Comment by solaire_oa
4 days ago
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).