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Hacker News
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)
by gyomu
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.
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.
by greenlimetea
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.)
by mrkeen
> 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?
by fer
> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.
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...
by frameset
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.
by alphazard
> 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.
by mancerayder
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- Hacker News
- 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)
by gyomu - 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.
- 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.
by greenlimetea - 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.)
by mrkeen - > 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?
by fer - > I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.
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...
by frameset - 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.
by alphazard - > 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.
by mancerayder