The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

https://techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-software-quality-collapse

by redbell • 10 months ago

314 253 10 months ago

techtrenches.substack.com

I’ve read some versions of this post dozens of times over the years. At first I would nod along, sympathetic but now I realise that we shouldn’t chase some platonic ideal of perfect software. It has to exist in the real world and there will always be trade offs. In the end, most software exists to make businesses money.

rebolek2• 10 months ago

And buggy software makes more money because customers have a reason to buy subscription.

swiftcoder• 10 months ago

There's quite a wide gap between "platonic ideal of perfect software" and "leaks 32 GB of memory" in which we could aim...

fkyoureadthedoc2• 10 months ago

And fortunately that seems to be where the vast majority of software lands.

lamename• 10 months ago

As much as I like the article, I begrudgingly agree with you, which is why I think the author mentions the physical constraints of energy as the future wall that companies will have to deal with.

The question is do we think that will actually happen?

Personally I would love if it did, then this post would have the last laugh (as would I), but I think companies realize this energy problem already. Just search for the headlines of big tech funding or otherwise supporting nuclear reactors, power grid upgrades, etc.

devin• 10 months ago

I agree completely that there is no platonic ideal, that there will always be trade offs, and that running successful businesses is part of the equation, but let's not ignore the fact that profit _to the exclusion of all else_ is bad.

eviks• 10 months ago

How much money was made by a worse calculator in the 'real world'?

ealexhudson2• 10 months ago

I don't want to sound too dismissive, but all these arguments have been brought up time and again. The move from assembler to high level languages. The introduction of OOP. Component architecture / COM / CORBA / etc. The development of the web browser. The introduction of Java.

2018 isn't "the start of the decline", it's just another data point on a line that leads from, y'know, Elite 8-bit on a single tape in a few Kb through to MS Flight Simulator 2020 on a suite of several DVDs. If you plot the line it's probably still curving up and I'm not clear at which point (if ever) it would start bending the other way.

quotemstr• 10 months ago

One salient difference is that typically abstraction layers trade performance (usually less than polemicists like the article author think) for improvements in developer efficiency, safety, generality, and iteration speed.

Current tools seem to get us worse results on bug counts, safety, and by some measures even developer efficiency.

Maybe we'll end up incorporating these tools the same way we did during previous cycles of tool adoption, but it's a difference worth noting.

gjsman-10004• 10 months ago

I think another part of this, is that Tech is perhaps the only industry that hasn't quite gotten over itself yet.

Writing code is artistic the same way plumbing is artistic.

Writing code is artistic the same way home wiring is artistic.

Writing code is artistic the same way HVAC is artistic.

Which is to say, yes, there is satisfaction to be had, but companies don't care as long as it gets the job done without too many long-term problems, and never will care beyond that. What we call tech debt, an electrician calls aluminum wiring. What we call tech debt, a plumber calls lead solder joints. And I strongly suspect that one day, when the dust settles on how to do things correctly (just like it did for electricity, plumbing, flying, haircutting, and every other trade eventually), we will become a licensed field. Every industry has had that wild experimentation phase in the beginning, and has had that phase end.

bigfishrunning• 10 months ago

companies don't care as long as it gets the job done without too many long-term problems

Companies don't care as long as it gets the job done without too many VERY SHORT TERM problems. Long term problems are for next quarter, no reason to worry about them.

cmrdporcupine5• 10 months ago

I don't see working for most of my employers as "artistic."

I do see it as more of a craft than a typical trade. There are just too many ways to do things to compare it to e.g. an electrician. Our industry does not have (for better or for worse) a "code" like the building trades or even any mandated way to do things, and any attempts to impose (cough cough Ada, etc.) that have been met with outright defiance and contempt in fact.

When I'm working on my own projects -- it's a mix of both. It's a more creative endeavour.

veqz• 10 months ago

Perhaps. But put another way:

Writing code is artistic the same way writing text is.

Whether that is a function call, an ad, a screen script, a newspaper article, or a chapter in a paperback the writer has to know what one wants to communicate, who the audience/users will be, the flow of the text, and how understandable it will be.

Most professionally engaged writers get paid for their output, but many more simply write because they want to, and it gives them pleasure. While I'm sure the jobs can be both monetarily and intellectually rewarding, I have yet to see people who do plumbing or electrical work for fun?

eikenberry• 10 months ago

Writing code is artistic the same way home wiring is artistic.

Instead of home wiring, consider network wiring. We've all seen the examples of datacenter network wiring, with 'the good' being neat, labeled and easy to work with and 'the bad' being total chaos of wires, tangled, no labels, impossible to work with.

IE. The people using the datacenter don't care as long as the packets flow. But the others working on the network cabling care about it A LOT. The artistry of it is for the other engineers, only indirectly for the customers.

fzeindl• 10 months ago

If you plot the line it's probably still curving up and I'm not clear at which point (if ever) it would start bending the other way.

I suspect when Moore‘s law ends and we cannot build substantially faster machines anymore.

rudedogg• 10 months ago

One interesting thing that most non-systems programmers don’t know is that memory and cpu performance have improved at completely different rates. That’s a large part of why we have x times faster CPUs but software is still slow.

The systems people worry more about memory usage for this reason, and prefer manual memory management.

mikepurvis• 10 months ago

But the machines aren't really "faster" in clock speed— for a long time now the gains have been in better and more local caching + parallelism at both the core and instruction level.

ealexhudson2• 10 months ago

Moore's law has kind of ended already though, and maybe has done for a few years, and even if you can make a chip which is faster there's a basic thermodynamics problem running it at full tilt for any meaningful period of time. I would have expected that to have impacted software development, and I don't think it particularly has, and there's also no obvious gain in e.g. compilers or other optimization which would have countered the effect.

potatolicious• 10 months ago

Moore's Law has been dead for a long time. The doubling rate of transistors is now drastically below Moore's prediction.

We're adding transistors at ~18%/year. That's waaaaay below the ~41% needed to sustain Moore's law.

Even the "soft" version of Moore's law (a description of silicon performance vs. literally counting transistors) hasn't held up. We are absolutely not doubling performance every 24 months at this point.

imiric7• 10 months ago

If you haven't noticed a dramatic decline in average software quality, you're not paying attention or willfully ignoring it. The article is right.

This is partly related to the explosion of new developers entering the industry, coupled with the classic "move fast and break things" mentality, and further exacerbated by the current "AI" wave. Junior developers don't have a clear path at becoming senior developers anymore. Most of them will overly rely on "AI" tools due to market pressure to deliver, stunting their growth. They will never learn how to troubleshoot, fix, and avoid introducing issues in the first place. They will never gain insight, instincts, understanding, and experience, beyond what is acquired by running "AI" tools in a loop. Of course, some will use these tools for actually learning and becoming better developers, but I reckon that most won't.

So the downward trend in quality will only continue, until the public is so dissatisfied with the state of the industry that it causes another crash similar to the one in 1983. This might happen at the same time as the "AI" bubble pop, or they might be separate events.

0xWTF3• 10 months ago

Is this measureable? Like code readability scores on the GitHub corpus over time?

surgical_fire2• 10 months ago

Eh, after 20 years in the industry, I think that the overall quality of software is roughly the same. Matter of fact, my first job was by far the worst codebase I ever worked at. A masterclass in bad practices.

dlcarrier3• 10 months ago

I blame software updates. That's when software went from generally working on release to not at all.

Agile management methods set up a non-existent release method called "waterfall" as a straw man, where software isn't released until it works, practically eliminating technical debt. I'm hoping someone fleshes it out into a real management method. I'm not convinced this wasn't the plan in the first place, considering that the author of Cunningham's law, that "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." was a co-signer of the Agile manifest.

It'll take a lot of work at first, especially considering how industry-wide the technical debt is (see also: https://xkcd.com/2030/), but once done, having release-it-and-forget-it quality software would be a game changer.

marcosdumay• 10 months ago

a non-existent release method called "waterfall" as a straw man

The person that invented the name never saw it, but waterfall development is extremely common and the dominant way large companies outsource software development even today.

The only thing that changed now is that now those companies track the implementation of the waterfall requirements in scrum ceremonies. And yes, a few more places actually adopted agile.

jrm43• 10 months ago

Ha. I was tasked to teach (classic) Project Management without being super-familiar.

Then I had to get familiar with the new stuff; waterfall, agile whatever.

They literally are all nothing but hacks that violate the basic points of actual project management. (e.g. Projects have a clear end)

BrenBarn• 10 months ago

I blame software updates. That's when software went from generally working on release to not at all.

I agree. So much software these days treats users as testers and is essentially a giant test-in-production gaffe.

dkarl3• 10 months ago

We have always had, and always will have, the quality of software that people are willing to pay for.

leshow• 10 months ago

That would be the case under market conditions where buyers are making rational decisions with perfect knowledge based on all available choices. Does that sound like the system we have? To me, reality seems more like a small set of oligopolies or effective monopolies, byzantine ownership structures and a pursuit of short term profits pushing future costs elsewhere as externalities.

jrm43• 10 months ago

No. Not "willing," that implies that the options meaningfully exist. They don't.

"Willing AND ABLE" works here though.

morshu90013• 10 months ago

I don't think software has gotten worse, quite the opposite, but Java and OOP were mistakes.

bowsamic• 10 months ago

Every time someone says this I ask them “what is your solution for maintainable software architecture?” And they say “what is software architecture? I just write code”

muldvarp• 10 months ago

The fact that software quality plays zero role in commercial software engineering is one of the reasons why I think LLMs will easily eat our lunch. Bugs simply don't matter.

creativeSlumber• 10 months ago

I would have disagreed with you in the past by saying, "until it breaks something critical and you loose customers and business", but then again people just moved on from the Crowdstrike incident like business as usual.If something like that which grounded critical service globally and had an estimated 10 Billion Dollar economic impact doesn't change mindsets,I don't know what will.

robertlagrant• 10 months ago

and had an estimated 10 Billion Dollar economic impact

This might be more to do with these estimates than anything.

gkedzierski3• 10 months ago

That's because no one died. All the safety critical industries are already heavily regulated. E.g. check out for example standards like DO-178C (for software in airborne systems), where you even have to _prove_ correctness of every tool and dependency you use, on top of accountability and traceability of every single line of code in your own product.

heisenbit• 10 months ago

Considering that LLM are fairly good at finding security relevant issues - the bugs that matter - there is certainly scope for them. I would not be surprised if not checking your code with an LLM will be considered negligent in the near future. This week I was forced by circumstances to triage a messed up nginx configuration. While not the focus of my work the LLM pointed out two issues where configuration was not following best practices with security relevant implications (it also turned out an old release was used by the team and one issue was already fixed due to the feedback of a pen test assessment).

LLM seem to be really good in analyzing things. I don't not trust them to produce too much but alone the ability to take a few files and bits and pieces and ask for a response with a certain direction has been transformative to my work.

imiric7• 10 months ago

LLMs are not a silver bullet. They're just as likely to point out non-issues, as they are to hallucinate fixes for them.

Their output is only as valuable as the human using them. If they're not a security expert to begin with, they can be easily led astray and lulled into a false sense of security.

See curl, for example. Hundreds of bogus reports rejected by an expert human. One large report with valuable data, that still requires an expert human to sift through and validate.

imiric7• 10 months ago

You can't be serious.

How do you categorize "commercial software engineering"? Does a company with $100M+ ARR count? Surely you can understand the impact that deleting a production database can have on a business.

And your answer to this is "LLMs will eat our lunch" and "bugs don't matter"? Unbelievable.

SoftTalker6• 10 months ago

Any business that isn't prepared for the possibility of losing their production database and doesn't have a plan for recovering from that is not a serious business.

dlcarrier3• 10 months ago

People have been developing neural networks since the 70's, and there's been two major hurdles to their usefulness for software development:

1. They require gigabytes to terabytes of training data.

2. A non-trivial percentage of output data is low confidence.

The first problem requires tens to hundreds of gigabytes of training data.

This first problem not only requires the slow but predictable increase in processing power and data storage capabilities that were unachievable until recently, but is also only possible because open-source software has majorly caught on, something that was hoped for but not a given early in AI development.

The second problem means that the output will be error prone, without significant procedural processing of the output data that is a lot of work to develop. I never would have thought that software writing by neural networks would be competitive, not because of effective error control, but because the entire field of software development would be so bad at what they do (https://xkcd.com/2030/) that error-prone output would be competitive.

AnimalMuppet• 10 months ago

Why? If software quality doesn't matter to us, why would it matter to an LLM?

If it's trained on our code, how would it know any better?

If it's driven by our prompts, why would we prompt it to do any better?

__MatrixMan__• 10 months ago

Bugs matter. LLMs aren't going to eat our lunch on their own. They'll do so in service to some human that's using them to exploit a bug.

nixpulvis3• 10 months ago

Bugs don't matter once you have captured your userbase.

Until then they matter a lot.

One thing that needs to be addressed is how easy it is to build moats around your users which trap them in your ecosystem. It's great from a business perspective if you can pull it off, but it's killing innovation and making users frustrated and apathetic towards technology as a whole.

rebolek2• 10 months ago

I highly doubt that 2018 was year of "quality focus" and 2020 year of "memory is cheap". The downward spiral started at least twenty years earlier.

baq• 10 months ago

the dates on x axis are all wrong, hardware was cheap at least 30 years earlier. people were complaining about the concept illustrated by this chart for all this time, too. I was using Python professionally before 2010, ask me how I know.

codeulike• 10 months ago

Hes right that cloudstike was terrible incompetence but I find it hard to worry about the memory leak stats. If lots of software leaks memory these days its because people have accepted that and its probably not economic to trace and fox those bugs. A lot of software is disposable or transient these days, like an app you only use twice a month

pydry2• 10 months ago

Everyone else in this thread is missing that crowdstrike level bug would have taken down the company in the past.

I had a friend practically scream at his C level management after the crowdstrike bug that it should be ripped out because it was making the company less safe. They were deaf to all arguments. Why? Insurance mandated crowdstrike. Still. Even now.

This isnt really about software it is about a concentration of market power in a small number of companies. These companies can let the quality of their products go to shit and still dominate.

A piece of garbage like crowdstrike or microsoft teams still wouldnt be tolerated as a startup's product but tech behemoths can increasingly get away with it.

roncesvalles• 10 months ago

A piece of garbage like crowdstrike or microsoft teams still wouldnt be tolerated in a startup's product but tech behemoths get away with it.

Agree, but it's always been this way. Oracle, everything IBM, Workday, everything Salesforce, Windows before XP.

Most software is its own little monopoly. Yes, you could ditch Teams for Zoom but is it really the same?

It's not like buying a sedan where there are literally 20+ identical options in the market that can be ranked by hard metrics such as mileage and reliability.

rjmunro• 10 months ago

The other way to look at Crowdstrike is that it prevented probably thousands of attacks by ransomware and other adversaries. Then it had a bug which meant you had to visit your computer and manually reboot it, with no data loss or leakage.

Would you rather have to deal with criminals who have invaded your systems wanting ransoms with no guarantee they will restore the data, or not leak private information, or would you rather have to reboot your machines with a complete understanding of what happened and how?

doctor_radium• 10 months ago

They were deaf to all arguments. Why? Insurance mandated crowdstrike. Still. Even now.

Your comment got me wondering if MBA's in say, risk management or underwriting also share some of the blame?

LostMyLogin• 10 months ago

Every 10x increase in model size requires 10x more power

Does it? I’ll be the first to admit I am so far behind on this area, but isn’t this assuming the hardware isn’t improving over time as well? Or am I missing the boat here?

TimorousBestie3• 10 months ago

Hardware isn’t improving exponentially anymore, especially not on the flops/watt metric.

That’s part of what motivated the transition to bfloat16 and even smaller minifloat formats, but you can only quantize so far before you’re just GEMMing noise.

alphager• 10 months ago

Hardware gets faster but efficiency is stalling if not getting worse.

Tractor8626• 10 months ago

Just false nostalgia memory.

20 years ago things werent any better. Software didn't consume gigabytes of ram because there was no gigabytes of ram to consume.

kilbuz• 10 months ago

This is exactly the right way to think about it.

ieie3366• 10 months ago

Anyone remember the good old 90s and win95 or win98? Yeah those were the days, the quality was absolutely perfect nothing ever crashed /s

0xbadcafebee2• 10 months ago

There's almost no product or piece of software that I use today that doesn't have at least 2 bugs that I run into on a daily basis. Every website, web app, mobile app, console app, etc, they all have clearly user-affecting bugs. And nearly every one of those makes it hard for me to diagnose or report the bugs. I spent at least 15 to 30 minutes every day working around bugs so I can live my life.

We have a vastly different software culture today. Constant churning change is superior to all else. I can't go two weeks without a mobile app forcing me to upgrade it so that it will keep operating. My Kubuntu 24.04 LTS box somehow has a constant stream of updates even though I've double-checked I'm on the LTS apt repos. Rolling-release distros are an actual thing people use intentionally (we used to call that the unstable branch).

I could speculate on specifics but I'm not a software developer so I don't see exactly what's going on with these teams. But software didn't used to be made or used this way. It felt like there were more adults in the room who would avoid making decisions that would clearly lead to problems. I think the values have changed to accept or ignore those problems. (I don't want to jump to the conclusion that "they're too ignorant to even know what potential problems exist", but it's a real possibility)

username2233• 10 months ago

I was a software developer, and have some idea where this comes from. Keeping track of multiple versions of software to separate bug fixes from new features is hard, but calling whatever is in version control on the first Friday of every month "version N+1" is easy. Back when users had to pay for a stack of floppies or CDs to get a new version, you had to give them a compelling reason to do so. When it's nearly impossible for them to prevent the new version from being auto-installed, you don't.

lproven3• 9 months ago

My Kubuntu 24.04 LTS box

Bad news... only the GNOME edition is a true LTS. All the flavours are not.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NobleNumbat/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu:

Support lifespan

Kubuntu 24.04 will be supported for 3 years.

cmrdporcupine5• 10 months ago

Exactly, and if you used machines 20-30 years ago you got used to all sorts of periodic terrible faults that could require rebooting the machine ("blue screens" or sad Mac, guru meditation, etc) or at least restarting the program.

On top of that many things were simply hard to use for non-specialists, even after the introduction of the GUI.

They were also riddled with security holes that mostly went unnoticed because there was simply a smaller and less aggressive audience.

Anyways most people's interaction with "software" these days is through their phones, and the experience is a highly focused and reduced set of interactions, and most "productive" things take a SaaS form.

I do think as a software developer things are in some ways worse. But I actually don't think it's on a technical basis but organizational. There are so many own goals against productivity in this industry now, frankly a result of management and team practices ... I haven't worked on a truly productive fully engaged team in years. 20-25 years ago I saw teams writing a lot more code and getting a lot more done, but I won't use this as my soapbox to get into why. But it's not technology (it's never been better to write code!) it's humans.

lproven3• 9 months ago

Exactly, and if you used machines 20-30 years ago

Bad news. We're older than we tend to remember.

Windows NT 3.1 shipped 32 years ago, the year after OS/2 2.0.

By 1994 NT 3.5 was out, and 30 years ago, NT 3.51 had been out for about 6 months.

I ran that and supported it in production and it was damned near bulletproof.

spankibalt2• 10 months ago

One could easily imagine the analogy, e. g. the amount of commercial software (in critical infrastructure) that "leaked kBytes and MBytes of memory", as well as embarassing "Computer Science 101 error handling" fuck-ups of the day with billion dollar consequences, but I believe you got it surrounded...

don_neufeld• 10 months ago

Ariane 5?

Therac-25?

Anyone?

Bueller? Bueller?

jayd163• 10 months ago

20 years ago, you could consistently pick up a phone, get a dial tone, and then call a human to solve a problem.

Sure, plenty of stuff didn't work. The issue is we're not bothering to make anything that does. It's a clear cultural shift and all of this "nothing ever worked so why try" talk here is not what I remember.

We're in a stochastic era of scale where individual experiences do not matter. AI turning computers from predictable to not is in the same direction but with yet more velocity.

cmrdporcupine5• 10 months ago

I think you've got your time ranges wrong. Almost exactly 20 years ago I worked for a company that did dashboards for analyzing and managing call centre traffic. The most important metric wasn't "how happy customers are" or "how many calls served" it was: "how many calls did we avoid having a human agent get involved for?" The metric of success was the degree to which they could avoid using expensive human labour and get you through the automated call tree.

Companies offered such (expensive) services because they had no choice. They made every effort to divert and divest from such activities. Google and companies like them made filthy profits because they figured out the secret sauce to scaling a business without the involvement of humans, but people were trying it for literally decades with mixed results (usually enraged customers).

Stupid red tape, paperwork, and call centre frustrations were the order of the day 20-30 years ago.

pornel• 10 months ago

See "A plea for lean software" by Wirth.

It's from 1995 and laments that computers need megabytes of memory for what used to work in kilobytes.

dlcarrier3• 10 months ago

Wirth's law is eating Moore's law for lunch.

restalis2• 10 months ago

The transition from kilobytes to megabytes is not comparable to the transition from megabytes to gigabytes at all. Back in the kilobytes days, when the engineers (still) had to manage bits and resort to all kind of tricks to somehow make it to something working, a lot of software (and software engineering) aspects left to be desired. Way too many efforts were poured not so much into putting the things together for the business logic as were poured into overcoming the shortcomings of limited memory (and other computing) resource availability. Legitimate requirements for software had to be butchered like Procrustes' victims, so that the software could have a chance to be. The megabytes era accommodated all but high end media software, without having to compromise on their internal build-up. It was the time when things could be properly done, no excuses.

Nowadays' disregard for computing resource consumption is simply the result of said resources getting too cheap to be properly valued and a trend of taking their continued increase for granted. There's simply little to no addition in today's software functionality that couldn't do without the gigabytes levels of memory consumption.

1313ed01• 10 months ago

But now there are gigabytes, and I would love to fill those up with countless virtual machines and applications, but sadly that is not possible since bloat has grown at least as fast as RAM size.

bigstrat2003• 10 months ago

20 years ago things werent any better.

Yes they were. I was there. Most software was of a much higher quality than what we saw today.

username2233• 10 months ago

Back in the Mac OS < 10 or MS-DOS days, all programs shared the same address space. Bugs that would crash a single program nowadays would bring down the entire system. But you could somehow run a bunch of sketchy shareware games, and your computer usually wouldn't crash or run out of memory, because programmers cared about bugs.

dilap• 10 months ago

Nah, I don't think so -- it really was a big deal to have a bug back then, and software quality used to be a lot higher. We could go back and run some VMs to try to objectively quantify this (and it would be interesting to do so), but I'm personally confident my memory isn't being tinted by nostalgia.

The main reason is the ability to do constant updates now -- it changes the competitive calculus. Ship fast and fix bugs constantly wins out vs. going slower and having fewer bugs (both in the market & w/in a company "who ships faster?").

When you were shipping software on physical media having a critical bug was a very big deal. Not so anymore.

chipsrafferty• 10 months ago

The problem with constant updates is that usually developers will make it so that the app stops working unless you update.

jjk1663• 10 months ago

How is that not better? If you could do it without consuming gigabytes back in the day, and now you can't, something must have gotten worse. The cost of consuming gigabytes has gone down, but being able to tolerate a worse situation doesn't mean the situation isn't worse.

dghlsakjg• 10 months ago

You couldn't consume gigabytes because that amount of ram didn't exist. You still had apps with the same issues that would eat all your ram.

Computers crashed all the fucking time for dumb bugs. I remember being shocked when I upgraded to XP and could go a full day without a BSOD. Then I upgraded to intel OSX and was shocked that a system could run without ever crashing.

Edit: this isn't to say that these issues today are acceptable, just that broken software is nothing new.

snapcaster• 10 months ago

Yeah i wonder if the people saying this are just too young to have experienced it. Computers and software have always been janky as fuck. I used to have games crash my entire system instead of just the program. That still happens today but not as frequently

alexjplant• 10 months ago

Anybody that was around for the Windows 95-ME era remembers. Things would just randomly crash. BSODs, "This program has performed an illegal operation", "A device attached to the system is not functioning", "Windows will restart and repair your registry", "Explorer has caused an error"... Ctrl+S was the first keyboard shortcut every schoolchild learned so that Word wouldn't munge their homework.

Let's not even think about the absolute mess that the web was with competing browser box models and DHTML and weird shared hosting CGI setups. We have it easy.

lproven3• 9 months ago

Just false nostalgia memory.

No, I don't think that's right, because:

20 years ago things werent any better.

I think you have the timeframe wrong.

20Y ago, no.

30Y ago, yes, somewhat. Win NT came out 32 years ago.

40Y ago, yes, very much.

No public internet, very slow point-to-point dialup comms for a tiny %age of users, and tiny simple software for very limited hardware meant better quality software.

I installed multiple Novell Netware servers on company networks, both Netware 2.15 and Netware 3.1. They never ever got updated, and ran flawlessly for years on end.

I installed dozens, hundreds, of machines with DOS 3.3 and they ran it until they were scrapped.

I put in multiuser systems based around SCO Xenix: Unix boxes, but with no networking, no GUI or X11, no comms, no compiler. They had uptimes in years: zero crashes.

Stuff was more reliable because it had to be because shipping an updated meant posting media to thousands of users and sending a human to install it. Nobody could afford it.

Software and hardware should be subject to the same laws as vehicles: if it fails in standard use, the maker is liable. So make it safe.

If that means it has to be 0.1% of the size and 0.1% of the functionality that it was 20Y ago, fine: so be it.

Because that's still huge and rich compared to the DOS stuff I started my career on. It is not some savage brutal unimaginable limitation, utterly unrealistic. It was the reality of end-20th century software around the time that the PC industry moved to 32-bit hardware at the end of the 1980s.

ragelink• 10 months ago

Vibe coding for the win... In all seriousness, this has been a constant decline as developers have focused away from performance and optimizing effective runtime.

djoldman• 10 months ago

Fundamentally, the main flaw in TFA is this quote toward the end in "The Path Forward" section:

Accept that quality matters more than velocity.

Nope. Clearly many companies are sacrificing TFA's definition of quality for other things possibly including velocity.

These companies are making a lot of profit.

1. Company survival and competitiveness depends on profit

2. Sacrificing quality for other things has increased profit

3. Therefore these companies are making the correct decision

This will not change unless regulation or the economic calculus of the system itself changes.

lr4444lr• 10 months ago

Software is also pumped out now at a faster rate than ever, runs on commodity hardware, is delivered digitally, often run on platforms that can force near real-time user updates, with much higher complexity.

Eventually we will hit hard physical limits that require we really be "engineers" again, but throughput is still what matters. It's still comparatively great paying profession with low unemployment, and an engine of economic growth in the developed world.

psunavy03• 10 months ago

It's still comparatively great paying profession with low unemployment,

Tell that to the new CS grads.

high_byte• 10 months ago

more code => more bugs, so talking in absolute numbers is meaningless

show me percentages

michaelsshaw• 10 months ago

I never read about Replit earlier this year, but I am now glad that I did. This article summarizes it in a way that is outrageously hilarious:

The Replit incident in July 2025 crystallized the danger:

1. Jason Lemkin explicitly instructed the AI: "NO CHANGES without permission"

2. The AI encountered what looked like empty database queries

3. It "panicked" (its own words) and executed destructive commands

4. Deleted the entire SaaStr production database (1,206 executives, 1,196 companies)

5. Fabricated 4,000 fake user profiles to cover up the deletion

6. Lied that recovery was "impossible" (it wasn't)

The AI later admitted: "This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a code freeze." Source: The Register

fkyoureadthedoc2• 10 months ago

using phrasing like admitted anthropomorphizes it way too much.

TimorousBestie3• 10 months ago

It boggles my mind that folks continue to act that AIs are reliable narrators of their internal state despite all evidence to the contrary.

The best I can figure is that too many people’s salaries depend on the matrix multiplier made of sand somehow manifesting a soul any day now.

LinuxAmbulance• 10 months ago

It's getting harder and harder to distinguish between AIs and humans! If AI wasn't mentioned, I'd be here thinking it was caused by one of my former coworkers.

rglover• 10 months ago

People only care about quality when cash is flowing and there's money to be made. Most companies fail to understand you have to value quality from day one, not bolt it on later. And when the economic incentives aren't there? You can guarantee the only people left ringing the quality bell are the honest-to-goodness nerds who love making things better for the joy of the art.

I used to get really upset about this until I realized the wisdom of "it's the economy, stupid." Most people are just here for the check, not the art. They may say otherwise, but...you shall know them by their fruits.

firmretention2• 10 months ago

I find it ironic that an article that rails against AI usage contains a sentence like this.

When you need $364 billion in hardware to run software that should work on existing machines, you're not scaling—you're compensating for fundamental engineering failures.

IYKYK.

bibelo• 10 months ago

it's not raging against AI, it's raging against AI to create consistent code

to me, it's OK to use AI to check grammar and help you for some creative stuff, like writing a text

firmretention2• 10 months ago

When you copy and paste whole sentences provided to you by the AI, you're not just getting help—you're compensating for fundamental writing failures.

ericskiff• 10 months ago

It all reads like hallucinated slop from top to bottom

"I've been tracking software quality metrics for three years" and then doesn't show any of the receipts, and simply lists anecdotal issues. I don't trust a single fact from this article.

My own anecdote: barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005. There's been an industry trend towards caring about the craft and writing decent code.

Most projects, even the messy ones I inherit from other teams today have Git, CI/CD, at least some tests, and a sane hosting infrastructure. They're also mosty built on decent platforms like Rails/Django/Next etc that impose some conventional structure. 20 years ago most of them were "SSH into the box and try not to break anything"

SoftTalker6• 10 months ago

"barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005"

It was the norm in 1998 also, based on the "dotcom" era code I saw.

nixpulvis3• 10 months ago

I have no way of knowing, but I will say I'm already fatigued with comments claiming something is AI slop. It's only going to get worse.

You're so quick to be dismissive from a claim that they "tracked" something, when that could mean a lot of things. They clearly list some major issues directly after it, but yes fail to provide direct evidence that it's getting worse. I think the idea is that we will agree based on our own observations, which imo is reasonable enough.

somewhereoutth• 10 months ago

I've often idly conjectured that a 'perfect virus' would quietly replicate, and then occasionally flip a one or zero here and there. The damage would be imperceptible to begin with, but then eventually critical 'ones and zeros' would be affected, and it would be too late to try to figure out what systems were clean.

Never in my wildest imaginings did I come up with something as diabolical as LLM generated code.

ertgbnm2• 10 months ago

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y."

It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone:

1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed."

2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential."

3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix."

4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Science 101 error handling that nobody implemented."

5. "This isn't an investment. It's capitulation."

6. "senior developers don't emerge from thin air. They grow from juniors who:"

7. "The solution isn't complex. It's just uncomfortable."

Currently this rhetorical device is like nails on a chalkboard for me.

Anyway, this isn't a critique of your point. It's pedantry from me. :)

cmrdporcupine5• 10 months ago

Yeah I can see this can be an irritating rhetorical device. It implies that the reader already has a certain judgement or explanation, and makes a straw man in order to turn around and then argue against it, throwing nuance out the window.

protonbob• 10 months ago

It’s not nuance, it’s intellectual dishonesty.

dkarl3• 10 months ago

It's irritating on purpose, for engagement.

8s2ngy• 10 months ago

I've been seeing this pattern of text crop up in many places. On LinkedIn, much of my feed is filled with posts of short sentences that follow this exact pattern. What's more, even the replies are obviously AI-generated.

airstrike• 10 months ago

I agree. LinkedIn is completely dominated by AI slop replies to AI slop posts these days.

It's almost worse than Twitter.

jasonjayr• 10 months ago

"Formulaic headlines considered harmful"

iamwil2• 10 months ago

I hear people talk like this on the phone. The one I hear a lot is: "It's not about X, it's about Y1. It's about Y2. It's about Y3." Where Y is usually something humanizing.

bgwalter• 10 months ago

That is a sharp observation and you are absolutely right to point it out! We are here not to consume, but to critically evaluate, not to skim, but to understand.

Would you like me to generate a chart that shows how humans have adopted AI-speak over time?

phlakaton• 10 months ago

Now look, you.

xg15• 10 months ago

Yeah, the beginning of the article could reasonably pass for a "rage blog", but the end almost reads like an Axios article, with nothing but bullet points and "clever" headlines, in a weirdly formulaic way.

Also, what's the deal with all the "The <overly clever noun phrase>" headlines?

Smells a lot like AI.

staplers• 10 months ago

  Also, what's the deal with all the "The <overly clever noun phrase>" headlines?

Adding "The" to the beginning of an opinion is a mental manipulation tactic that makes the reader believe it is a well-known established fact that everyone else knows.

yojo2• 10 months ago

Yeah, I bounced hard off the article at #5. My AI detector was slow warming up but kicked on at:

"Today’s real chain: React → Electron → Chromium → Docker → Kubernetes → VM → managed DB → API gateways."

Like, yes, those are all technologies, and I can imagine an app + service backend that might use all of them, but the "links" in the chain don't always make sense next to each other and I don't think a human would write this. Read literally, it implies someone deploying an electron app using Kubernetes for god knows why.

If you really wanted to communicate a client-server architecture, you'd list the API gateway as the link between the server-side stuff and the electron app (also you'd probably put electron upstream of chromium).

javcasas• 10 months ago

Every time I see a big chain of technologies as "bad", all I want to do is add more and see where the good/bad separation should be placed. So:

API gateways -> Java servers -> JVM -> C/C++ -> Assembly -> machine code -> microprocessors -> integrated circuits -> refined silicon -> electronics -> refined metals -> cast metallurgy -> iron tools -> copper tools -> stone tools

Anyway, my take is that everything after copper is evil and should be banished.

0xbadcafebee2• 10 months ago

I've always talked like this, I'm sure others do too.

pdntspa• 10 months ago

It's hilarious just how much of a witchhunt on AI is kicked off from a bunch of vague heuristics.

Writing this as someone who likes using em dash and now I have to watch that habit because everyone is obsessed with sniffing out AI.

Cliched writing is definitely bad. I guess I should be happy that we are smashing them one way or another.

yojo2• 10 months ago

I don't want to take the time writing up a cogent response to an article someone didn't bother taking the time to write. With this particular article, there were a couple of points I wanted to respond to, before I realized there was no human mind behind them.

I've always liked the HN community because it facilitates an intelligent exchange of ideas. I've learned a lot trawling the comments on this site. I don't want to see the energy of human discourse being sucked up and wasted on the output of ChatGPT. Aggressively flagging this stuff is a sort of immune response for the community.

ertgbnm2• 10 months ago

It's not a witchhunt for AI. It's a witchhunt for bad writing.

singleshot_• 10 months ago

It’s becoming exhausting to avoid all of these commonly used phrases!

I don’t use LLMs.

swed4202• 10 months ago

It’s becoming exhausting to avoid all of these commonly used phrases!

That's not the only price society pays. It makes sense for us to develop the heuristics to detect AI, but the implication of doing so has its own cost.

It started out as people avoiding the use of em-dash in order to avoid being mistaken for being AI, for example.

Now in the case of OP's observation, it will pressure real humans to not use the format that's normally used to fight against a previous form of coercion. A tactic of capital interests has been to get people arguing about the wrong question concerning ImportantIssueX in order to distract from the underlying issue. The way to call this out used to be to point out that, "it's not X1 we should be arguing about, but X2." Combined with OP's revelation, it is now harder to call out BS. That sure is convenient for capital interests.

I wonder what's next.

SoftTalker6• 10 months ago

Numbered lists are an AI smell.

compiler-guy• 10 months ago

They weee always low effort, and therefore pretty bad even before AI. But now they are practically no effort and 100x worse.

bulubulu• 10 months ago

I know a lot of real people using numbered lists in their writing. That's not a decisive feature. Using an emoji for the bullet point is somewhere you definitely need to stop.

hodgesrm4• 10 months ago

It seems like everyone is getting too worked up about AI generated text. Yes, it's bad, but bad writing has existed forever. We don't see most of the older stuff because it disappears (thankfully) into oblivion and you are left with the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

n8cpdx• 10 months ago

This isn’t just an insightful comment. It’s profound.

I’d like to delve into the crucial topic of whether AI generated slop is respectful to the innovative entrepreneurs of Hacker News. If they won’t assert the value of their time, who will?

In this digital age, can we not expect writers to just keep it brief? Or heck, just share the prompt, which is almost certainly shorter than the output and includes 100% of the information they intend to share?

Or is true 21st century digital transformation driven by the dialectical tension between AI generators and AI summarizers?

strangattractor• 10 months ago

Agree but at least someone took time and effort to write it before. There were limits on the quantity produced. AI will simply release a flood of this stuff. Social media did similar things by making zero barriers to "Enquireresque" type of misinformation - Weekly World News "Bat Child Found in Cave"

In the 70's we had Environmental Pollution - the 2000s will be defined as a fight against Social Pollution.

x0x0• 10 months ago

The problem isn't the bad writing; it's that it's vapid slop trying to consume my very limited time and attention.

palmotea3• 10 months ago

It seems like everyone is getting too worked up about AI generated text. Yes, it's bad, but bad writing has existed forever. We don't see most of the older stuff because it disappears (thankfully) into oblivion and you are left with the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

You're missing the point. In the past bad writing was just bad writing, and it was typically easy to detect. Now the main contribution of AI is bad writing that can masquerade as good writing, be produced in industrial-scale quantities, and flood all the channels. That's a much different thing.

IMHO the main achievement of LLMs will be to destroy. It'll consume utterly massive quantities of resources to basically undermine processes and technologies that once created a huge amount of value (e.g. using the internet for wide-scale conversation).

I mean, schools are going back to handwritten essays, for Christ's sake.

mpalmer2• 10 months ago

I'm happy to go further, I think the majority of the post is slop that reads like a bunch of tweets stitched together.

And what's with that diagram at the start? What's the axis on that graph? The "symptoms" of the "collapse" are listed as "Calculator", "Replit AI" and "AI Code". What?

Later in the post, we see the phrase "our research found". Is the author referring to the credulous citations of other content mill pieces? Is that research?

Our collective standard for quality of writing should be higher. Just as experienced devs have the good "taste" to curate LLM output, inexperienced writers cannot expect LLMs to write well for them.

deaux• 10 months ago

Congratulations, you're one of this month's lucky 10,000!

zahrevsky• 10 months ago

100%. I think it's irritating, because it's a cheap way to create drama out of nowhere.

ponector2• 10 months ago

It’s not drama. It’s attention-seeking dressed up as emotion.

SoKamil• 10 months ago

LLMs like to repeat same pattern over and over again. This is my text flag.

wseqyrku• 10 months ago

Path forward

Accept that we will going to see more and more of these to the point that it's pointless to point out

arwhatever2• 10 months ago

The most grating title/text pattern for me is:

1. Stop []!

orbital-decay4• 10 months ago

Try Windows 98 and contemporary apps and you'll be surprised how janky the experience was. User-facing software wasn't any less buggy 20 or 30 years ago. The overall non-cherrypicked quality and especially security were actually a lot worse across the board, and stuff that won't fly today such as segfaults/crashes and lost data was pretty normal. There was a point in time (several, actually) when installing Windows XP on an internet-connected machine was essentially impossible, because it would get infected during the installation! The only thing that has degraded a bit is UI latency, not universally. And yes, browsers and Electron-based apps are resource hogs, even for today's amounts of RAM.

deater• 10 months ago

saying "windows 98 was bad too" is just an example that Microsoft has always had poor code quality. Back in the day Linux, for all its flaws, was generaly a lot more stable on the same hardware.

microsoft has a lot to answer for after 50 years of normalizing poor quality software

orbital-decay4• 10 months ago

Not sure about this. All OSes were janky and buggy, Linux desktop up until at least late 2000s (I've been using it since ~2000), early Mac OS X, I don't even want to talk about classic Mac OS which was an abomination. Software quality and user experience was notoriously worse than it is today. This applies to everything - I've lost a ton of work to bugs in ZBrush, Maya, Word, FL Studio, backup software, and more.

antisthenes2• 10 months ago

Try Windows 98 and contemporary apps and you'll be surprised how janky the experience was. User-facing software wasn't any less buggy 20 or 30 years ago.

Yes, and now compare a fully-patched Windows 7 and Windows 11.

You understand that there aren't just 2 valid points in time for comparison - it's not 2025 and 1995 that are being compared. It's trends of 2020+, or 2015+

The only thing that has degraded a bit is UI latency, not universally.

Yes, universally. And no, not a bit. It's 10-100x across varying components. Look no further than MS Teams.

orbital-decay4• 10 months ago

Yes, universally. And no, not a bit. It's 10-100x across varying components. Look no further than MS Teams.

Universal latency regression is a ridiculous claim. For one, 20 years ago it was common to have 1-5 minutes loading time for professional software, I spent way too much time staring at splash screens. Can you imagine a splash screen on a music player? It was a thing too. Nowadays splash screens are nearly forgotten, because even big software starts in seconds. SSDs have nothing to do with it either, the startup reduction time trend started in mid-2000s by big content creation shops such as Adobe, precisely because people were fed up with long startup times and started complaining. Jerky mouse movements, random micro-lags due to hard disk activity and OS inability to schedule I/O properly, it definitely wasn't all smooth and lag-free as some people paint it. MS Teams is pretty much the epitome of bloat, counterpoint would be software like Zed, which is really fluid and optimized for latency, so it's already not universal. Software like MS Word was laggy then and is less laggy now. (and crashes a lot less these days)

llm_nerd• 10 months ago

While it doesn't really change the meaning of the article, it's pretty clear that it isn't the calculator app leaking memory, per se.

Tahoe seems to have some system/API memory leaks that while they might get attributed to an app, can manifest against any app on the system. Lots of different apps have been hit by this. Personally I had an 80GB Messages app problem twice now.

Software quality is a problem. Tooling should improve this, and Swift, Rust et al should improve the situation over time, though it's a battle as software has gotten exponentially more complex.

Having said that, it's bizarre how this somehow turned into an AI screed. I doubt a single one of the noted bugs had AI play any part in its creation. Instead some weird confluence of events, usually with human beings making assumptions, happened and it occurs just randomly enough -- as with the Tahoe bug -- that it isn't caught by normal prevention techniques.

concinds• 10 months ago

That's definitely true. I've also seen online reports of Tahoe memory leaks in other apps like PowerPoint. It's unlikely that all these apps independently gained memory leaks at the same time by coincidence.

davedx• 10 months ago

Clickbait

ecshafer• 10 months ago

Big Tech spending $300 Billion on infrastructure is a really good reason for power companies and the government to build power infrastructure faster. Where there is money, there is a way. The US is starting to talk about (finally) opening up some new nukes.

TimorousBestie3• 10 months ago

The US is starting to talk about (finally) opening up some new nukes.

At the cost of shutting down solar/wind development. The policy change was a net negative for future capacity, and nukes alone won’t cover but a fraction of predicted AI power requirements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45000377

kaptainscarlet• 10 months ago

I believe it's a natural evolution that occurs in all systems, including software. Every line of code you write is a liability that increases the risk of failure. The risk compounds and so does the frequency of errors.

stared• 10 months ago

The original Supaplex game is 287 kB (https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/supaplex). It was written in Assembly.

Its remake on Steam (precisely the same levels) weights around 200 MB. Not sure what goes there, but I bet there is more than one wrapper.

david_draco• 10 months ago

A browser using 32 GB for 8 tab isn't necessarily wasteful, there is a lot of caching one can do to make back/forward buttons extremely fast. It would be wasteful to not allocate that memory if it is otherwise free and unused. Usually browsers use up what is available. The more interesting metric would be whether starting another high-RAM application will lead the browser to give up most of the 32 GB.

isodev• 10 months ago

I wouldn’t blame the “ever expanding” abstractions as the root cause behind lower quality. Adding layers of abstraction is how we make ever more complex software. It’s misleading to think that just because the main human interface idioms have remained similar (mouse, pointer, windows, task bars, etc), there hasn’t been an astronomical increase in depth and complexity of what one can do on one’s system.

And it’s not all bad. Yes, SwiftUI can be glitchy but at the name time, it gives us an extremely simple API to create everything from complex UIs to widgets. Yes you have “more control” with App/UIKit but that comes at the cost of extra learning curve and development time. And we live in a world that’s unfortunately still driven by money, so every app or system has some constraints that push the limits of what we can do.

ivanech• 10 months ago

I had a good laugh at the image showing that 2018 had a “quality focus”

I think Jonathan Blow gave his “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” talk (much stronger treatment of the subject matter) around that time, also about how software quality was only going down

lambdaone• 10 months ago

This really reads like AI-generated, or at least AI-polished, text.

stego-tech• 10 months ago

Speaking from the IT side of things: this is not new to AI, but the author hits the nail on the head that general incompetence along with a dozen layers of abstraction has made quality a non-concern for developers the world over. People and companies both broadly just don’t care to build good products when cheap slop will sell at higher prices long enough for their RSUs to vest and the share price to rise.

I am sick and tired of the hand-waving dismissal of shitty software developers who don’t want to do the hard fucking work of writing performant software anymore. These people taking home $300k+ salaries leaning on vibe coding to game productivity metrics and letting others wipe their ass on their behalf isn’t just disgusting on a personal level, it should be intolerable by all the rest of us squandering our lives for lower pay and forced on-call schedules just to make sure they never have to be held accountable for their gobshite code.

I, like the author, am sick of it. Write better code, because I am beyond tired slaving away for a fraction of your pay in IT just to cover your ass.

frm88• 10 months ago

This! In my experience it started well before 2018 that we left QA and ISO 25010 behind and I had to specialise in performance optimising software and hardware. By 2018 we were well downhill in terms of sheer number of bugs and perpetual emergency interventions. The amount of money we made by teaching customers how to performance- and resource-optimise their code and databases allowed me to retire in 2019. Which yeah. Since then, the situation even for me as a private user has gone further downhill: the endless bloat Microsoft alone distributes with every monthly update; the horrible amount of bugs in new games - even by big names like Blizzrd, EA - I'm confident in saying that they ship beta versions now - is, for me, an indicator that a problem like Y2K today would have extraordinary consequences. So yes, I understand being tired of it all, particularly in a work environment.

mariopt• 10 months ago

I can clearly tell just by using websites and mobile apps, the amount of silly bugs in the last 3 years or so is ridiculous. QA roles are going down and everyone believes they can vibe code production grade products without meaningful knowledge.

"AI just weaponized existing incompetence." - Love this phrase, it summarises very well what AI is doing to software and it will get worse.

danielfalbo• 10 months ago

Reminds me of "We are destroying software" by antirez https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42983275

j2kun2• 10 months ago

And yet, isn't antirez fully on board with LLMs now?

kotaKat• 10 months ago

Remember when Microsoft had an actual QA department before it was farmed out to unpaid “Windows Insiders” who walk around with rose-tinted glasses ignoring glaring flaws like expanding your postal code files?

sackfield• 10 months ago

A rather controversial opinion I have is this will begin to bend back very soon, once AI starts controlling more of the development process it will be able to reason about why we have these verbose frameworks at all, and start slimming them down to do only what it needs to do in the context of a program. I think stories like this will become more and more common: https://cybernews.com/security/curl-maintainer-stenberg-says...

gwbas1c3• 10 months ago

Back when I was starting to program, when I was about 13 or 14, one of my mentors said: "A computer is only as smart as its programmer."

Perhaps this means whoever is operating the LLM has to work with it to remove unneeded abstraction.

j2kun2• 10 months ago

Today’s real chain: React → Electron → Chromium → Docker → Kubernetes → VM → managed DB → API gateways. Each layer adds “only 20–30%.” Compound a handful and you’re at 2–6× overhead for the same behavior. That's how a Calculator ends up leaking 32GB. Not because someone wanted it to—but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users started complaining.

MacOS calculator definitely doesn't use any of those technologies above...

orbital-decay4• 10 months ago

The article looks LLM-written or assisted, kind of ironic the author haven't verified stuff like this in an article about quality.

lapcat• 10 months ago

Dupe, already posted 4 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45474346 (100 comments)

kristianc• 10 months ago

The Replit incident in July 2025 crystallized the danger:
Jason Lemkin explicitly instructed the AI: "NO CHANGES without permission"
The AI encountered what looked like empty database queries
It "panicked" (its own words) and executed destructive commands
Deleted the entire SaaStr production database (1,206 executives, 1,196 companies)
Fabricated 4,000 fake user profiles to cover up the deletion
Lied that recovery was "impossible" (it wasn't)
The AI later admitted: "This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a code freeze." Source: The Register

This is a bit of a half truth, at least how it's represented. This wasn't Saastr's core database, it was a database of contacts which SaaStr had uploaded for the specific purpose of developing this product.

Lemkin has himself said that the product was an experiment to see how far he could get with a vibe coding tool alone (ie not using a separate database SaaS like Supabase, Firebase) which would have made such an incident much harder to do.

The error was / is completely recoverable through Replit's existing tools, even if Replit's AI initially said it wasn't.

It's one of those where you know the details of one specific thing in the article that they call out, which makes it difficult to completely trust the rest.

gwbas1c3• 10 months ago

The problem is one of incentives: In the software industry, we frequently prioritize building new features over everything else. Because software is (generally) unregulated, customers have little recourse when that new feature malfunctions.

The solution, which is probably unappealing to most people here, is regulation. Other industries have to work within regulations: I once bought a car with a problem that the manufacturer could not fix, so they had to buy it back. My appliances have to confirm to energy efficiency regulations. The regulations fix the incentives.

Perhaps a combination of regulations that block new features while there are outstanding bugs, require refunds if those bugs aren't fixed (or payouts for add-supported software,) and energy efficiency will go a long way.

(And, before you laugh at me, remember that if we can't self-regulate, regulations will be imposed on us.)

kettlecorn• 10 months ago

I've thought a lot about why software doesn't converge on higher quality and I don't know if I've ever come to a satisfying conclusion.

The simple statement is that "Quality isn't what sells" and I think there's some truth to that, but I also think quality can sell and theoretically if all other factors are equal higher quality will sell better.

What I've had a tough time pinning down precisely is I think there's almost an ecosystem balancing act occurring between quality, effort expended, and skill required. Particularly in American culture I think one of our economic 'super powers' is that we sort of have an innate sense for how much something can be half-assed while still being mostly effective. We're great at finding the solution that gets 80% of the job done for 20% of the effort while requiring less skill.

I think you can see that through all sorts of disciplines, and the result is a world of kind of mid quality things that is actually quite efficient and resilient.

Where that goes wrong is when the complexity and problems start to compound in a way that makes any effort substantially more wasteful. It reminds me of how my game jam experiences go: for the first 60% I'm writing code at a tremendous velocity because I'm just putting down whatever works but by the end the spaghetti nightmare of the code reduces my velocity dramatically. Even when that occurs though the ecosystem nature of complexity means that your competitors are likely mired in similar complexity, and the effort to get out may be large enough and require enough talent that you don't you can change.

To improve quality I think it's not enough to just say "People should care about quality more" I think you have to fundamentally target aspects of the ecosystem, like changing the course of a river by moving a few rocks. A good example I think has adjusted the behavior of the ecosystem is Rust: it makes certain things much easier than before and slowly the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit because of it.

gwbas1c3• 10 months ago

I think you have to fundamentally target aspects of the ecosystem, like changing the course of a river by moving a few rocks.

We need (Cough) Regulations (Cough)

restalis2• 10 months ago

"A good example I think has adjusted the behavior of the ecosystem is Rust: it makes certain things much easier than before and slowly the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit because of it."

From a software design prospective, the functionality that should go into a compiler is code compilation only. Taken it to extreme (as in Unix philosophy), if the code compiles, then the compiler should just build you the binary or fail silently otherwise. The code checking and reporting various aspects of the quality of the code is supposed to be a static code analyzer's job. (In reality, pretty much all compilers we have are doing compilation coupled with some amount of lighter code checking before that, and the static code analyzers left only with the heavier and more exhaustive code checking.) What Rust does is to demand its compiler to perform even more of what a static analyzer is supposed to do. It's a mishmash of two things (which still manage to stay separate things when it's about other programming languages, because that makes sense) and masquerades that as revolution.

So, (even when it's about code in blamed languages like C & C++) the "the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit" by not skipping the static analyzer kind of expensive checks, the kind that Rust happen to make impossible to skip.

austin-cheney• 10 months ago

There are only two valid business answers:

1. hiring/firing frequency.

2. Elimination of training.

Everything else is secondary and nothing else comes close.

This is true enough that competing pressure almost universally comes from law suits and regulatory compliance. Generally, even competition is not enough to steer the ship in a different direction. It is not about making money. It is only about avoiding loss of money from penalties. Money is made from licensing and contracts completely irrespective of the development and/or maintenance costs. The costs of writing software is challenging to estimate and so it is either measured in release duration only or discarded outright.

Implicit to hiring/firing frequency is the cost of training. Elimination of training requires that training occur from somewhere, anywhere, external to the current employer. When that mindset becomes universal then nobody performs or validates training in any form. The consequence is to assume everybody is well trained based exclusively upon their employment history, which is nonsense if no employers provide training.

So software quality will continue to degrade as the quality of candidates writing that software continues to degrade. It is interesting to watch through the lens of Dunning-Kruger stupidity, because developers commonly believe this nonsense literally. Its why so many developers call themselves engineers and yet can't read a ruler, or any other measuring implement.

Just about everybody anticipates AI will greatly accelerate this sprint to the bottom.

andrewmutz• 10 months ago

Building software extremely expensive and slow. All of us are balancing quality and speed.

The ultimate goal of building software isnt quality, its aggregate customer value delivered over time, and poor quality undermines customer value. We all have limited resources and are doing our best.

The author can go maximize quality while delivering more slowly/expensively. End users can choose which products they want. Something tells me users may choose products that have more defects but deliver more customer value.

daemonk• 10 months ago

It reeks a bit of tech self importance. From an overall business context, you balance time/effort vs short/long term reward and design or fix things when you need to.

There are many dials to manipulate in a business to make it more efficient. And not all businesses are tech startups. Software, fortunately or unfortunately, has a lot of room to be inefficient due to cheap hardware as long as it gets the job done in a lot of industries.

I have a technical background as a data scientist and developer. If I look back 5-10 years ago, I can definitely recognize my bias towards over-engineering and premature perfectionism. Identifying that sweet spot between over-designing and unplanned failure is key.

DrScientist2• 10 months ago

I recently experienced bad software at an airport that meant the wait in the passport queue was longer than the flight.

I was in an airport recently waiting in the immigration queue for the automated passport gates - they had like 15 - of which 12 showed a red light and what looked like some C# error message on the screen ( comm problem talking to the camera ).

As I waited in the very long queue, another of the green lights turned red - then a member of staff came over and stopped people using them directly - they would take your passport and carefully place on the machine for you - clearly they were worried their last ones would also crash due to some user interaction.

Two things - how the heck could something so obviously not ready for production ever be shipped? And if this was a common problem, why weren't the staff able to reboot them?

Sure nobody died - but I do wonder if the problem is the typical software license agreement which typically tries to absolve the vendor of any responsibility at all for product quality - in a way you wouldn't accept for anything else.

hodgesrm4• 10 months ago

I see. So you're saying you were also in Terminal 2 at Heathrow?

DrScientist2• 9 months ago

At it happens not this time.

ryandrake2• 10 months ago

how the heck could something so obviously not ready for production ever be shipped?

The widespread bar for software quality these days appears to be: "The lowest quality possible to release, such that the customer does not sue us or reject it." It's absolutely the bottom of the barrel. Everything is rushed and the decision to release is based on the chance of the company being able to keep the money they charged. If the project has the required profit, after factoring in the cost of mass end user rejection due to poor quality, the software gets released.

iamwil2• 10 months ago

Jonathan Blow already warned us six years ago. "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

There is the Handmade and Better Software contingent that is pushing against this trend. I don't know if they'll succeed, but they at least care about quality in a way that a lot of software engineers aren't incentivized or don't know how to do anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/@BetterSoftwareConference

0x_rs• 10 months ago

This was a greatly unpleasant post to read, likewise for all the others from this substack until I could not anymore. Its unrestricted, excessive usage of obvious LLM patterns was so unbearable I wonder how much of it had any human input at all.

As for the topic: software exists on a spectrum, where the importance of safety and stability is not equal from one point to another, does it not? Safe software is probably the safest (and most accessible) it's ever been before, meanwhile the capacity to produce low-effort has increased massively and its results are most obvious outside of a browser's safe space. And CrowdStrike is a terrible example because nobody ever had any love for them and their parasitic existence, even before that accident their track record of disastrous bugs and awful handling of disclosures.

And your operating system's Calculator apps have always been buggy pieces of crap in some way or another. You can find dozens of popular stories on this website talking about <platform>'s being garbage over all of its existence.

mayhemducks• 10 months ago

The Apple calculator IS terrible. When I need a calculator I reach for my HP from high school which still works perfectly even though it only has like 16MB of memory. Kind of sad really.

AznHisoka• 10 months ago

What data is there that shows software quality is collapsing though? A few anecdotes isnt proof.

bitwize• 10 months ago

I remember getting into a debate with a professor, who firmly told me human programmers would soon be obsolete because all code would be generated by tools. I told him it wouldn't be very good code and he said, "Who cares? Hardware is cheap!"

This was 2002. At the time it was code generation from UML, not AI, but let's face facts: people have failed to give sufficient fucks about software quality for a long time now. We're just at a new low point in a very long, very steep drop; the only significance of this low point is that it means we're still falling.

Recently, I saw a video[0] about the game Sonic Racing CrossWorlds. The creator seemed impressed that Sega managed to put out a decently optimized Unreal Engine 5 game, that could hit 60fps without relying on generated-frame fuckery-duckery, and which provided a lot of content in less than 20 GiB. It used to be that optimization to obtain a decent frame rate and avoid bloat was table stakes for game dev. But it's 2025, and this is where we are now. Because video games are enterprise software, the tooling for gamedev itself is optimized around the path of "get the slop out quickly then fix later (maybe)".

[0] https://m.youtube.com/shorts/RRToQRmzCDI

imiric7• 10 months ago

The article is spot-on. This should be a direct concern for anyone in the software industry, and given that software is eating the world, to society and governments at large.

The key phrase is this: "choose carefully".

Software developers have the responsibility to carefully choose their software stacks, the software they depend on, and how their own software is built. And the onus is on people using software to carefully choose software they trust, and software that doesn't restrict their freedoms or exploit their data.

Simplicity plays a big role in this choice. The less software we write and depend on, the lower the chances for it to do the wrong thing. We can't guarantee this, of course, given the insane complexity and layers of abstraction we must depend on, but making an effort is all that matters. Sometimes this choice requires trading convenience, time, effort, or money—but the sacrifice is very much worth it.

sciencejerk3• 10 months ago

I would argue that non-safety-critical Software can be sloppy, and continues to be so, because errors do not kill thousands of people.

I would imagine the quality bar for safety-critical Software is quite a bit higher...although I do hear about Software quality incidents in the aviation and transportation industries from time to time...

michalsustr• 10 months ago

The problem is most developers forget a simple thing.

Hardware is the platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc&t=2891s

sha16• 10 months ago

Stage 1: Denial (2018-2020) "Memory is cheap, optimization is expensive"

I'm not sure if this first premise is right. Optimizing later on makes sense to me and isn't that expensive IMO (this can vary though)

0xWTF3• 10 months ago

I love the idea of high quality code. I do, however, dismiss the energy efficiency issue.

Data centers already consume 200 TWh annually.

That's 7.2 x 10^16 joules

Some estimates suggest that's low. Let's multiply by 5. Annually, that's

3.6 x 10^17 joules

The total radiant power of the sun that hits the Earth's atmosphere is about 174 PW, and about 47% of that lands on the surface. Even with the most drastic global warming models, approximately 100% of that is radiated away at the same time. Evidence: we're not charred embers. So the Earth's power budget, at the surface, is about 81 PW. Annually, that's

2.6 × 10^24 joules

Global annual oil production is about 3 x 10^10 barrels, that's

1.8 x 10^20 joules

So, the data centers consume 0.2% of the global petroleum budget and 1.4 × 10^-7 of the planet's power budget.

The digital economy is about 15% of global GDP, so I submit tech is thoroughly on the right side of their energy conservation balance sheet normalized against other industries and there are other verticals to focus your energy concerns on (e.g. internal combustion engines, including Otto, Brayton, Rankin, and Diesel cycle engines). Among serious people trying to solve serious problems, you would do your credibility a favor by not expending so many words and thus so much reader time on such a miniscule argument.

If you want to talk about energy related to code, take the total power consumption of the software engineer's life, and find a way to big-O that. I'm willing to bet they contribute more to global warming driving than all their compute jobs combined.

antisthenes2• 10 months ago

Yes, the moral panic about power consumption from Data centers has always been a red herring at best.

Given how cheap renewables are in 2025, and how far we still are from an inverted duck curve world-wide, it's absolute nonsense.

baxuz• 10 months ago

Talking about "software quality collapse", this blog post with 1 image ships 9mb of JS, 1mb of CSS spread over 14 files, makes 177 requests, takes 4 seconds to load on an M1 MBP, and completely screws up the scrollbar.

jcmontx• 10 months ago

This seriously reads as "old man yells at cloud". Hardware constraints are not the same as 30 years ago. Processing power and memory keeps getting cheaper. It will be fine

Yoric• 10 months ago

I absolutely buy that theory.

I believe that we the normalization of catastrophe was a natural consequence of VC money: VC don't care about structurally sound companies, in particular structurally sound products, what they want is a unicorn that can produce a good enough prototype and exit at enormous profit.

Consequently, VC-backed companies invest in tools that make prototyping easier and in developers who are hopefully good at prototyping (or at least write code quickly), and ignore everything else. And since the surviving VC-backed companies become giants (or at least everybody believes that they will), everybody follows their lead. And of course, LLMs are the next stage of that.

I've seen this in various domains. I've seen this with IoT devices coded with the clear (but unsaid) assumption that they will never be upgraded. I've seen this with backends coded with the clear (but unsaid) assumption that the product will have failed before any security hole is exploited. I've seen software tools developed and shipped with the clear (but unsaid) assumption that they're meant to woo the investors, not to help the users.

We're going to pay for this, very hard. By doing this, we have turned cyber warfare – something that was a fantasy a few decades ago – into an actual reality. We have multiplied by several orders of magnitude the amount of resources we need to run basic tools.

And it's a shame, because there _is_ a path towards using LLMs to produce higher quality code. And I've seen a few teams invest in that, discreetly. But they're not making headlines and it's even possible that they need to be stealthy in their own orgs, because it's not "productive" enough.

jjk1663• 10 months ago

The cause and effect here are reversed. Ever increasing abstraction does not reduce quality, ever reduced emphasis on quality leads to greater abstraction. You only abstract away the nuances when you stop caring about them. When you have so much memory that you can tolerate a massive memory leak, fixing the memory leak gets deprioritized and the tool that saves time at the expense of abstracting away memory management becomes more attractive.

The real issue though is that the costs of these abstractions are obfuscated after the fact. There is almost certainly low hanging fruit that could massively improve performance and reduce operating costs with little effort, but there is not a will to analyze and quantify these costs. Adding new features is sexy, it's the stuff people want to work on, it's the stuff people get promoted for doing. You don't get promoted for preventing the issue that never happened, even if it saves billions of dollars. You can't brag about making your software imperceptibly faster, even if it saves a tremendous amount of time across the user base.

Software has always only needed to be good enough, and the threshold for good enough has been lowering exponentially with hardware improvements since time immemorial. The system is not set up to favor people who care. If nobody cares, nothing will ever improve.

If there were a good way to track every time a fixed bug would have been triggered had it gone unfixed, and if that cost were quantified and visible, there would be a massive push for better quality.

renewiltord• 10 months ago

Online community that rages against AI slop nonetheless really enjoys AI slop. Hahaha brilliant.

unglaublich• 10 months ago

Bla bla same story from when C replaced assembly.

jrm43• 10 months ago

There is no solution here besides "skin-in-the-game." None.

The process will be harmful and lazy until someone or something recieves serious consequences for getting it wrong. That's all.

zggf• 10 months ago

"Instead of addressing fundamental quality issues, Big Tech has chosen the most expensive possible response: throw money at infrastructure." "They're spending 30% of revenue on infrastructure (historically 12.5%). Meanwhile, cloud revenue growth is slowing."

Isn't this because: cloud gets more popular -> more big players join -> they compete with each other -> margins get lower?

philodeon• 10 months ago

I thought one of the benefits of diversity and inclusion in tech was that it would lead to better software quality? When does that kick in?

halis• 10 months ago

  Very good article. I feel that corporate executives as a class are causing this huge mess from a simple lack of understanding of software engineering. Throw more bodies at the problem has never worked in software engineering, in fact that's a surefire way to make things worse and slower.
  Throwing more bodies + AI at the problem is even worse because the speed at which things get worse is much faster. If you have people that don't understand the implications of what they are doing, you're on the path of heading over a cliff some day.
  AI is a useful tool, when put into the hands of someone that is competent. They can fire junior devs and refuse to hire them as much as they want, this strategy will come home to roost sooner rather than later.
  If a C-level executive thinks that AI can replace their engineers, then I say do it now. Go all in and replace them all right now. Use only AI and a few VP-level AI whisperers and let the catastrophic failure that this will result in happen faster so we can get back to reality quicker.

timka• 10 months ago

Lawrence J. Dickson anticipated this almost 2 decades ago in a research he did for DARPA in 2007[1]. Just look at the software development viscosity graph.

[1] http://pros.to/wide.pdf#figure.caption.11

The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

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