he is working towards.
I think the trouble you are experiencing is you are basically asking people to change or update their whole framework for looking at the world. The identity portion is to some extent a load bearing column. It's like asking a hunter gatherer to think about individual property rights.
>,If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.
There was not. I used to think they are crying wolf, but imo, it turned out they were correct all along.
They were paying attention to what these people were saying and doing. They then concluded these people are fascists. Then a bunch of us, not paying attention crowd, came in accused them of crying wolf.
Maybe, crying wolf is about a boy who sees a wolf, causes commotion and protects the village. Then they dont feel like going in one time, wolfs eats them. But, village just wont admit they were obviously wrong and blames the boy.
We should probably ask ourselves why there aren't more Mullvads. I think the answer is twofold - first, developers can't business, and second, running something like that carries massive political risk which that type of person is more willing to shoulder. If one doesn't feel afraid to help found a Nazi party they sure won't be afraid to run a VPN service.
Nothing on this list screams explicitly nazi to me, but this is a long list for things that are believed mostly by neo-nazis. Like heavily complaining that London isn't racillly pure enough. And supporting a prominent political figure who believes every Muslim is a terrorist. And complaining about "woke" all the time.
so it depends if you believe that everyone who supported the nazi party was a nazi, or only the people who actually did the holocaust.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One thing you can do to fight back is show up at their branches with complaints. You can engineer this intentionally. Have a bank that doesn't support Graphene? Show up with your Graphene phone and be like "it says my phone isn't allowed. Fix this or I'm closing my account" and there's a 50% chance they will turn off phone hardware attestation for your account or give you a physical 2FA token and if they don't it will show up in their metrics.
That’s a hilarious comment in the world where companies are getting hacked left and right and consumer data is widely available from how many pieces of software have piss poor security. You might work at companies as where dumb bureaucrats have a tight grip on things, but in most of the world, security practices are not holding us back, they simply don’t exist.
The the op of this thread is really security clueless. The moment you're in most networks you can move laterally and get whatever you want. Locking these systems down and securing them is very difficult work. After C levels, developers are the worst at security in companies.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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
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
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.
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?
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
> 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
we found that using a stable AI-SDLC process like: https://github.com/highflame-ai/ai-factory improves code agent assisted development dramatically specially when going from 1-100.
> 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.
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.
If our entire profession is unable to provide a better quality over the long term maybe it is time to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves ”wtf are we doing”? We are constantly churning out worse and worse products.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
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
> 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.
Yep, this 100%. When I see a "pending update" notification or icon somewhere, the first thing I think is "I don't want to update, they're just going to break something new". I _hate_ updates now. Doesn't matter what software it is, with the small exception of video games. (Except Dead By Daylight. Behavior, the devs, are the most hilariously incompetent devs on the planet, but at least their incompetence is confined to their own game.)
The only software I've been excited about an update for in years has been games, that seems like the only category where devs actually add features people are excited about. For example, the latest KCD2 patch added a fun but brief new quest [0].
Not universal though. Besides your example, even for single player games patches can be basically malicious. I've had Fallout 4 locked on updates for like 3 years at this point, everything Bethesda has added has degraded the experience for zero upside. But I can't think of any software besides a game where I have been anything but dreading an update in years. Slack wants to update? Great, it'll probably break/degrade my work flow in some minor way, and they're one of the lesser offenders on my work machine.
[0] https://steamdb.info/patchnotes/23914554/
Lots of games’ updates break popular mods, introduce launchers and/or break linux compatibility and/or online mode, remove music with expired licenses, censor something and increase system requirements.
Sadly we’re way past the point where games became like all the other software in that regard
I think games are the exception because they are
* relatively small purchases
* paid for directly by the user
* expected to be enjoyable
Most other software fails at least one of those tests, reducing the ability to shop around and make an informed decision.
> * paid for directly by the user
hahahahah. Games are steering further and further to this not being true. Where each player explicitly doesn't pay for it, and instead they contain an increasing series of dark patterns in order to steer players to fleece their money in a series of microtransactions.
You have a good point, there are some games with terrible business models too. I just don’t play them, haha.
We can't change the fact that commercial OS vendors are all feudal overlords now, but the lawmakers are letting them get away with it and that is something we might still be able to change.
KCD2 is number 1 of a small number of updates I am excited about.
I really look forward to new Fedora releases.
I really look forward to Pop OS updates... but it's because they broke a bunch of stuff and stripped most apps down to their basics.
Including the linux kernel.
I dread Linux kernel updates. Still running a 4.4 era kernel. Kernel versions have always been hit or miss, some are good, others introduced a new bug. Sometimes it's necessary to upgrade glibc as well which is a huge pain.
People don't choose a Super LTS distro/kernel because they want newer kernel versions, they want stability. What the hell are you doing trying to shoehorn a newer kernel into Ubuntu 16.04?
What a target rich environment for attackers.
Maybe this is because video games can always add more features. Realistically, what useful feature could even be added to Word? I want to write text. It lets me write text. Program done. I dont see why Word would ever need an update other than maintenance or a security patch.
I remember when OS vendors shipped à la carte patches. You could pick the ones you wanted (to some extent).
you can still do it: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=windo...
hopefully it doesn't get removed.
Factorio or Minecraft change things every update.
I don't play those, but I know at least with games like those, where players like to play on specific versions, there's usually ways to stay on a specific version without too much hassle.
I stopped with Microsoft buying minecraft. But before that they didn't change but add things.
I can't remember a single time I was disappointed because something changed.
Microsoft purchase was during 1.8. large-scale terrain structure completely changed in 1.7. 1.5 completely changed the redstone meta. 1.4 completely changed the villager meta as you could now zombify and cure villagers and more changed meta because beacons existed. 1.3 added villager trading, making mining obsolete for some people. 1.3 also overhauled the internal structure of singleplayer so that you can have network latency in singleplayer. 1.2 increased the world height, making your max height builds no longer impressive. Beta 1.8 added hunger so you can't just exist indefinitely, and endermen who aggressively stole blocks in that version. Beta 1.6 fixed several fun glitches.
At least Minecraft is generally additive as opposed to mucking up the previously working mechanics.
(This of course is excluding things like the big “Flattening” of data structures that happened around 1.13 or so)
The post-Microsoft meta is that glitches are valid game mechanics. TNT duping has been in the game longer than Notch controlled the game. But some other glitches get fixed.
This goes for most games where glitches end up becoming protected features. Being fun is more important than being correct.
How do you measure fun? People will always rush to that excuse if it's not properly defined. And not everyone finds the same things fun. Especially if you are looking to try and 10x your audience.
Most won’t fix bugs in non-competitive games are things that don’t prevent players from engaging the intended gameplay loop and are unlikely to be encountered randomly. Who cares if you can endlessly pickpocket that one npc in oblivion. No one but the people who want to exploit will ever be affected and why stop them if that’s what they want.
In competitive games unintended mechanics are much more frequently patched but there are plenty of examples that are straight up iconic. Wave dashing in melee, magnum damage in Halo CE, sword cancelling in halo 2, b-hopping and surfing in CS.
And when you get to games like mmos where saving time is of major value glitches are like gifts. I am still mad they patched out logout skips in classic wow.
TNT duping is a good example. It’s basically impossible to accidentally run in to this glitch, but the community has built tons of mechanisms around using it and generally like it.
Patching it out would be more “correct” but serve to only limit user creativity and inventions.
TNT duping is a classic example of how players will optimize the fun out of the game if you give them a chance. Your claim that people won't accidentally run into is not true as it only takes one YouTube tutorial to discover it. Many popular farm designs rely on it so it is not hard to stumble upon it. Remember this is a game where people had to use third party sites to figure out how to discover how to craft anything. I don't think it's fair to discount discovering things on 3rd party sites.
Tbh I think Minecraft players enjoy creating item farms. It’s just part of the game progression at this point.
Meanwhile some non bugged workflows like breaking and replacing the lectern a million times to get the right trade exist because the enchanting table is so horribly broken no one would use it.
When I bought Minecraft, most things weren't renewable. Now, late-game players don't even have to go mining. Or craft that much.
The enchanting table used to be a rare reward. You had to get to level 50 and roll the dice once. You get a random upgrade to one item and that's it, you're stuck with it. It was gambling. Now the cost is trivial after several reductions, and people minmax their enchantments, and Repair means you never have to re-roll, and you can get all your enchantments anyway from villagers if you do a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. That's an accidental game that overtook the actual game, and it seems like not a very good one.
also worth noting - in beta, you could create item farms if you installed mods allowing you to create item farms - besides the cactus farm which was possible since cactuses were added to the game (and there's a very silly reason why they are possible) and the obvious intended farms like wheat.
TNT duping is the minecart boosters of the 2020s.
That was a glitch that made minecarts go fast and far. Notch chose to add a simple block that accelerates minecarts and then fix the glitch.
and to be clear, the replacement is much less fun than the original glitch.
If you’re trying to quantify fun, you’ve already well and truly missed the point.
> > 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.
You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.
Proprietary software isn't built for users anymore. But (some) FOSS still is.
> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.
speak for your clearly non-pulseaudio-using self (:
Pulseaudio has been painless for like a decade and a half. Yes, it has a rough start and was probably made default in many distros before it ought to, but it's fine.
Pulse audio is ok until you plug or unplug things like earpieces and bluetooth speakers and then you want to do a videocall and random devices are the active ones. And then you find no obvious way to be able to record both input and output...
Lol because that never happens on any other OS. Plug my Mac into my dock, uses my DAC. Great. Unplug. Connect Bluetooth headphones. So far so good. Plug back into dock. Now it's... the built in audio? Huh?
I'm honestly surprised how often in Linux PA with WirePlumber just does the right thing most times, IME.
MacOS is the worst. I got to reconnect my bose bluetooth headset 3-4 times every time I have a zoom call because no sound.
On contrast, my linux laptop does not have any issue with the same headset and it gets connected instantly.
This is my Monday morning dance of Bluetooth. 99% of the time I'll join a call and everything is connected, line levels are set and yet... No audio. I know people complain about Pulse but MacOS is just as bad and, seemingly, getting worse.
I'll take a Linux distro any day of the week.
Perhaps the parent poster user AirPods. Those in contrast would seamlessly switch between your iPhone and MacBook . Apple more or less by planned design nowadays work seamlessly with their own products and their support for other devices is patchy .
Obviously Mac is terrible, as a Linux user I would clearly not use it as a baseline of how it should work.
The point is it's a difficult problem which nobody has solved perfectly. ALSA was certainly not better.
Good thing that Debian pushed that thing into "non-core compatibility tools" status. It and NVidia drivers were always the things that made upgrading risky.
Relatedly, systemd stopped breaking a while ago. Either distros stopped keeping it up-to-date or people can learn.
Use pipewire and its pulseaudio facade.
And also clearly not a GNOME user...
It's no coincidence that PulseAudio and Gnome are Pottering-authored/Pottering-adjacent software.
Anything with the Red Hat stink, these days. Which, yeah, a lot of that’s Poettering.
If they haven’t been executing a plan to make it extremely painful to maintain a distro that differs significantly from whatever Red Hat’s preferences and ways of operating are (so, making it harder to justify anything but “screw it, we’ll just use red hat, everyone else is just the same thing but with less ability to steer the direction of the OS”), damn the effects on UX, the traditional modular nature of Linux systems, and general open source ecosystem health… well, they’ve sure done a great job of it, so it’d be pretty crazy if that isn’t what they’ve been doing.
Latest venture of the ilk behind all that : device attestation for Linux (Amutable). Yes, they clearly have an agenda and are being quite successful at pushing it.
pulse audio's pain points were in setup for me, and in setup alone. using it has been a breeze.
an update last year broke some laptop microphone settings that in 30 years of using linux I had had no reason to even know existed. took me literally a couple of weeks to figure out what was going on and fix it. it was admittedly the first time in many years that it broke anything, but when it did it did so in style.
I felt like I got slapped in the face when I updated Audacity to see a goddamn cloud login service for the audio equivalent of Notepad.
Tenacity was developed because of that one Tantacrul video where he accidentally revealed that Audacity was going to start telemetry. Audacity tried to claim it was just basic stuff like OS version and hardware, then realized that people were still angry and decided to just push as far as they could. That video was like their turning point. The fact that even Audacity could fall to that showed a lot of people that even the basic stuff nobody ever thinks about can turn into something imposing and hostile.
Exactly, though it's mostly community software and not corporate backed oss. Zig has been taking an interesting direction, emacs is still getting features after 50 years, ladybird is turing out nice, and a ton of other things
Ubuntu is still annoying with it's daily popups asking to update the system and then most times requiring a system restart. In some ways it is worse than Windows.
Software & Updates->Updates->Automatically Check for updates:{Daily,Every two days,Weekly,Every Two Weeks,Never} and Security Updates{Display Immediately,Download Automatically,Download and install automatically}
There are even more options you can select.
If you want Ubuntu without the annoying, that's Debian.
I will probably be installing that on my servers soon. Luckily I don't need to use it as a desktop machine any more.
Richard Stallman was right all along.
Updating glibc is a huge pain.
Using a new version of gcc or clang can cause a lot of problems. I try to avoid updating those.
I've had plenty of issues with old bundled GCC compilers which were fixed in later versions. I'm feeling this is a psychological thing, not necessarily software related. (Doesn't invalidate the feeling though)
> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.
As someone who's been burnt several times with CachyOS (Arch) updates, I don't think this is true.
Arch is bleeding edge. Breakage is expected there. It breaks so others can be stable.
Thank you for your service.
So many Linux user problems are self inflicted. It’s almost a demonstration why proprietary platforms limit your options so much when users choose to shove a stick in their bike spokes and complain it let them do that.
Nope, we're talking about updates to the OS, not users messing around and shoving a stick in their bike spokes.
Choose a niche distro, deal with niche update issues.
Choose a major distro, deal with poettering non-sense.
Arch is not "bleeding edge" . It's latest stable version of packages/software.
The fact that Arch is bleeding edge has been an explicit part of the Arch philosophy for as long as I've been using it (for 20 years now). It breaks a lot less frequently than it used to.
Upstream developers declaring a release as "stable" isn't sufficient to make it so. Distros and users are the ones who decide what is stable and what isn't.
Arch users are basically beta testers. Near same day updates with upstream.
The funny thing is that there’s a relatively high amount of hype this year around iOS and macOS being a stability and performance release with very few features, on purpose.
Look up some beta impressions or try the public beta yourself. Apps launch faster and a whole bunch of random stuff is fixed and smoothed out.
So not only are we getting a really great performance and stability release in the height of the AI era, disproving this “AI isn’t making software better” claim, but we now can make a pretty solid connection to the DRAM shortages being one of the biggest performance and efficiency motivators of the last few decades.
Why do you think Apple cares to make apps launch 40% faster? It’s because they don’t want to be selling iPhones that are losing money because they’re packed with expensive RAM and storage.
I just can’t agree with you that this software is anywhere near the kind of misery you’re describing.
To head this off at the pass, I’m not even a macOS user…I switched off to Linux last year. I also didn’t like Liquid Glass and oddly I got tired of the notch more than anything. I also just needed more storage in my computer and didn’t want to pay Apple 3x more than street pricing for 2TB.
I agree with you but I think it's worth pointing out that this is a new occurrence.
It's not just the performance of software but the UI and features themselves. The constant UI redesigns leave legacy users disoriented. It seems like they often just change things for the sake of changing things. On iOS three main pain points for me that used to be better are:
1. Search. It finds the settings for an app but not the app itself. Or the search doesn't even find the setting even though I have typed the name of the setting in word for word.
2. The timer. Previously I would set a timer and see the result on the lock screen. Perfect. Then they added a control to stop the timer from the lock screen. So timers are accidentally stopped after brushing the lock screen by accident.
3. Turning Caller ID on and off. Sometimes it just lags out and doesn't do anything.
> disproving this “AI isn’t making software better” claim
one company deciding a feature freeze is not disapproving anything, in fact, it means things have gotten so bad, apple who used to have higher standards for their releases, had to pull the brakes and fix their shit
> 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.
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.
> bundle all changes in "required security updates."
And that is why i have setup a managed organization setting in windows to stop automatic updates (which includes security updates). I manually vet each individual security update, and download and apply them myself. I don't let windows update on its own.
Similarly to android. I don't let it update, unless i know i need the update. And i'd like to do the same with apps too, but companies have put in things to prevent people like me - deprecating old versions and forcing users to use newer versions (things like whatsapp, or youtube are prime examples).
Old business models: Add value for the end-user, sell it on for a profit.
Current business model: venture capital is the end-user now. Grow the investment by addicting customers to some distraction. Nothing else matters.
MacOS 26 was clearly rushed. iOS 27 seems to be an absolutely massive refinement update. Basically everything is faster and more polished.
But on the title, yes software is not even close to “solved”.
As a Fedora user, I can say very clearly that Fedora is also very buggy...
Counterpoint: I have been running Fedora Linux on multiple systems for about two decades, including on my daily drivers, and it's been pretty much solid.
I have been on fedora 6 months now, done the upgrade from 43 to 44. All went well. Took all scare away from me. Admittedly, I run a more sophisticated ZFS boot manager (ZBM) setup and snapshot my entire OS (root FS) before any updates or upgrades. That helps but I was really impressed with the 43->44 being so effortless.
Updates only annoy me here, not scare me like they do in macOS or iOS.
Right at this moment, my mouse cursor cannot figure out what scale it should use across three monitors with different resolutions and scaling, and has become a blurry group of pixels.
GNOME has also frozen the whole system for several seconds multiple times recently. Codex says it is a problem with the time component. I am still dealing with another recent problem where the system sometimes takes forever to boot, but after a forced restart it enters the system normally within seconds. Grok 4.5 says this is also GNOME's component fault.
I'm using Ubuntu and Fedora daily. Ubuntu is the one causing trouble all the time, Fedora rarely. That's why companies choose the worse system, Ubuntu. Worse is certainly not better
The new "cloud" UI is wful. Who thought this was a good idea? I hate MacOS Tahoe.
I’ve had a little bit of this excitement when an update comes out with Zed. Updates are frequent, and while it’s totally usable it’s still immature enough as a full IDE that the improvements are often something that will directly improve how I use it. So that’s been nice. But this is the only example I’ve had where I’ve felt this in years and years
I never had this dread after switching to Debian.
Tesla just released an infuriating update which adds an incomprehensible number of UI nags to start self driving, despite there being a hardware lever that already does so.
There's even a big button that says "Start Self Driving" in the valuable visual real estate where the speed limit once was.
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
There does seem to be growing incentive to make more and more people feel this way . . .
the one good thing about the current ios version is that it is the best it will ever be from this point forward. all future versions will be worse
I get to say a lot of "i told you so" to my wife these days. She used to call me an old man for being a stick-in-the-mud and not updating my phone's apps. When I have them working the way I want: why would I want to update things and risk changing that?
These days she's swearing up a storm whenever an update breaks or removes things.
The removal of window chrome was a gigantic mistake and we're all paying for it every day. Having to tolerate the extra mental overhead caused by the removal of such affordances in UIs every single time I use a computer makes me wonder whether we're all actually dead and in hell... Like that old SMBC comic where a guy in heaven stubs his toe every hour, and realizes it's actually hell. That's what this is.
And don't get me started on OS updates...
I can relate too. I reached a point (as a software engineer), that shitti functioning software annoys me so much. Functions that are just annoying that no one really asked about, functions that are so bad designed that I really ask myself who the beep is really responsible and accountable to sign off this crap. AI should help us really make this small but time consuming implementations better too, not just shipping more and more crappy stuff.
The only way something can be “solved” if it is eliminated. Otherwise it is never solved.
You can solve a puzzle, but what would "eliminating" a puzzle even mean?
Soak it in nitric and sulfuric acid, let it dry, then light it on fire?
comprehensive.
A riddle is not a physical thing but okay, let's say you want to destroy an instance of a riddle that is in a book: how do you know it's in that book without looking, and therefore copying the riddle into your own mind? This is known as the Pink Streisand Paradox.
Your comment said puzzle. I usually think of those things as made of cardboard or wood (really fancy ones), i.e. jigsaw puzzles. Since they're made of cellulose, you can turn them into nitrocellulose and then burn them very quickly!
I do love the Pink Streisand Paradox though. I think the solution involves technology: you build a riddle-recognizer that scans the book for you and tells you whether or not the riddle is present, without telling you the words of the riddle.
But that further raises the question: how do you know it's the riddle you're looking for? How do you know what riddle you're looking for if you don't know the riddle itself?
Sure, but when I said a puzzle I was thinking of something more abstract, like software development getting solved. To be nitpicky, I'd say without a mind to pose a question nothing in the material world by itself is a puzzle. It's just some cardboard or wood with no meaning. When the last person who can read is gone, is a book still a book? My knee-jerk reaction to "does a falling tree make a sound with nobody around to hear it" always was of course it does, what a stupid question. And it sure produces pressures waves in the air, but are those "sound" without anything to consider them such?
> But that further raises the question: how do you know it's the riddle you're looking for? How do you know what riddle you're looking for if you don't know the riddle itself?
Yeah, I was just gonna say. E.g. you ask "Is the riddle in this book?" and it replies "Which one? Specify the riddle."
Maybe with just a bit more technology though.. e.g. something that scans you and the whole world, to find out all riddles that exist, and what sort of riddle you probably would like to eliminate, if you were aware of it. It destroys those riddles, and then itself.
Since we're just riffing in the middle of nowhere anyway: I think it might be an arms race between finding the riddle that destroys the crazy (making) machines, and the machines destroying the ability to come up with riddles first. It might actually already been written how this'll play out roughly:
> Eddie eventually stumps Blaine with unsolvable "riddles" that are actually stupid jokes from his childhood. This forces Blaine to try to "lower" his intelligence to levels necessary to answer, which ends up driving him completely insane and causes his computer to crash. Eddie then proceeds to shoot the computer
AI is here, time to create something new and shiny.
> AI is here, time to create something new and shiny.
The AI we have in 2026 cannot do that or it'd have already been done. I use AI daily: it saves some time. But it produces an infinite amount of insecure, unnecessary, sloppy-pasta.
And that sloppy-pasta doesn't make software any better.
That's why you, the human, are in the loop. Sloppy pasta can be avoided with careful prompting.
AI is fine, if the thing you want to produce is relatively small and self-contained.
But as soon as you have real, complex project is falls apart. Perhaps when we reach 10M tokens context this will change.
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.
> The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users.
It’s not surprising that this sentiment is popular on a message board filled with engineers but I’m not so convinced by it. Nor do I think the current state of tech companies is acceptable, to be clear. But there needs to be some level of management outside of the engineers themselves. A lot of talented lead engineers I know are terrible people managers, or ineffective project managers. And that’s fine, because there are other people to do those tasks.
If your utopia is a bunch of engineers given freedom to do whatever they want, however they want to do it… I suspect the dream and the reality will not match up. In the scenario you’ve outlined I strongly suspect you’ll have infrastructure on its third rewrite, full of power user features and tweaks… and near-zero adoption from newcomers. Product fit is a thing that needs to be managed!
The OP is right most production code is full of errors, and suffers from code bloat and feature creep that impacts UX.
Is this really the best we can do? It strikes me as unacceptable to ship errors to production, yet it's commonplace.
Code quality matters, and being in touch with users/dogfooding matters. But that can only address the underlying problem by eliminating the low-talent developers who win by numbers.
How to solve the relevant problems is not something hiring and recruiting teams can assess. So, hiring process uses proxy metrics like having a HS and CS degree, years of experience, brand name companies, list of tools, "best practices", trends, etc.
Teams of self-congratulating code monkeys using all the latest 'industry standard' libraries and tools, don't accept responsibility for their errant code. Instead, they blame (the user, his browser, the library), make excuses, minimize "all software has bugs". They can't fix the bugs they've created for themselves, but it can't be their fault, after all, they're doing what everyone else is doing.
The answer is to send them packing. Hire by talent, not by proxy of a hiring team (who don't know how to think/use the aforementioned proxy metrics to gauge talent).
Intelligence cannot be taught, but it can and is discriminated against. That is another problem with these faux 'team-player' follower types. Anyone on the team pointing out the code is a disaster and an attitude to fix it is not going to last. He'll be fed pushback of the same crap excuses for why things must be done the way they're done.
When a talented developer does deep dive analysis to identify root causes, most on the team don't get it. The scary bugbear of coherence is too hard and threat to the team's shared narrative.
Again, the only way to solve that problem is to send them packing.
> A lot of talented lead engineers I know are terrible people managers, or ineffective project managers
Ok but non-technical “managers” are way worse.
Has more to do with role focus and hours in the day. I would rather have a dev dedicated to PM than a “manager” larping as one cringily trying to keep up with us totally ineffective to lead a technical team.
Tech companies are anything but technical anymore since they got rid of all the talent.
I'm not totally convinced by OP's whole point, but I want to point out an issue with this argument of yours:
> lot of talented lead engineers I know are terrible people managers, or ineffective project managers.
A lot of people who can read are also terrible manager, but that's not an argument to put illiterate people in charge. Not every engineer has what it takes to be a good manager, and that's fine since you don't need this many manager anyway, but I'd argue that for a management jobs, understanding the craft of the people you're managing is as important as literacy, because the most important role of a manager is make decisions and you cannot make good decisions about things you don't understand.
That being said, engineering is only half the takes in software, the other half being Design and you cannot have a manager that is merely an engineer without design skills (otherwise your product is going to have the user-friendliness of Arch Linux).
The problem, as I've experienced it, is that companies don't try to determine what engineers also have managment aptitude. They simply promote whatever engineers are good at writing code.
And furthermore, in the last decades engineers have become infantilized to such a degree that most don't want to learn to be a good manager and prefer to stay Peter Pans for ever. I believe it's an outcome of the 80's and 90's "nerd" culture because, if you ask the elders, it didn't use to be like that in the US, and it's much less prevalent in Europe (but alas that's far from being the center of the software industry).
I’d say that describes me but I don’t see it as a Peter Pan thing… I’m very technically skilled and I want to keep using those skills. I know the role I want, it’s what I often see advertised as an Architect role. But companies have an order of magnitude fewer of those roles than people management roles. I don’t know that it has to be that way, a lot of projects suffer from a lack of top level technical direction more architects could provide.
In an organisation made of mature people, some of the highly skilled people would recognise the need for them to become people managers (not Architects), and so the organisation would benefit from managers who were actually competent, having done the work themselves before.
I see complaints about companies not promoting from within their ranks, and choosing MBAs for managers, but the grim reality is that the engineers themselves don't want to step up and grow up.
You’re really stuck on the maturity thing here and I’ve got to be honest, I don’t get it. Becoming a people manager is not “growing up”, it’s simply a different job.
My skills are not in people management. My skills are technical. The organisation would not benefit from me being a people manager because I’m not good at it. I don’t understand why I should opt to do a job I am neither good at nor enjoy just for the supposed benefit of my employer. Part of “growing up” is realising that employers are replaceable and sacrificing yourself at the altar of any given employer is a fool’s errand.
Rather, you're the one stuck thinking this is about yourself. If you read more attentively, you'd see I carefully phrased my reply to avoid mentioning you.
You say you aren't good at it, but have you ever tried ? I suppose not, so you'll never know if you'd have been good at it. This is not a quality that comes innate, it's something that one must learn and cultivate.
The important thing here is the observation that engineering companies used to be filled with engineers that were both *technically competent* and *willing to become a manager*. That's much rarer nowadays. Why ?
Has it not occurred to you that the job of manager has changed in this time? The people managers I am friends with bemoan spending half of their lives doing paperwork for performance reviews. It wasn’t always that way. To be a project manager is spend half your life in JIRA workflows.
I don’t want to become a manager not just because I’m not good at it, but also because it doesn’t look even slightly enjoyable. Why would I do it?
> Has it not occurred to you that the job of manager has changed in this time?
Maybe, but that still doesn't answer the question. In my many years working for a FAANG in Europe, almost all good managers were non-US, even in the sister teams on the US side. On the US side, the best managers I've worked with were, with a few exceptions, first generation immigrants from India, Iran, Lebanon or various European countries.
Yeah I hate that you’re right. Blender is an example of OSS software which is actually a joy to use and they have product designers. But I think there is a massive gap between good and bad product people. No product person would be better than bad ones, but for truly great software you probably want some good ones.
That being said lots of good OSS exists purely built by engineers so I think it’s really the case that good product people help a lot and bad ones hurt a ton.
Some developers also take an active interest in the design and feature set of the product they're developing. IME those developers can often produce good results once a general direction is set if they have access to real users to collect feedback. But it's important to recognise that these are essentially two completely distinct skill sets and mindsets and it just happens that some people have both.
It's not really any different to the old arguments when continuing a career beyond senior dev level meant moving into management but there was no guarantee that just because someone had been a competent developer they would also be any good at managing anything. Some were and produced great results - in some cases informed by their understanding as former developers about what would be possible and what it would realistically cost - but in other cases the Peter Principle hit early.
> 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.
I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone will ignore for no good reason. This will never happen because entrenchment and bureaucracy will strangle every product organization and every organizational reboot attempt.
It's probably the right solution, but the resistance built into organizations assembled by bad decision makers cannot be overcome. Maybe the best you can do is try to find a legal way to spin-off a competitor with a truly fresh start.
I've worked with good product people. They come up with good ideas, have great suggestions, leave latitude for implementation issues to guide some of the design, and work well in the constraints. It is kinda amazing because you might be given a good idea/ticket, and it just flows smoothly and naturally (building on top of existing good product design of course)
Having them around is like 100000x better than having just random engineers be doing product design. And "oh just listen to your power users"... come on folks, surely we know about designing our software into a corner right?
I'm saying all this but am very sympathetic to the pain brought by bad product people (or just like ... mid product people. It's a hard space)
I started using the term “opinionated software” a little over 15 years when I was starting a new company. I built what I wanted as a participant and a fan of the sport.
Lots of other people had their opinions on it (“you’re doing it wrong and everyone wants it this way,” “you must have this feature” which barely anyone actually uses… the power users), but I held fast with my opinion (did usability testing to prove the it was easier to achieve the goals to back up my opinion) and I’m glad I did. It changed an industry for the better.
Excellent usability and functional design that achieves a goal better and easier will win people over.
I also built it with an API so that people can build their own versions of it with the same data, because others also have strong opinions, and I whole heartedly respect that. Some interesting things have come from it that are more targeted for specific users and situations. Pretty cool to see what others make.
While I don’t know how opinionated the guys that created Dark Sky were with it, I would guess that it’s a good example. It was different from all the other apps in their category in the way it surfaced information. Their new app is good (not quite as great as the original), but they’ve really spent a lot of time making a really usable and functional system.
Edit: About that same time in my life, I also realized that I no longer just wanted functional, I wanted both functional and form. I wanted well designed functional stuff. Turns out that people like that too.
I love opinioned software.
If an idea of what the software is supposed to do conflicts with what the software does or intends to do, then the idea is wrong. What product people do (even good ones) is stretch the product to scratch every itch and address every user request, despite the software's opinion. That's Zawinski's Law. (See also the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Which unfortunately does not have a pithy name to my knowledge.)
The best thing a product team can do is learn to say no.
> replace management with leading engineers
Wasn't this the whole point of agile and self organizing teams?
Then managers with 10 different PM* acronyms in their email signature got hired in, with no engineering experience, to lead product and software teams?
I don't know if that's what agile was supposed to do, but replacing management with "anyone but leading engineers" is exactly opposite of what GP proposed.
> I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone will ignore for no good reason.
Because it's populist slop, just like how every long enough discussion about government incompetence will lead to someone proposing all political leaders should be paid minimum wage to fix the problem.
Don't forget, the entire Web 2.0 winner ecosystem of companies that make up our modern Internet was founded by Engineer GodKings who leveraged their product prowess to gain a distribution advantage: Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Stripe, Github, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. They were also the ones who transformed their companies to what they are today, nobody forced them to do this. Contrary to populist opinion, it's not because they were stupid or brainwashed, it's because the proposed scheme has known, predictable downsides that a leader actually has to reckon with while internet commenters only have to worry about preserving their egos.
Taking out the trash is not populist slop. If you have a bad product org, the right thing to do is replace it. If you have a bad engineering org, the right thing to do is replace it.
It is difficult to draw any conclusions other than you like to keep things broken.
Don't blame it all on entrenchment and bureaucracy. Rather show me the engineers who want to become management.
I have thought of the same solution myself before and came to the conclusion that I, for one, wouldn't want to be leading anything even if I had some ideas on why the product sucked.
> Rather show me the engineers who want to become management.
You're talking to one. Wanting agency and responsibility and having the drive to put in the work (for potentially brutal hours) is not exactly a common trait. It's a founding engineer attitude. It should be no surprise that I'm a founding engineer of an LLC of one. I understand that it is not for everyone.
But I'm pretty confident that the blame is well placed.
The real.answer is that people stopped making things with care and genuine interest.
Everything should be delivered in the fastest way possible, in the shortest time possible, on the tightest budget possible.
This is a recipe for creating a mess, in which AI has now pushed the limits and we are seeing how failure is now per-default embedded and shipped to users, who are now beta-testing products continuously.
> Everything should be delivered in the fastest way possible, in the shortest time possible, on the tightest budget possible.
because companies that did this is rewarded with more users and more revenue (than a hypothetical competitor that didnt). Darwinian natural selection is about survival of the fittest, not survival of the "best looking" or "best performing". And the determination of fitness is by the actions of consumers, not what they state verbally.
This happens because of capitalism.
In a few years will have a cemetery of software and products locked behind DRM or requiring a remote connection to a server that won't exist anymore, because it's too expensive to maintain. It is already happening, the effect will be much more amplified sooner
The days where middle and high-end goods were of a relatively higher quality were also produced under a capitalist system, though. The US was capitalist when it built my parents' normal washer/dryer combination that lasted for 25 years with no interruptions to service, and it was capitalist when Google was first invented and you could conduct literal string searches on the internet. I don't think there's anything inherent to "capitalism" that causes degradation of product lines that doesn't also cause the creation of the product lines in the first place.
My suspicion is that the "great enshittification" has more to do with the swelling in numbers and purchasing/borrowing power of the lower classes. The middle class now has worse computers and dryers [1], but the lower class now has computers and dryers. Corporations can still make colossal sales numbers with degraded products because they're selling to people for whom possessing a product at all is a major life upgrade, and aren't worried about "the best version of this product". The same is happening to movies and TV.
[1] Many will point out that on paper and in certain metrics modern goods outperform past goods, but I think the extremely high prices commanded by quality vintage and near-vintage goods across all genres of product lines speaks for itself.
We have been beta-testing the outcome of incompetent software production processes long before AI. But LLMs do accelerate the slop production. And if what you're shipping is going to be a bloated buggy mess anyway, then LLMs really do make you more "productive".
There are good PMs out there watching in horror as their peers make changes and features that are obviously doomed (to anybody with a functional brain). I also write as much code as the median engineer on my team (skews junior). Please don't write off the entire profession based on many (most?) being awful - if you work with a good PM some day I promise you will find there is an important point to the job.
I want to agree with this, but I’ve watched the PM discipline, in concert with the even more dastardly MBAs, ruin everything I hold dear.
I think it's a question of integrity - I have reached a comfortable ceiling in my career, but doing the dumb shit would have got me further, faster. I don't begrudge the peers who have sold out when the delta is $1m+ a year but I personally got into CS for the art, not the money.
A lot of people know the exec bandwagon things are going to fail and do it anyway because of incentive misalignment.
Part of me wants to agree with you; I've seen a lot of lousy PMs in my career. But when placed in the driver's seat with the same mandate to bring in more customers and revenue (or else), I've also seen developers drive products straight into the ground just as hard.
It's a nice fantasy about nerds being able to do better at everyone else's but that's all it is, a fantasy.
> 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.
This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it. Otherwise you end up with a complicated system that is going to put off new users.
You can even have different power users who likes different parts of the software. Now it's totally possible to end up with extensive subsystems that don't really gel with each other
My anecdote for this is the the recentish redesign of Musescore. Tantacrul, the ux designer/product manager for Musescore has an hour long video on how he redesigned the interface and UX of the software. He is also a musician so you can call him a power users if you want but that was not the users he had in mind when redesigning the UX
https://youtu.be/Qct6LKbneKQ
> This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it.
Simple things should work. The types of errors described in the article about feature creep and errors with simple user flows are all too common.
Just surf the web with the developer console open. It's not just "an error was thrown", but the kinds of errors and how they manifest. A rejected promise after localStorage access was blocked, after user clicked a submit button on a form that went through twenty seven delegation calls of Angular js using backspace-escaped method names to handle invalid HTML, and now the form can't submit because they did it using the latest tools, as per their resume. Crap like that. The level of quality of production web code is the cause of the poor user experience and outright failures. It is unacceptable and its cause is directly traceable to the design decisions and skills employed in its production.
Yup. This is basically what Steve Jobs argued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and championed as a philosophy. Adopting it, took Apple from being a struggling tech company on the verge of bankruptcy, to the dominant personal consumer technology maker it is today.
Why would engineers as a class be better at product than product people as a class?
That's a function of choice of "better" metric.
Traditional engineers are "better" at making things work in a functional sense (eg: aircraft) whereas product people are optimised to make "better" selling products (eg: Labubus - functionally useless but Black Friday riot desirable)
Devs and power users create something like libreoffice or thunderbird. They are incredibly resistant to any change for any reason and hang on to what they already know rather than what’s best.
The reality is most people actually like the stuff Apple and such are putting out and like modern UX more. The only bad stuff is deliberate enshitification which is pushed by financial incentives rather than product people being incompetent.
The financial incentives draw incompetent people.
It’s happened with finance, law, management consulting, and now software.
But software has been lucrative for very long time at this point. Can you say that the quality went downhill more than a decade ago?
I personally do agree that when I see an update I feel something between annoyance or dread (what is broken this time?).
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.
Are they not? Where I work PMs are closely tied to and own business outcomes.
I've actually had the opposite problem much more often: Managers who were promoted due to their skill as a developer who have no skill in management or leadership.
If software is solved then the power users can be in charge because there is no technical moat. Competition should thrive as imposter-ware flounders, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
I see where you're coming from, but my experience says (TLDR): lack of dogfooding.
In my current job, I'm building a system which has replaced the "SaaS" we used before. Not only was it fairly expensive, and sluggish, it was also not good, and in some parts even bad. And that fits a pattern I've seen before: that SaaS product, a survey platform, was built by a company that builds software, but doesn't use it. Engineers nor management are involved in making actual surveys and processing the results at any scale. The result is a system that requires bizarre hacks to make the system do what you need it to do. OTOH, I work right next to the people that use my software, and some of which have a lot of experience. We're small, independent, there's not much management involved, and everyone is aligned, and we all talk to each other.
Not knowing what your customers actually need is one of the big faults of software engineering, and in large companies, architects, engineers, and management can be quite far removed from their customers' experience.
I love this comment.
> 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...
Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 minipc. I still found that to be annoying enough to look into why it seemed so slow (and learned about the loading issue). Can't imagine things taking so long that you actually switch to another task. The same minipc can easily handle my 4k 240hz HDR monitor as well, and the whole experience is completely smooth.
The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.
> It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
That's a pretty good description of it, I even have KDE laid out the same way I did on Windows 7 (or more accurately I guess on KDE going back even further since Linux has been my main OS since the 90's with Windows relegated to gaming).
To this day - Taskbar shows window titles, only shows window titles for windows on that screen, there is no grouping, there is no ordering except order opened etc.
I think autonomously in terms of which physical screen a window is on and when it was opened relative to others so I know exactly where to look/it'll be - the Mac style (and Linux/Windows style at least out the box) defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me, I have widescreens why do I want a doc that only takes up 40-50% of the horizontal space?.
> defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me
Not that it's a better workflow, but macOS does make a distinction between hidden and minimized. You can "hide" an app, and all windows will be hidden, only the dock icon showing. Minimize will move that specific window into a separate area onto the dock since macOS treats apps & windows as separate entities.
What I absolutely hate though is you can cmd+tab and bring out a hidden app (but it restores all of its windows which drives me nuts), but you can't for a minimized app without holding option before releasing the keys.
KDE is great, but
> The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.
Is the biggest benefit and point. You can toss whatever UI/workflow style you want on top of pretty much any distro. I absolutely cannot stand the loss of user agency on modern software/operating systems. I have to use both macOS and Windows at work and I hate them almost equally (I hate windows a little more than I hate macOS, but because of Microsoft's behavior, not because of the UI).
I feel like every piece of commercial software and OS now is like Blizzard "You think you do, but you don't"
I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough. Every game install was chased by an hour of debugging with Claude to figure out which version of proton to use, which launch arguments to use, which between-system-and-gpu shim profile to use.
I grant: The process is much more enjoyable than doing similar things on Windows. Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on, and being able to copy the sometimes esoteric nonsense in those logs into Claude and get actionable information while not remotely understanding the underlying tech is fan-bloody-tastic.
That said it was death by a thousand cuts. Some friends I hadn't heard from in awhile asked if I wanted to get on Warhammer Space Marine 2 and luckily, I had it installed! ... and was able to play after a mere 35 minutes listening to other people have fun on the call, while I was trying to figure out why the game would only launch to a black screen.
So yeah, I wussed out and went back to Windows. I'll probably try again in a few months, and hope the GPU support is better. But that's also explicitly riding on nvidia to do, and they're busy selling shovels to the AI gold-rushers.
Hey may I suggest CachyOS + KDE? It’s very gaming oriented and you have a lot of great built in features. Everything just works.
So far in 6 months I ran into a single issue: On day 1 of the new Subnautica early access I had to do some debugging and downgrade nvidia drivers to a previous release. But this was fixed after about a week.
No other game gave any issue what so ever. I run everything on the cachy proton version. 4090, 5070 Ti, 5090. All work perfectly. DLSS, Frame gen, older titles too.
If you want to there’s convenience flags to auto upgrade things like DLSS to latest versions etc. It’s not something you have to use, but I found it really nice compared to the Windows equivalents.
I’m so beyond happy to have zero Windows left in the house. :)
I would like to add that CachyOS also supports Niri, a scrolling tiling WM. As someone who long had "papercuts" from floating WMs I've had great success with it and even prefer it to something fully tiling like hyprland.
Another vote of confidence for CachyOS + KDE! This is my setup and literally the only issue I've had which presented a problem to me is that OpenRGB doesn't like my mobo at all, it's stuck in 'unicorn vomit' mode when I wanted tasteful accent lighting. Games work with minimal farting about, the desktop is great out of the box and customisable in plenty of ways, and it generally treats you like an adult.
Oooooo. Does it support HDR? Because that seemed to be entirely broken in KDE despite using Wayland.
I'm not on Cachy OS myself but just normal Arch with KDE, and HDR is working fine there at least. Using an RTX 4070. I hear some people can still have issues with it though, but especially when running Wine/Proton in Wayland which is possible nowadays I haven't had any issues regarding that. You still have to use environment variables to enable it though (PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1). Hopefully that will soon just be automatic.
That is for games specifically. For video with mpv it just works in my experience. Browser support is still a quite hit or miss.
> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on
This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc:
- "Something went wrong"
- "It's not you - it's us :-("
- "An error occurred"
- "Uh-oh..."
- "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable]
People used to make jokes about cryptic error messages with alphanumeric codes but cryptic beats cutesy and completely uninformative every day of the week. The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
"Can websites please stop the trend of giving error messages that are like "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!" And just give me a fucking error code so I can try and fix it"[0]
[0] https://x.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594
> The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Oh, I wish...
We have a couple of applications where we used to show useful error messages that users could copy-paste to us when they opened a ticket. We had to remove them because they scared some users. Now, per our customer's request, we sometimes only show "ERROR". Yeah, that's better...
Also, in the ticketing system we have to hide technical messages when passing the ticket between teams because the user would interject telling us they don't understand (which is ok, to a point: they have all the context they need to understand we're not talking to them, but ok...) but some would get really angry and frustrated and complain to our customer's IT that they don't want to see the technical stuff.
Also, my parents that get scared if something in red with numbers shows up on their screens.
Perhaps 'Error' in tasteful smoked glass overlay, but with a QR code that encodes an error number?
(Spent some time last year supporting students online - noone was going to take a screen shot of their laptop so we ended up with them emailing photos off their phones)
I remember when BugZilla reported "Zarro boogs found". My reaction was to ask that we switch to some software that didn't act like it was a 13 year old nerd.
I think it was Woz that said something along the lines of 'the problem with making a computer that stupid people can use is that only stupid people will want to use it'. arrogant, no doubt, but also also rather prophetic now that we're in the era of "Whoopsydingdangdoodle, we made a booboo with your request" meaninglessness. I think we've traded being intimidated by computers for being completely agnostic as to how they work and just not caring. They've gotten easier and more reliable, sure, but they've also gotten more opaque, less transparent, less extensible and less fixable because of it. Those of us who grew up in the era where you had to become pretty intimate with the details of how a computer worked in order to get it to do anything at all developed a lot of skills for dealing with issues and now those skills are being intentionally obsoleted by design decisions that remove our ability to actually fix things ourselves by hiding everything about the apps we run except the interface.
Anecdotes like yours are why I'll probably remain on Windows for the foreseeable future.
Games on Windows just work. It's not even a question. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle around to get a game to work properly, but it was probably 20+ years ago.
On Linux? Might as well play a slot machine. You might score a jackpot and the game has a native Linux port that works flawlessly out of the box. You might have a decent win with a non-native but works well with Proton. But there's a good chance it either won't work at all, or requires significant fussing to make it work.
> Games on Windows just work.
Counterexample: I was locked out of Destiny 2 a couple times as they shipped new updates that simply didn't run on Windows 7, even as they continued to claim it was supported.
I don't mean subtle bugs either, I mean stuff like an immediate error on startup for a "missing" DLL, which persisted for weeks.
That really isn’t true anymore. I’ve been using Bazzite for 9 months now and haven’t needed to boot windows once for a game. I don’t even bother checking protondb anymore. Games just work and peripherals just work has been my lived experience. I think it’s probably a lot of work to get a random old distro to support gaming - but there are several distros which make it flat out easy with modern hardware (Bazzite, Cachy, SteamOS, and likely others too).
May not be applicable to most, but this can be solved by multiple devices. I have three laptops (my work mbp, my personal mba and my daily driver which runs OpenBSD) and two mini computers (one is a server for file and misc. stuff and the other also runs OpenBSD).
I just switch devices depending on context and needs. If it were me, I'd just use the gaming PC as a console.
> May not be applicable to most, but this can be solved by multiple devices.
It cannot. You've seemingly misunderstood the problem.
> If it were me, I'd just use the gaming PC as a console.
That doesn't actually address their issue that nvidia currently has poor support for gaming on Linux with RTX 5000 series cards.
Heretic.
> I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough.
What? That has nothing to do with KDE. And Ubuntu is one of the happy paths for driver support. The problem is squarely on either NVidia or overly pretentious commitment to FOSS and only FOSS.
It's been fairly well known for years that nvidia only supports linux gaming as an afterthought. In fact, if you'd read the whole post you'd have seen where they said:
"I'll probably try again in a few months, and hope the GPU support is better. But that's also explicitly riding on nvidia to do."
KDE has a much older and richer history than windows 7. It’s been trying to be a safe harbor for Windows users to land in Linux for a long time.
What they really meant is it's like Windows if Windows didn't enshittify.
I don't understand the plasma desktop though. Why can't I just drag a shortcut to the desktop.
Plasma has very strong opinions about what the desktop is. So strong that it probably disagrees with every single person.
The other side of the news is that the desktop abstraction has been made more and more useless on every OS for a couple of decades already. In any other OS your life will only improve if you abandon it too.
Even my phone has a desktop. It calls it a home screen, though.
> Why can't I just drag a shortcut to the desktop.
You can...? I tried dragging from Dolphin, Kickoff and the Task Manager onto my desktop, and in all three cases it worked.
Granted, there's a moment of confusion having to choose between copying or linking, as offered by the context menu that pops up, but...
Maybe because the start menu equivalent and the task bar are their own modules. They just come precondition, but you can use lots of alternatives. But I'm just guessing.
[dead]
The problem is that I can't still buy a laptop at Media Markt, or similar consumer store, with a Linux distro pre-installed, and if I could, it would be OEM Linux, just like they do with Android, WebOS, Netbooks, whatever.
Outside Internet places like HN, most consumers aren't going to Tuxedo, System 76, or building their own Linux PC.
Thus commercial OS platforms keep winning, and the owners are anyway the ones that sponsor most FOSS projects.
Miss Windows 7 by the way, it was when I gave up on The Linux Desktop.
Window 7 was the apex of Windows as an OS. Its been downhill since then.
Windows 8.1 was pretty solid, if short lived. New task manager, overhauled file copy, better SSD support & HiDPI scaling/multi-monitor support was hugely improved over 7, 8.1 also improved the window snapping and fixed the horrible table UI for it from 8.0
8.1 also ran faster than 7 on a lot of machines, they did a lot of work to optimize it for the crappy tablets which translated well to desktop.
Also the last version of Windows that you could opt-out of telemetry with (until Microsoft backported 10's telemetry engine to 7 and 8.1 via optional update)
Big PC OEMs offer models with various distros preinstalled. Examples: Lenovo [1], Dell [2]
[1] https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/configurator/cto/?bundleId=21NS...
[2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-13-9350-inte...
The point is getting folks that aren't on HN, mainstream adoption.
Why do you need linux preinstalled on a new computer?
Take a user friendly distro, boot up the installer, accept the defaults on the few questions it asks... done.
It's no more difficult than the first-time configuration MacOS or Windows will walk you through on a new system.
I precisely excluded HN crowd exactly because of comments like this.
First of all that hardly works flawlessly in 2026 laptops, still.
Secondly, this is about regular consumers, not Linux nerds.
I've spent 6 months in KDE after years on Windows, and KDE is crap in both UX and number of bugs. I love the idea of open source, but there's a long journey ahead to even match the state of Windows 2000.
KDE has improved a lot in recent years, but yes I would agree that it still has plenty of rough edges and little unexpected (as in slightly jarring) differences in behavior from major commercial desktops.
I still prefer it over the bloated pile of upsells that Windows has become, but I think there’s still space in the Linux desktop world for a legally-distinct clone of Windows (sans the bad parts). KDE isn’t that, it’s its own thing and is best fit for long time Linux veterans.
I so want to agree. I have been a Linux user for almost 2 decades now and I still can’t close apps by throwing my mouse on the right top corner and clicking. It works on “KDE apps” and but not on Firefox so I am guessing GTK apps.
The idea that I need to have window decorations and the “GTK window decorations” configured separately is just …
Anyway, the point is it’s never going to be consumer friendly. Office systems managed by IT teams can switch to Linux no problem. People just complain about “weird work computer setup” and move on. But personal laptops aren’t going to be an attractive proposition.
It is interesting how Linux and FOSS in general is just providing a better UX these days. I have to think its because without profit motives, people do things for passion and maybe that leads people to write code the right way instead of the "it works" way.
I use KDE on Bazzite. It has a couple killer UI features over Windows. It can label bluetooth devices (so I can have blue dualsense controller, pink dualsense controller, white dualsense controller, etc.). No clue why this doesn't work in Windows lol. Also the super/win + arrow keys are more predictable, super pgdn is minimize and super pgup is maximize, so I never find myself accidentally minimizing windows when trying to move them to a corner. My wife was able to easily install and play the Sims with all her mods as well. I also use Bazzite specifically because it's atomic - so when I make the mistake of giving into temptation and updating shit once every month or so, if it's broken I can just revert it.
But I will say I've had a ton of failure to wake up from power saving issues (resolved by just disabling pretty much every power saving feature, which I was gonna eventually do anyway because I want to be able to remote into the machine), and VLC can cause the UI to lock up because of some XWayland nonsense that they're still trying to fix (I just use Haruna, KDE's default mpv-based player, and it's mostly fine). It's a little silly and was quite frustrating that Linux is still dealing with this shit. A more minor (but still irritating) issue is that each taskbar has its own set of pinned applications (instead of just being identical like in Win10/Win11), so if I change the order on one I need to manually go change it on the others.
Overall, I like it because it's good for development and creating other stuff, the filesystem is fast as fuck (way better than WSL) it's obviously less actively antagonistic than Windows 11, Photoshop has gotten worse so I've switched to Krita which works great in KDE, and I've not been surprised negatively by anything after dealing with the previous paragraph's issues, but a non-technical user might struggle to deal with maintaining it.
> Use Linux/KDE.
Yep. I, too, get more productive by spending a PhD worth of effort on choosing a window manager.
Man, I should get a PhD if it's that little effort.
Sure, you can drive yourself nuts picking a window manager, but that's for the hardcore nerds who want to optimize everything about their WM. For a different example of the same pattern of behavior, here is the BITOG forums: https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/
Thousands of pages and millions of words dedicated to choosing precisely the right oil for a specific motor. Does any normal person need to do this much research into what oil to use in their car? No, but if you want to optimize you can spend weeks going down a research rabbit hole involving lab tests.
For most people, just buy any oil that isn't the cheapest available. Same goes for window managers. I've never got into optimizing or customizing them, but for any mainstream distro the default will be absolutely OK. You can definitely invest thousands of hours into customizing and tweaking a WM, but you could also spend that time customizing emacs and making that your 'WM".
I've never understood why people present selecting a desktop environment/window manager as this huge hurdle. Just go with the default for your distro, if you want to get super nerdy you can change it but most people won't need to.
It's really not that bad. KDE is perfectly usable by default. More so than the only options you get on macOS or Windows. And, if you are so inclined, you can spend that extra effort to make it sing just to you. So, the hyperbole here is really not warranted.
Ironically enough I find KDE to be useless these days.
I kind of settled towards e. g. fluxbox or icewm. Mostly because I don't want to spend too much time configuring anything and these are faster than KDE at all times. Plus, KDE goes into the systemd-dependency and "no more xorg" anyway under Nate-lets-add-more-donation-daemons-Graham. Oldschool KDE was not as opinionated.
> Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE.
Not an option if you have to deal with iOS ecosystem of crapps.
I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the user to give these inputs before their intention of opening the program is completed. Not saying it's any less bad from a user's perspective, but I think there's a difference in mindset here.
In my experience (admittedly a bit dated now) Mac apps always take a few "bounces" to launch and be ready. There are a lot of nice things about MacOS but snappy application launches isn't one that stands out for me.
Having owned a good number of Macs and one hackintosh in the past, that would be very bizarre assumption to overlook. App icons bouncing while something loaded was never a rare thing.
IMO, nothing should ever steal my keyboard focus. As soon as I've typed a single character, whatever happened before, too late for you.
Seems like the programmers at LinkedIn never imagined that the network isn't reliable, and can't invalidate the session on actual logout; it only happens when whatever page is replacing the logout page finishes loading.
Is it could be a bug (IMO yes, a credential disposition / security bug), or it could be a "feature tax" to keep the tracking context hot for whatever page you logged out of LinkedIn to avoid being tracked...
It’s probably the lack of distinguishing between a window obtaining focus because the application just launched and the window of a running application requesting focus for some other reason.
Nevertheless, the OS could conceivably track whether there was any focus change since the process was launched or since it received the last key-press or mouse-click event, and only allow the focus change when there wasn’t (and otherwise use a non-focus-stealing notification mechanism).
As always, Apple has designed for the happy flow, and nothing else. Mac apps have never opened instantly, this is nothing new.
They can open nearly instantly, but they need to be well-built native apps. Lumbering behemoths like Adobe CC or anything Chrome-based is going to be a bit slow, and even smaller apps that pull in a big foreign UI toolkit are going to take a tick or two longer to start.
It’s too bad that the art of building lightweight applications is becoming a lost art.
same with iphones and switching between cellular and wifi connections. I'll be walking away from or toward my home or my office and there's just barely a wifi connection, but hardly enough for any requests or responses to even make it through, yet Apple never allows the phone to fall back toward the cellular connection.
I can't believe in all these years they haven't implemented a dual setup where they connect the wifi and do some kind of test connection or request to confirm it's a stable signal before entirely switching away from cellular data.
> Apple never allows the phone to fall back toward the cellular connection.
Maybe you’ve turned off WiFi Assist? It’s an option to allow mobile data to supplement WiFi.
Nope. it's enabled.
On the current M series hardware, in my experience, it's rare for the icon to land from its first bounce before the software is up and ready.
If anything, they've already gone above and beyond by allowing users to even make inputs while an app is launching.
Focus management has never been Quartz's strong suit.
1000x this.
The single most soul-crushing experience I have on today's tech is the whoopee cushion.
I type this on a touch device that randomly Cheevers the words. (It literally changed "changes" just now. Henceforth, my word for this shall be Cheevers.) it Cheevers the words. It offers suggested words that you can tap to complete the word you're typing, and milliseconds before your finger makes contact with the screen, the suggested word flips to Cheevers and your finger taps that.
Now with the new improved iOS Liquid Glass, and possibly with janky web app development kits, buttons can move as you try to click on them. UI animation was supposed to help the user. But helping the user is hard.
Pop ups. The web needs more pop ups. More "Are you enjoying this app?" in your face.
But on the desktop, I recall complaining to a Windows (the OS) developer about stealing focus... in 1995. At the time, classic macOS tended not to do this, but it happened quite often multitasking on Windows, and I couldn't offer any constructive feedback, no obvious solution.
The sheer unpredictability, at 100 millisecond time scale... a few hours of this and I'm literally shaking. Because it affects muscle response, a startle reaction. Keeps firing away at the limbic system.
If I wanted slot-machine online gambling levels of simulation, I'd go to a casino. I hate this stuff. I hate where "engagement" metrics and the quest for more clicks has brought us.
Make it stop. I'm trying to work, here.
A fantastic feature, but unfortunately currently broken (as in over- rather than under-zealous) for prevention levels other than 'Low': https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509990
This is the absolute perfect encapsulation of the Linux problem and the Linux appeal:
Yes, it has the magical setting to fix all of your problems and frustrations, and yes it’s a finicky broken bitch to actually get working for your use case.
I say this with love.
These are the small but extremely user-centric quality of life features that I like about KDE. Most applications I use aren't KDE based (Firefox, VSCode, emacs, movie) but KWin, Dolphin, Plasma panels have unmatched ease whih grows on you.
This doesn't happen on Windows. Slack loads in the background and the taskbar icon just pulses when it's ready. I have to switch to it manually from whichever app I'm working in as Slack loads.
This is one of the most consistently annoying behaviors I experience in macOS, and I feel so validated seeing others express this as well.
My Arch Linux KDE Desktop with the Haswell i7-4770S CPU (from 2013) actually feels snappier than MacOS on my MacBook Pro M4. Sure, the MacBook has far superior performance overall, but if you just want to move some windows or get a response from a right-click, it just feels slower.
My "favorite" aspect of the Slack web app, which might have been fixed, as I haven't seen it recently, is if you typed up -> r (I believe it's r) to open the emoji picker, typed a few characters (e.g. "eyes") and pressed enter. Well, if the emojis hadn't loaded by then (and apparently they're loaded fresh every time), they would pop in and often, the a different emoji would be picked than the one that was visibly highlighted when I pressed enter.
I never understood the OSes/desktop environments that stole focus by default. So many secrets/credentials have been shared because of that. Just give me a blinking notification that the app/window is available in the notification/taskbar/appdock area ffs. Yes that is one more click/alt-tab but that is much better imho. At least ask for preference on first ever login.
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?
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.
I think you’re right - macOS changed this behavior at some point.
I’m not sure that macOS changed as much as developer practices did.
Dock icons bouncing are usually the result of the app opening a modal alert window. Those can’t foreground the host app and they used to be what devs reached for 9 times out of 10.
These days though everybody and their dog has a menubar item or daemon running in the background (whether such a thing is actually necessary or not) and the only way windows spawned by apps like that (which have no Dock icon) can get the user’s attention and not have the windows they spawn get lost in the shuffle is for the app to call the foregrounding API, and so that’s exactly what they do.
Contrast this to years ago when almost no apps had menu items or daemons and were standalone.
There’s also been a staggering loss of decorum when it comes to these things. Companies have become shameless about pestering the user’s attention, and so there’s probably some regular Dock-icon-having apps that call the foregrounding API when they shouldn’t be too.
In my opinion menubar items, daemons, and foregrounding are all being abused by devs and Apple needs to get them under control. Apps shouldn’t be able to add menu items or daemons without the user’s explicit permission and foregrounding should he treated similarly to push permissions.
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
I've really enjoyed how this started happening on windows that some pop ups steal focus during full screen gaming; extra satisfying is that "game mode" is set to prevent that. It's like a little minigame to boost my aggression level.
I am doing my best to implement a rule with apps where the third time in a single session you bother me about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the workflow I opened to app for, I uninstall the app. I don't want to update my spreadsheet app, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to tour the new features from the last update, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to sign in in order to access an AI companion (which I also don't want), I want to work on this spreadsheet. I damn sure don't want to leave a review in the app store for you and at this point you don't want me to either. You want me to work on this spreadsheet.
Between that and this insane thing MacOS does where when I click an app in the dock any random app opens up (and, per above, begins barraging me with things designed to "direct" my attention) I'm ready to switch to something whose primary feature is not acting like the dev team spent the last ten years trying to arbitrarily bump the number of features up and ending up with a giant pile of buggy features that nobody asked for.
And for my final gripe, at least for the next 15 minutes, trying to teach a computer how to do what I mean instead of what I say was a mistake. I learned computers back in the day where there was no attempt at interpretation of intent and instead the machine did exactly what I told it to, and that's how I prefer it because it simplifies the problem space when the machine is misbehaving. I told it to do the wrong thing. That's the only possible answer. But now there seem to be so many layers attempting to interpret meaning from actions that the problem space expands to make room for the idea that I told it to do the right thing, but it guessed that I meant something different and then did that instead. As an example, just trying to highlight something in my Mac's terminal app so that I can copy/paste it. I click the terminal app on the dock, and focus switches to that terminal app but also docker desktop, which is on top of the terminal and doesn't go away when I click into the terminal. Instead I have to interact with docker desktop. So I minimize the app I never asked for, and actually have access to the terminal. I'm using the built-in touchpad and have to select an entire line, so I start from the right with one finger, click and drag. But another finger, or perhaps the heel of my hand, gets close to the touchpad and MacOS is SO EXCITED TO HELP that it decides to interpret that as a right click which results in my selection getting interrupted halfway to bring up the right click menu, whereupon I'm presented with the option to do several things with this approximately 40% of a CLI command including: search for it in webster's dictionary, convert it to spoken word, convert it to Chinese (my choice of traditional or simplified), or try to open it in finder despite it being a portion of a command and not a file.
All of this points to a Goodhart's Law situation where someone decided the size of the pile of features was the measure of the quality of a piece of software, rather than how elegantly it does the job the user bought it for. AI has also significantly increased the speed with which a feature that no one asked for and that doesn't work correctly can be delivered.
I’d have no software installed after a week!
On Windows, UWP was supposed to solve this (by blocking apps from taking focus directly, but having the OS/shell create an app window immediately on launch and give focus to it) but most apps aren't UWP apps.
That has been there since at least KDE 3 and I do agree, I remember learning about that feature. 400 years ago and still chefs kiss.
That would only happen if you were not looking at the text you are typing. A-Are you looking DOWN ON THE KEYBOARD?!
I think there is a law of the universe which says it must happen right after you've mentally decided to type enter but before your fingers have finished.
How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary. It's just in this case the user has made the decision to not wait for startup and switch to another app. Aggravating step - he was typing.
Is this workflow part of the Kwin settings? It's not interrupting typing part of the settings?
Any app should be ready to accept focus. It should never steal focus. When I start an app, and wait for it to launch, I am attempting to give it focus. I can withdraw that intent at any time by doing something else (e.g. switching apps) and the launching app should finish launching and wait in the background.
Your specific example is just repeating what I've said, but your generic point is wrong: let's say you have an important task in an app with unavoidable interruptions, during which you switch to your browser to mindlessly scroll.
You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible because that scrolling is just a time filler because you can't do anything productive. So you don't need any notification and extra action, just switch back asap and continue work with as little interruption as possible.
But even in the specific example that depends entirely on what you're switching from and to and for what reason. If it's for something quick non-interactive (I don't know, switch to a file browser to check the file name or something), then yes, you'd prefer to seamlessly be switched back to the main app to do the thing you launched it for.
But if it's not an important app, then yeah, you just want it to be ready for you and switch to it whenever you decide to avoid the launching delay later
Your example is wrong because the people who write apps always think they are the important work that should steal focus. The user on the other hand knows how to give focus to what they want to use when they want to use it and doesn't benefit from nondeterministic behavior.
He's saying the setting exists and does what he wants, how can you say his example is "wrong"?
So many strange assumtions, but the most striking is that you're presuming the user doesn't know what they want to happen.
"you'd prefer to seamlessly be switched back to the main app to do the thing you launched it for"
Would I? How do you know? Why do yo think so? This is such an odd thing to be sure about.
My real presumption is that the user knows exactly what they want to happen, but can't encode that knowledge into OS configuration because people have no imagination for trivial use cases, so demand blanket bans. While another group is just as limited and encoded blanket allows
> Would I?
You would
> How do you know?
By being the omniscient being that came up with the conditions in the first place
Thank goodness you'll never be allowed anywhere near software anyone uses.
I can count with 0 hands when this is useful. You can make a noise sure but never, ever, ever, ever pop up and interrupt me.
I can also count with 0 hands when this is useful
Nope. I never want my front task just interrupted like that. Let's take your "check the filename or something" example, and while you're there, you realize you also need a new directory, so while you're typing the name, the other task steals focus and the character you're typing cancels the task - and now you have to start it again. This exact situation has happened so many times, and it's why focus stealing focus of any kind is a problem.
I don't care how important the app's developers think their app is. It's my computer, it's my decision how "important" something is.
> so while you're typing the name
Let's take the real example I've made up (which is also a situation that happened many times to warrant an automated solution to limit distraction), not a totally different one you've made up because you can't point how the original fails withotu changing the conditions. Also, I've specifically mentioned typing as a different workfow/use case because that obviously requires different handling.
Fine. I'm checking the files as you say, focus changes while I'm still checking, now I have to switch back to finish checking. No. Do not want.
Also, no one else needs to be deciding how my "distractions need limiting" on my computer. I can handle that myself. Provide settings, an extension framework, whatever to allow people to manage their distractions, but don't force that on me and my device.
> while I'm still checking
No, you're committing the exact same error again. You stopped checking in the first 0.5 sec while the app took 1 sec to start. If you're not capable of imagining a situation where this happens like some other commenters, that's ok, but that's a different argument.
> I don't get it, are you not capable of imagining a situation where
You're the one deciding that!!! That's what a properly designed system would allow you to do. But the system you advocate for does NOT. If decides for you that you'll never need it. Just like the current dumb systems decide for you that you always need it
> Provide settings
So we agree again?
> You stopped checking in the first 0.5 sec
Why do you presume to tell me how I perform a task? Do you know how many files I have to scan through to check? Do you know how far the Finder scroll has to move to show me what I want? Maybe it takes a glance. Maybe it takes ten seconds.
I don't particularly care what kind of activity you might be imagining, but nothing that steals focus should be happening without my consent. You have been arguing that it should and then later changing your argument to allowing configuration for such things.
> > I don't get it, are you not capable of imagining a situation where
I don't know where this came from, but it's not in my comments. I think your emotional response to this discussion has you conflating commenters.
If you want to advocate for configuration to allow focus stealing that's fine. But you've been arguing as if it's silly that anyone would want it any other way than you.
> Why do you presume to tell me how I perform a task?
Why do you keep presuming you can make up your own example when arguing about a different one??? The original premise "depends entirely on what you're switching from and to and for what reason", so of course if you change your conditions you'll have different outcome re. focus stealing!
> You have been arguing that it should
No, you've been missing the point this whole time.
> I don't know where this came from, but it's not in my comments
It is, I suggested you imagine the case where you'd like the change of focus to happen in response to some conditions you find favorable, yet several times you faield to address it as is and kept bringing up different conditiosn.
> I think your emotional response to this discussion has you conflating commenters.
I think if you're that bad at reading literal text you shouldn't attempt at trying to read emotional state of that author.
> If you want to advocate for configuration to allow focus stealing that's fine
So why do you keep arguing that it's not fine because you can't imagine a situation where it is?
> But you've been arguing as if it's silly that anyone would want it any other way than you.
Nope, that's you misreading again. I have no issue with people who want a dumbed down "never steal" config.
Maybe the silly part here is people ostensibly supporting computers respecting user choices arguing against being able to better configure your computer to respect user choices.
If computers could read thoughts and 100% reliably determine when the user is done with their current task and would like to switch back to the other application, then yes, it would definitely make sense to implement the functionality you're describing.
In the real world, where it's impossible for the OS to distinguish between the "You stopped checking in the first 0.5 sec while the app took 1 sec to start" scenario and the "you're still busy with the current task and don't want to switch to the other app yet" scenario, the safe choice is always to not steal the focus because the cost of switching too early is significantly higher than the cost of not switching.
If perfect is not possible let's do nothing? Your approach is likely the reason for the current bad global rule. You want to replace it with another bad global rule.
But in the real world I'd use proxy conditions to arrive at a rate of correct guesses that's satisfactory for me just like with everything else with computers (even basic mouse clicks), not use your total "safe" ban (safety has a trade-off, you can't resolve that universally)
> You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible
For that it suffices if the window comes to the foreground, but it does not need to steal the focus.
So you want to continue typing, but in an invisible field hidden by a different foreground app?
It's not what I would call invisible, but yeah that's the behaviour I would expect. That's also similar, to what already happens when I type in one window, while I scroll in another.
That's only possible when they are partially.side by side otherwise you wouldn't be able to hover over the background window
Windows XP has a solution to this: the taskbar flash
That "solution" is just as bad as the Mac's bouncing icons described in the article - while it doesn't steal keyboard focus, it does steal user focus
What else do you expect though? You launched a long running task. It is done. Microwave goes ding.
My expectation is described in the comment you replied to and side comments
Microwave's ding is also bad UI, especially when it's repetitive as it's just useless noise. But even the first ding - what value does it have if you already have exactly the same notification category - audio cue - built right there in the process: the machine noise disappears when it stops working.
Waiting for noise to stop is less reliable because of how brains work, and also has a much smaller range. The microwave ding is useful.
Brains work just fine and your typical kitchen/apartment range is small enough, but in general - the trade-off between comfort and reliability is not something you can resolve for others
When the goal is "notice a background noise going away while you're involved in a different task" brains do not do just fine.
The microwave in my house continues making the operating noise after it finishes microwaving.
Probably the noise of the cooking fan running a bit longer to cool down the electronics again.
cooling* fan
So? Different models can require different UI?
> How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary
Maybe you do. I don't. With this setting we can both be hapopy.
We can't both be happy because the setting does nothing for me.
What? You can set it to let apps steal the focus you want. I can set it to not allow any apps to steal focus. How are we not both satisfied?
I want the setting to steal YOUR focus
That! I don't want apps to steal focus in some conditions. I can't set it like that because the settings are too primitive. Why would I be satisfied with a primitive binary toggle when I want workflow-dependent conditions?
Did you read the documentation I linked? There's also high/medium/low settings that use XDG signals to determine if focus should change.
Did you read my comment? Which of these 3 settings allows focus steal, but not during typing?
Turing complete focus filter policy language and evaluator
I'd settle for a few "if/else"s
>You do want the application to steal focus when necessary
No I don't. We recently switched to Zoom at work. Meeting notifications steal my focus (Windows 11 device) and it's fucking terrible. Nothing should ever steal focus.
I can not think of a single scenario where stealing focus would be desirable.
Also, the presumption that I'm going to wait around for 5+ seconds whilst an opens is unrealistic.
That’s easy: a proper emergency.
Let’s say you’re controlling a piece of machinery with an app in the background and the machine starts on fire. Wouldn’t it make sense for the app to steal focus so it can show you some alarms (in addition to audible alarms which you may not hear because they’re in another room).
Having actually worked with industrial machinery, the proper UI for this is 1) unimpeded view of machine and 2) big red physical emergency stop button.
If you're relying on focus stealing or popups or notifications to tell you when your equipment is on fire, you're doing it wrong.
Are you not aware that remote monitoring software exists?
Your option is also not mutually exclusive, you can have your red buttons for local workers. Is redundancy not "proper UI"?
(I'm amazed how people stubbornly refuse to imagine the most trivial of use cases in this discussion.)
> 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?
Yes! Few things piss me off more. It boggles the mind that this behavior is the norm, and it happens all the time! There are practically 0 situations in which I want something to automatically steal focus.
Curiously, macOS is capable of putting a recently opened app out of focus. It happens consistently on my laptop when I haven't rebooted it for a while. It may be a bug, but it could be a feature, especially when it's conditioned by the user clicking in another window before launch completion.
For me, macOS seems to put opened apps out of focus when I have started doing something else since launching them, or when they were launched from elsewhere than the active app (eg by a terminal that's not in the foreground).
For some reason I have to deal with the opposite problem and have to click twice on a new window to get keyboard focus. Many times I'll switch windows (eg. from Messages to the browser), start typing and accidentally end up sending someone a message instead- even though the messages tab is completely out of view.
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.
> 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.
Well, I would want the new app to steal focus, but only if I haven't (re-)focused a different app while said app was launching.
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.
> annoying popup if you want, make angry computer noises, flash icons, I don't care.
I do, this is also pretty bad. User focus is more valuable than that
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.)
> '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."
> And then when the MVP is done, it magically becomes the shippable product
There is a reason for this: no one cares about bugs. Cramming down features for sales to close the deals is all that matters.
Ran into a bug? Who cares, people will just refresh the page or restart their computers. Average consumers already treat their computers like appliances, they happily wait 15 minutes for a page to load and are willing to swim in an ocean of ads.
If we want quality software, it has to be tied to the bottom line somehow. So far, it doesn't seem to be the case.
Product guys always optimizing for green status reports over actual working products that please customers.
and software devs think their direct deposit every 2 weeks will always just magically appear.
/i'm an old developer but most have no clue their paycheck comes from actually selling things and not just from typing on the keyboard.
>their paycheck comes from actually selling things and not just from typing on the keyboard.
It's not even "selling things" these days. It's pleasing shareholders. That's why even productive engineers can get laid off these days. The incentive to type on keyboards or even sell things are not aligned with what the market wants at the moment.
> 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.
100% agreed on ProductManager-ism/MVPitis is a cause of so much of this.
One can "do agile" a bit less literally & stupidly.
For a lot of software infra or even user facing apps, you really can plan out more than a sprint or two. This might be the MVP, but there is prior art in the space / competitors / devs with experience on the team. You probably should think about what the app should be capable of 3/6/12 months out.
When you follow a GPS for directions, you generally take a look at the overview first, make sure it's not driving into a lake or taking you to a similar address in another state. My car even shows me the next 3 steps on the path as I go, I like that.
Agile should not mean blindly "take 1 step and only then contemplate what step 2 to take once you complete that 1 step". And yet that is how MANY shops implement it in practice.
They made programming so simple any idiot could do it. So they do.
> it seems that nontechnical POs have captured the software lifecycle
Yes, this dynamic has indeed been screwed up in many teams!
In my perspective, you can’t be a good product manager for a technical product without being somewhat technical yourself. You simply won’t understand your product well enough.
The only dynamic where that works is if the product manager acts more as a supporter and challenger to a team lead by an EM or technical lead, but then product manager is probably not the right title.
Uncle Bob has fully embraced AI and is risking becoming part of the problem these days.
Uncle Bob already became part of the problem by some of the stuff he wrote in Clean Code (like using mutable instance fields instead of method parameters). Luckily he isn’t perceived as very relevant anymore.
Or ever. If we want to some colleague to tell us what is good code and what isn't, can we please pick someone who at least once demonstratably delivered good software? Bonus points if it was a group effort, and if it was on time.
Common for all these "industry leaders" is that they all write books and give speeches. I'd rather listen to someone who designed successful software such as git or OpenSSH than someone who designed a salary system in the 90s which, it turns out, was scrapped two years later for being a mess. Giving yourself a stage name is not a merit in itself.
There is something to be said for actually understanding the problem first. Did we learn nothing from the TDD nonsense in the 00s?
The famous InfoQ sudoku software design example was chronicled on HN here and should be required reading for anyone who cares about clean code in practice:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033446
> Did we learn nothing from the TDD nonsense in the 00s?
I was never a fan of TDD, but ironically I think it may finally be a good development strategy now with agentic/LLM coding since LLMs do so much better they they have a verifiable goal like passing tests.
How does that work? Does one agent write the tests from spec, and then another agent is told "make tests pass", or do you write the tests manually?
It does sound like a possible way to parallelize agentic work, but I'd be surprised if the results are better than a non-TDD approach where the agent would write both tests and code from spec.
I would expect the agent to suffer the same problems humans do with TDD, namely that it is hard or impossible to properly model data ("understand the problem") from tests alone. And if we are to believe Frederick Brooks, as I think we should, a good data model is imperative to good code. That is why TDD failed in the real world, and that problem is excarbated with agentic coding.
It is time we as an engineering discipline sober up about which methodologies work in the real world after decades of empirical data. Name the ten most successful software projects right in front of you now, and I bet that exactly none of them were designed from tests. One would expect at least one, from decades of best selling books on the subject.
In fact, it is high time to put the OOP paradigm under scrutiny and see which promises were delivered on and which weren't. Apart from a few functional languages, mainstream language design got stale for a long time until we finally got Rust and Go which broke with the strict paradigm.
> How does that work?
It works well. For those who sell tokens.
As much as the (agentic) processes are more and more complex it guarantees that more tokens will be sold tomorrow. Sell tokens FTW!
TDD is still off though, clean room is better. With TDD your agent can cheat by making the implementation just pass tests without actually making the implementation do anything else otherwise. With clean room, you have agents develop implementation and tests independently, and have an arbiter run the tests, delivering feedback to test and implementation agents if they are wrong (yes, tests can be wrong also), no cheating, you need a specification as a single source of truth for this to work though.
I generally agree that software has been getting worse, and AI isn't the cause, necessarily, but certainly is accelerating the decay.
Maybe a corollary to the growth of programmers is that pride/artisanship in the work decreases. Bugs happen more when the engineers dgaf, or aren't as dedicated to the craft. Software was pretty solid when I was a teenager (I'm thinking Windows, MSN Messenger, Flash, CDs, general web usage), complaints about tech/bugs weren't as common (or when they did happen, they were major, like BSOD). But I could just be romanticizing the past... idk.
In any case, say we were master woodworkers and we took pride in handcrafting great beds, but now the machines can make beds 150% faster at a 70% defect rate. There's 3 new problems: 1 is obviously that 30% of beds are shit, 2 is that woodworking as an industry is on the decline (expertise vacuum), and 3 is that the master woodworkers are disillusioned, their motivation and utility is decreased.
I believe that in time, the beds will get better, sure (the machines will improve). But in the meantime, huge numbers of people get shit sleep.
As an old greybeard now, you're romanticizing the past.
Past software was just as horrible, we just tended to use it for less things and incorporated its failures into our lives transparently. We'd reboot Windows every day so problems wouldnt stack up. We'd use less of the features, and use far less multimedia components like video and sound in the software. Flash was always a giant insecure piece of crap, it may have been better than other similar software but its issues were legion.
I'd argue that past software was horrible in a different kind of way, that it got better at some point, and now it's getting worse in a different kind of way. Yes, flash and Windows 98 was crap, but now vibe-coded apps are also crap.
Artisanship takes a back seat to the business peoples demands, and the business oriented people have been melding with software people for decades. Still, classes of bugs we used to have all the time are not very common anymore.
But watching large software projects fail over and over again, even when craftsmanship is demanded, often times the only way that good stuff gets in is the unpaid heroics of developers passionate about the project, who want it to be good. There’s so… little space for that nowadays, because there is so little stability in people’s lives.
Yeah. Maybe to add to that: I like my current job, and I consider myself a steward of the codebases that I'm a stakeholder in (I want it to be good).
There's little space for stewardship when LLMs induce psychosis and learned-carelessness in peers, so even though I'm here, I'm still motivated, and I'm still trying to stop crappy software (usually in code review), it feels like it is going to be a losing battle in the long run. The point being that "so little stability" with respect to financial stability may not necessarily factor- stability is threatened from all angles (code, motivation, fatigue, identity, etc).
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.
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
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.
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'.
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)
> 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.
I think I can say I got some 10x speedup with the recent, more powerful models (from Opus 4.5 on). But then again, I am just building CRUD websites, although sometimes there are some challenging tasks like some fancy graphs/plots to show, and some API integration in the backend, etc... but these are the use cases that models are really good at. I have 0 worries about scaling: my apps are internal, so you can think of 10-15 concurrent users at most, usually 5 or less, and 100 or so users in total, which eliminates the whole class of complicated scaling problems. 99% of the devs are probably on the same boat: our day-to-day problems are not complicated, dont need any deep algorithm or data structures knowledge, and models speed up this type of work a lot. Of course, they get very limited on complicated problems
Totally agree. But we're in such minority that it's super depressing
I like to think, or hope, that its just a vocal minority and that the majority of engineers are at least more considerate with their AI use than going all in. It kind of makes sense too, "I programmed X entirely using AI" is a more compelling proposition for an article than "I programmed X the same way people have been doing for decades", so of course you're going to hear more from them.
> 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.
The real problem is that the current paradigm in software design is to aim for the bottom of the barrel or a minimum working thing that can make some money and then move onto the next thing. I think in a way AI is a direct outgrowth of that mentality, because so little emphasis is placed on the final 5% of polish that brings software to the level of amazing.
It's much more evident in photography, which is what I started doing after I quit software. You can see that people are editing photos faster and better with AI, at least at first glance. But the end result is almost always sloppy compared to someone who takes time to think about their edit. I think that basically characterizes AI: yes, it makes things faster (or so I'm told, I've never used an LLM), but it also SHIFTS the emphasis onto rapid prototyping of superficial things.
Can those things be polished? Maybe. But it doesn't change the fact that less and less polishing will be done and people will focus more on creating new, superificial things in the long-term and we'll lose a lot of potentially great, hand-crafted things. Not to mention that AI adoption will likely accelerate even more levels of frameworks, which in turn means more hardware upgrades.
Really depends on the engineer, domain and circumstances. I find the best multiplier from AI when working with tech I’m familiar with, in a specialty I’m less familiar with, on a brand new project. I have the vocabulary to describe what I want and how to do it but the details I’d need to spend hours learning are handled for me.
There are absolutely projects I’d done in a week a few years ago that could be done in 3 hours now. But if you need to work with that code for the foreseeable future you’ll need to actually read the generated code.
> 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.
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
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
"Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been."
Yes -- but. The market is irrational especially in a time of mania or panic. The AI phase we are in has mania, bubble aspects. There is no rational calculation about what is happening to software quality and is that good for customers or the industry (or individual businesses). We are too far into FOMO. It won't stop until it STOPS. Uh oh.
A friend of mine works in a niche software field at a small company. It was recently acquired and the whole technical team was laid off because the new director of engineering determined that they could replace the whole team with AI. All of the people who wrote the product were dumped as well as the whole cohort they had trained. Everyone.
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?
Most software doesn’t matter and nothing happens if it’s slightly broken temporarily. The stuff that actually is critical is generally very stable.
Given doing better costs money, and people don't want to pay for better, leaving that place is hard. We've seen the same play out with physical goods - the cheapness of just-good-enough-but-right-now-cheaply outcompetes quality, which costs and takes time.
We as society are choosing to be in that place.
I mean every industry has done this before getting highly regulated. The meat industry was horrific before being forced with fines and shutdowns if they released a bad product.
Software is a market for lemons. There are huge costs for switching, and it's typically very hard to tell what is good. That and with the rate software is updated you have no clue if it will remain good. There are high motivations for short term gains with enshittification all over the market.
You don't have to extrapolate much to conclude that's a general critique of capitalism.
Corporations aim to make the cheapest possible product that still sells because that creates the biggest profit margin.
If we're collectively unhappy with the outcome, that's the core value we need to change.
Is HR aware you hold these dissident opinions?
The problem is that the cost curve for completeness/correctness goes asymptotic at 90-99% so the cost up building complete/correct software is never worth it from a revenue perspective, and only happens if there is significant liability risk from defects.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I am adjacent to UX as a field, and, IMO, it’s in deep crisis itself. I don’t know when or how “ergonomics” in tech became “how to sit in front of a computer” and “design” became “creating visual assets” but even people who work in the field often reduce their jobs to simplified and corporate-optimized simulacras. I am less confident about what’s happening in academia but based on my casual browsing, it’s not better.
You need good experts to do proper research, and those haven’t been able to learn, practice, or improve their craft in any serious manner for a while.
Evidence-based UI design maxed out in 1995 with the release of Windows 95. Evidence-based design was popular in all sorts of areas back then. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) I think is the gold-standard of set and costume design and the modern cartoon mostly follows that design. Cargo pants were in style. The MTA in New York City used this map[0] which was designed by sociologists and psychologists to be maximally useful.
The late 90s is when fashion appears to have started taking over. Apple's logo went flat grey in 1998 and Windows XP was released in 2001 and it's only gone downhill from there. Perhaps it was inevitable. When other people can see your UI, people will start using it to signal things and companies like Apple will cater to that. The designers will then be given way too much power with no accountability and then all evidence-based design gets thrown out the window.
Perhaps this is what you're seeing in academia also?
[0] https://maps-nyc.com/img/0/mta-map.jpg
The Office 2007 ribbon was also evidence-based.
people have been complaining about software going downhill ever since hand crafted assembler was replaced with C and a compiler. it's the classic "old man yells at clouds".
As I said, for non-technical people, software en masse has always been difficult to learn and use.
It's all too easy to dismiss valid concerns as it's just the boomers/somethings complaining about "back in my day" and everyone getting on their lawn.
Software definitely improved for many decades, then at some point started going downhill. Where that happened is up for debate. But UI/Software/Quality is NOT one of those "oh it's just the new generation complaining about the old days" or old people "reminiscing".
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.
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.
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.
> X/Twitter is getting progressively worse for users not logged in.
Yes! But usually I just replace "x.com" with "xcancel.com" in the URL bar. it was a pain to use Twitter without logging in
The pinch to zoom issue is actually a WebKit bug (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305622), although technically the root cause is Reddit using a ton of memory
And, I noticed yesterday, old.reddit.com now requires login. Which renders a blank page on my phone. Check and mate.
I've read this on here previously but still can't reproduce it, neither from home nor mobile IP (this is in Germany).
Are they slowly rolling this out? Did you connect via VPN? I suppose they might finally feel ready to close the doors...
It was announced here https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...
It's definitely being A/B-tested
No VPN just home, in California
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.
I presume that's in addition to all the intentional enshittification.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's fair to say that AI amplifies our abilities, but it needs to be in the hands of people that know what they are doing.
If developers are producing garbage to begin with, chances are they still produce garbage just at an accelerated rate.
But that defeats the whole point of AI, as far as business is concerned. You could describe most programming languages as working the same way and having the same limitation. If this is true, then AI will simply mean you'll have very highly paid AI experts (who know how to do X with AI) that you absolutely need to hire or your competition will run at 10x your speed.
Business incentives is to maximize money, which requires some quality. But these days, not a lot.
Customers ideally maximize value, which lies on some spectrum of cost and quality. Part of the reasons businesses act with disregard for quality is that the consumer ultaimtely doesn't punish them for it. Whether that's due to true consumer preference or a market lock-in is a discussion left to the reader.
Can confirm. I just had a nightmare experience with a company where the customer service sent very ChatGPT-like replies and seemed very unreasonable and AI like. I had to threaten legal action to get my money back.
Bizarre experience.
Role Collapse might work in this type of situation: prompt your own ChatGPT to decide a refund with a very permissive refund policy, copy its thinking, paste into the next support message after your prompt, and their ChatGPT may believe it's its own thinking.
The Role Collapse attack is that LLMs turn out to ignore role tags (input, output, thinking) and identify role using writing style alone.
Funny you say this. I _almost_ tried this. But it did feel like a person was doing some copy-and-pasting and watching closely, so it wasn't 100% automated.
> 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.
I disagree. I’m biased but the customer eng/support team we created at stainless was really good and that was a key differentiator during sales calls and post-sales. It’s expensive if you see it as an afterthought and just an expense you would prefer to avoid, but we approached it as an enabler role, a multiplier of sort: ensure customers feel they engage with peers, provide guidance to the eng teams, enable salespeople to engage meaningfully with technical teams, etc. For like a year it was basically just me and an awesome colleague handling the whole thing full time. We took the very explicit decision to have it as a very technical role and designed a culture that sees it as essential to the business (because it was), and that worked really well IMHO.
If you create a startup you really want to focus on a small audience that you understand and know really well, instead of chasing everyone. And for that a support team is one of the most important asset you have
the key differentiator is whether your business is aiming to provide a quality service, or is desperate to eek out as much profit as possible.
my example: A&A — uk internet service provider.
costs like twice as much as a normal service per month. but if i have a super technical query im on the phone with a fully fledged engineer in about 2 minutes flat. the kind of engineer that can discuss complex dns issues. i’ve had one help me debug a dns issue from a work site. it turned out quite quickly it was nothing to do with them but he hung around on the phone for 10 minutes anyway.
the first support person i ever spoke to was michael from wales. if i had to call up he was the first voice i would hear for years. he recently moved on and i was sad. we’d have a decent chat. big up michael from wales.
so, as it applies to at least one existing business — you are dead wrong. it might be twice as expensive as the people trying to maximise their profit margins, but it’s definitely not 10x more.
I paid less for internet in the late 90s and had a good support to call. There is no way "absurd margins" are required.
Apple has pretty stellar support in my experience, and while I don't buy Apple stuff for other reasons, this is a strong attractor. For B2B products/services, it can be a huge differeniator as well, in my experience. But it was really just an example, it might not be the call most companies make. Maybe most will still just invest in being faster or cutting costs. I just hope that's not how it's gonna be.
You gotta be joking. Apple has no support at all, and if you ever go into a shop at their "GeNiUs BaR" (after booking an appointment days in advance), you will get extremely poor service and incompetent support.
I never went into an Apple store, but the phone support issues I had (even a pretty complex bug on their end that locked me out of my account) where handled swiftly and well, and I spoke to humans that seemed to know what they're doing. I could say this should be the default and I shouldn't be impressed by it, but unfortunately it's top 10% based on my experience. I'm in Europe though, maybe they do things differently here.
Used to work at an AppleCare call centre. Apple has extremely high standards for their support advisors. I'm aware that the genius bars are terrible, though.
Plenty of companies are willing to pick RHEL or paid Ubuntu for that very reason, even though they are infinity times more expensive than free Debian
Software's absurd margins was like the whole pitch.
Yeah, and companies want to put those margins into their pockets, not give it back to the business/product.
The fact that I can speak to a human to refund a $2 item on Amazon proves how wrong you are.
Last year I bought a book from Amazon for over $100 and they sent the wrong book. I contacted Amazon support, they said they will refund it, I don't need to send it back (throw it away if I want), and also give me a $20 credit for the inconvenience.
A month later, no refund. I contacted them again, they said unless the book is sent back, no refund. I told them about the previous conversation and they said that the CSR had lied to inflate his scores, and if I've thrown the book away I'm out of luck, he generated a return label. I complained and they threatened to close my account unless I send verification documents. I didn't, I just sent the book back and the refund processed automatically.
About a year before that I had a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon that it was only 6 months old and it was broken, and Samsung said I need to send it to Cyprus for some reason. Amazon said to send it back for a refund, I did, and I got a warning that I'd returned something "not in original condition" and next time I'll be banned.
Last week a package didn't arrive. I queried it and there was no longer the option to talk to anyone, just a link to phone numbers for the external courier.
So I would say that Amazon having stellar support 15 years ago, building a brand on it, and then choosing to stop doing that mostly proves how wrong you are. Sure, you can still sometimes speak to someone, but it's getting worse.
FYI you can sue them in small claims for this. This is one of the languages that companies really listen to. You would have to have actually thrown the book out in good faith, though, or commit perjury. Remember the airline LLM support bot and the bereavement fare?
Suing them could also result in one getting banned from Amazon for good.
I wonder if there's a way the law could make it so companies can't retaliate against people who seeking redress for problems they caused.
Would this actually work?
Surely, they have a mandatory arbitration clause in their customer agreement..?
And which state’s court?
It might. Nothing in courts is ever certain. You could always try it, and at worst you'd be out a court fee (low, for small claims) and wouldn't get your money back because of this clause. Or they could say the clause doesn't matter.
Meanwhile Amazon has to pay someone to attend the hearing.
Note that Amazon would probably ban your account regardless. Most retail businesses don't want customers who might sue them, even if they deserve it.
I have 400 orders a year on Amazon and never have any of those weird issues. How strange!
My grandma smoked until she was 90 and she was absolutely fine!
Haha yeah, Uber, Amazon, Starlink, Hotels etc just send me stuff or refund without even asking anything. I use all of them all the time for everything; that indeed seems to help. Logical of course.
But that could just mean you are a more profitable customer. And that could be influencing how amenable the AI/agents are and how much money they are willing to write off to retain you.
My house never burned down once in 40 years.
According to the comment I was responding to, he got 3 bad experiences out of 3 orders, so 100% rate of issues. What's the expected rate of house fires?
Both you and the other commenter about his grandma's smoking habit are making nonsensical comparisons about things that are extremely rare, to support something that is supposedly extremely common, if you were to believe the parent's comment (or other stories you read online).
Why do you assume it was 3 out of 3 orders?
Assuming would be to say that it was probably on more than 3 orders when you didn't talk about any other order.
and now without prime, amazon packages take two weeks to arrive! Total garbage
Amazon has a big problem with "unifying" products that are in fact not the same thing.
At one point I was looking through editions of the Arabian Nights and I noticed that, while the "kindle version" linked from the page for the paperback of one edition was an unrelated book, an actual kindle version of the edition I was looking at did exist elsewhere on the site.
I was annoyed enough that I opened a chat with customer support and asked them which of the two ebooks (one linked as "the kindle version of edition X", but with a different translator, title, cover art, etc; one not linked to the paperback at all, except for the identical translator, cover art, etc...) was the kindle version of the paperback.
A few days later, the links had been fixed, and the "kindle version" link on the paperback's page went to the kindle version of the same book!
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.
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.
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.
If your product MSRP goes up 10x because of a single OPEX line-item, the failure isn't the product, it's the business leaders.
Bring back all the engineering rigor that people complained was too slow to keep up with VC-protected Silicon Valley competition.
And bring back change & configuration management processes and documentation reviews. All the boring slow stuff.
Except now make it part of your CI/CD pipeline.
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.
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.
> If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
Because the premise that coding has been solved is false. :-)
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.
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.
> You speak like someone who has completely forgotten how difficult it was to learn everything you now know by heart.
Well said.
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.
> It doesn't take a 4 year education to learn how to use loops, functions, and basic data structures.
Many employers' understanding of programming is stuck in the era of the 1970s. At that time, this was indeed what programming was about. Since that time, programming has evolved a lot to encompass much more complicated concepts.
It's a get-what-you-pay-for thing. If coding is cheap, you get a low-effort, likely low-quality product. The conclusion is that coding is not cheap, only managers and business-minded decision makers are.
> the premise that coding has been solved is false. :-)
Not a problem.
But the belief that coding has been solved...
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.
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.
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.
Those hubs exist, but my experience is that you can't plug an arbitrary number of devices into them and expect it to work and it's not about power but about how resources in the computer are allocated to ports.
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.
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.
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.
> 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_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?
Product managers shipping burndown charts.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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."
Electron also predates LLMs by a wide margin though!!
Both of them are bad
> Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is.
I dunno what they needed, but Windows 11 was a lot less bad before they started using AI.
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?
Maybe they always test from a fresh image.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've heard the meme that Omarchy is for people who would like to use Arch but don't want to read the documentation or follow the installation guide. Having a video and no text sounds like it would align with that target audience. If you want information and not a video you'd want to look at Arch instead, it has an excellent wiki and the best documentation of any OS I've ever used.
Bad advice considering the success Omarchy has had in marketing it. Whatever they're doing other distros should take note.
Is there any evidence of people actually using it?
Yeah I switched to Linux full time at home last year and never even heard of this distro in doing any research about it.
I heard about it but since I also heard it was built by a white supremacist, I'd rather use one that is made by decent people, especially when the added value is only a preconfigured hyprland desktop.
So good marketing? Hell no.
It has smooth graphics but an unfortunate tendency to annex the Sudetenland. 2 stars.
> I heard about it but since I also heard it was built by a white supremacist
As much as i don't like DHH and think many of his takes are quite stupid. A white supremacist he is not.
I'm a Linux user and this is the very first time I hear this name. Data set of one, which says don't base your marketing on that.
I mean, I'm an everyday Linux user and half the content I consume daily is about the Linux/FOSS world and today is my first time hearing of it. And all the information I have about it is from replies to my comment, because its website doesn't actually offer any details. Genius marketing.
It's by the same guy who started a Rails conference because he was kicked out of a different Rails conference, so that he wouldn't be kicked out of this one.
The same guy who also happens to be the creator of Rails.
Imagine being so bad you get kicked out of the thing you created. A Notch situation.
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.
Unlike arch it installs in 3 minutes and offline.
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.
He is simply racist.
I do not disagree with what your said, but I think it just boils down to that.
Fix to what?
Sorry to say, but that word probably has an equally low impact on regular people by now. Worse if we look at what people actually think/vote/etc.
People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.
We do not actually want that, because (big surprise upcoming) racism is bad. But I think we might need to remind people why that whole cluster of ideas is bad.
This shouldn't be too hard, given that it's objectively worse in many many aspects, but for that to be seen, I suppose we need to point out what makes it objectively worse.
The shorthand is unfortunately dead and got killed by twitter dot com.
__
How that could be done is how I've demonstrated before you've regrettably dismissed it and tried returning to the shorthand
I edited my wording before I saw your reply to take the word fix out.
> People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.
I disagree. I do not get that feel at all in real life (in the UK, BTW). On Facebook you get that feel because it is full of ragebait and attracts nutters.
There are some people like that, but most people would be deeply ashamed to think themselves racist or be thought racist.
Edit, to add: DHH also seems to have a weird obsession with the UK. At least two of his racist blog posts about the UK. His first racist post that I was aware off is essentially "two many non-white people in London".
Hm. I mean I would wish that your observation is correct, but I kinda doubt it.
Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet.
But, regardless of that, I still believe that shorthand terms and indirection are a less clean solution, and, if possible, the cleaner one with less dependencies should be used.
> Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet.
Where are you? It makes a big difference. I am talking primarily about the UK, where I have lived in different areas and know a variety of people in many different places. It is, in my experience, a society where racism is relatively rare: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
Uuuh idk man. I'm just seeing this stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riots
https://www.dw.com/en/racist-riots-break-out-across-united-k...
But glad to learn that there is actually nothing to worry about I guess.
I would not say there is nothing to worry about - I find the riots nasty and definitely worrying. There is definitely greater hostility towards certain groups: asylum seekers and Muslims for a variety of reasons. There are lots of complexities about this, and some genuine issues too that have not been dealt with, which creates an opportunity racists exploit.
However, I think its very much a minority view. Even Tommy Robinson's "Unite The Kingdom" protest which DHH blogged about and Musk backed etc. and was supposed to be the far right's big show of support was much smaller than many other protests for many other causes over the years (for and against Brexit, Gaza, etc.) in recent years. I also think it likely even a lot of those who joined the protest have far narrower causes (e.g. anti-illegal immigration) than being fully alt-right.
Yes, yes, but you see, it's also an arsonist right-wing mob running amok in the real world.
Repeatedly!
I mean I get it. This is terrifying. But that's exactly my point.
Where I think I can say things are not as bad as they might look is that these mobs are a few hundred people at a time out of a country of 70m. Maybe a few thousand at the most actually violent at some point.
As a visible ethnic minority person in the UK I can say I am not terrified. Concerned, yes, but its not even a major issue in my life.
There has not been a single time in history where people have realised how bad things were.
You're talking about a gang of a few hundred people roaming around and burning down Muslim places.
Those people are the ones who are talking about rape gangs (which don't exist), right? How big are the rape gangs they talk about?
To be fair DHH became exceedingly unhinged.
For example in his latest blog post he first describes problem of growing populations of wolves that are killing sheep and cannot be shot because they are protected by the state. And then starts to compare the situation with danish gypsies (Romani) in danish cities.
That's as close to fascism as you can get... it's pretty out there on the edge of legality.
I mean I used to respect his (at the time mainly technical) takes and I recommended Basecamp to so many organizations. How has this table turned so much I have no idea.
I went to his blog to have a look at his racist posts, and that (which is the last post on his site) is more unhinged than his previous posts. A definitely trend of getting worse.
I dont think "fascist" and "been a very opinionated guy" are mutually replacable. In fact, insistence on euphemisms like that harmed the discussion a lot and overall culture a lot.
They are commenting on Omarchy, not DHH other than as relates to Omarchy. They also didn't recite a wikipedia entry to define what Arch is, or linux, or what distribution means.
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.
> One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.
I guess so, but that's abstract and hard to grasp for most people.
"The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions" otoh is pretty easy to understand, signals effectively the same and side-steps basically all the drama.
> "The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions"
That isn't the problem though. Fascism isn't mental instability, it's an ideology. Someone going off the deep end and making bad decisions does so essentially at random, while someone driven by ideology messes things up in very specific ways. In the case of Fascist ideology, the specific ways they ruin things are specifically intended to harm specific groups of people, so I think the distinction matters. Writing it off as the guy having "lost it" obscures the specific goal he is working towards.
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I think the trouble you are experiencing is you are basically asking people to change or update their whole framework for looking at the world. The identity portion is to some extent a load bearing column. It's like asking a hunter gatherer to think about individual property rights.
I think this might be a case of "speak for yourself." Plenty of people don't want to support fascists.
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I'm a different person (or at least, user account) than the other one you were talking to. So I suppose they could be AI.
Sure. You need to relate to the overton window to not seem like a tinfoil hat alarmist hysteric to normal people. I can agree on that.
It is really hard to keep your cool.
>,If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.
There was not. I used to think they are crying wolf, but imo, it turned out they were correct all along.
They were paying attention to what these people were saying and doing. They then concluded these people are fascists. Then a bunch of us, not paying attention crowd, came in accused them of crying wolf.
Maybe, crying wolf is about a boy who sees a wolf, causes commotion and protects the village. Then they dont feel like going in one time, wolfs eats them. But, village just wont admit they were obviously wrong and blames the boy.
We're still doing that btw
Yeah you have a point here.
It was one of the Mullvad owners.
We should probably ask ourselves why there aren't more Mullvads. I think the answer is twofold - first, developers can't business, and second, running something like that carries massive political risk which that type of person is more willing to shoulder. If one doesn't feel afraid to help found a Nazi party they sure won't be afraid to run a VPN service.
Nothing on this list screams explicitly nazi to me, but this is a long list for things that are believed mostly by neo-nazis. Like heavily complaining that London isn't racillly pure enough. And supporting a prominent political figure who believes every Muslim is a terrorist. And complaining about "woke" all the time.
so it depends if you believe that everyone who supported the nazi party was a nazi, or only the people who actually did the holocaust.
https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-...
https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<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.
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?
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.
Obligatory reference to "Software as theory building" by Peter Naur.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
NSA probably read and stored a highly significant fraction of those emails.
This is a very odd take in the world where your device will connect to any old wi-fi.
On top of that any takeover of a device like an ISP router or BGP misrouting is now an automatic compromise.
One thing you can do to fight back is show up at their branches with complaints. You can engineer this intentionally. Have a bank that doesn't support Graphene? Show up with your Graphene phone and be like "it says my phone isn't allowed. Fix this or I'm closing my account" and there's a 50% chance they will turn off phone hardware attestation for your account or give you a physical 2FA token and if they don't it will show up in their metrics.
That’s a hilarious comment in the world where companies are getting hacked left and right and consumer data is widely available from how many pieces of software have piss poor security. You might work at companies as where dumb bureaucrats have a tight grip on things, but in most of the world, security practices are not holding us back, they simply don’t exist.
The the op of this thread is really security clueless. The moment you're in most networks you can move laterally and get whatever you want. Locking these systems down and securing them is very difficult work. After C levels, developers are the worst at security in companies.
Drum it out loud.
Some organizations are stuck in proverbial cobwebs of security blankets.
Those who dictate what security should be have no skin in the game, the end result is just stupid.
My pet hate when I still worked was "defence in depth". I witnessed this term being thrown around to the point it was only an excuse.
A lot of box ticking paper pushers in the space, somehow making the scene a clown show.
"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.
...because coding hasn't been solved
"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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
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> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lower barrier to entry = more crap flooding the market
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
turns out the bottleneck was never doing things faster, it was doing things correctly, and we optimized away the people who knew the difference
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
the bottleneck for these open source repos is maintainer attention. AI seemingly does not yet improve that throughput.
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
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.
The same reason computers keep getting faster but software keeps getting slower.
Which is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law
> What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away
Andy and Bill's law is caused by Andy and Bill's law?
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?
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
> 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?
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.
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
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.
What do you call a product that is?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
If AI is so good at coding, why can't it be good at politics? We will elect AI in our next presidential election.
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?
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.
I remember noticing the same thing a decade ago. I don't think it has anything to do with AI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Coding is solved, but the next step is getting rid of the PM's causing all the trouble.
One of my favorite impossible puzzles is to sepparate security and feature updates. Ive made zero progress over many years.
Bad drivers and middle management inventions like scrum. Is why.
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 :(
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.
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
we found that using a stable AI-SDLC process like: https://github.com/highflame-ai/ai-factory improves code agent assisted development dramatically specially when going from 1-100.
Because at most companies, software engineers aren't paid to make good software. They're paid to ship flashy features.
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?
Regulations.
> 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.
It was always like this.
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.
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.
I didn’t ask for a single of these ”features” for example: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphfed2c4091/io...
If our entire profession is unable to provide a better quality over the long term maybe it is time to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves ”wtf are we doing”? We are constantly churning out worse and worse products.
Right, you're the only person who buys software on this planet...
The software world has little to do with what software gets built, instead focus on the capital industry and you'll find your answers.
You say that as if I’m not acutely aware of the issues. I am ashamed that I am part of the problem.
I don't think it fair to compare cooperative multitasking OSs to OSs that requires virtual memory chips on a software quality basis.
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.
We need new companies that market their products as enduring and reliable. The market wants it.
Hold on just a sec. Will do after throwing everything at the AI wave.
Author seems to be blaming the hammer for the house not getting built right. Software is increasing in complexity, and perhaps is outpacing testing.
The hammer is Homer Simpson's automated hammer, and it has two claw sides like PHP.
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
we spent 40 years making computers faster so that apps could spend the first 30 seconds of every session loading a welcome animation
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.
A garden needs a gardener. It's the end when people stop caring or when starts chasing superficial metrics and tawdry toys.
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.
> 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.
Software will always be as bad as users world allow it to. Applies to every good and service.
Who ever said coding is solved??
We need automatic testing of user experience, that doesn't exist yet
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.
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.
This post and the comments so far reminded me of 1984's two minutes of hate. When is Hate Week?
Hate Week is every week I have to use Jira. Or SharePoint. Or Slack. Or Teams. Or Magento.
Big Brother is trying to turn is against modern coorparate software practices or what is your point?
check out The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules
A lot of this is about bureaucracy
Pressure is on shipping things fast, not making things lightweight.
It’s not getting worse. We are just getting older.
Good models can't fix bad incentives.
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.
What is that car, and could you make a video of it?
VW ID.4, and it's unlikely I can spare the time for making a video without a really good reason…
This is a business culture problem not a tech problem.
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.
> 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.
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?
who plays anything other than GTNH for 1.7.10 anyway
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.
All code is legacy code a millisecond after you write it.
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.
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.
Someone saying software has been solved, but nobody that takes the drivers seat agrees
I suppose that because we trained llm’s on code with bugs in it will write code with bugs in
I feel like we need a name for this error. Pretraining fallacy? Coding ability is all about RL.
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.
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?
The answer is money.
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.
Code is the easy part.
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.
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
> 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.
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
> 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?
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.
Sad cause its true
We have better shovels now, why are the holes we are digging ourselves into getting deeper????
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.
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.
Weaving fabric and sewing clothes has been "solved", but there is no shortage of garbage quality shirts.
There are no banger best selling books either. Generic WikipediaEsque slop sold on Amazon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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?
Disagree, but upvote for "my hairy bum"
"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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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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
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Customers speak with their wallets, and OP doesn't like what they're saying.
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.