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  frameset
  > I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it when I have to use my work mac or windows computers.See here for docs, under "Focus stealing prevention" - https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehavi...
• willchis
  Since upgrading iOS, my iPhone (13) will: - sometimes fail to open the camera - make the bottom half of the screen blank when you do email searches - use more battery - become unusable if you turn on any transparency effects.
• Otterly99
  I agree with the author. I think everybody has strong or at least mixed feeling agent agentic coding and to me, the argument is always focused on the product itself.I come from sciences, where the problem of AI is more linked to AI-generated papers rather than coding. Again, the real underlying problem is the pressure to publish at all cost and the ranking grant system which rewards number of publication rather than quality.I'm sure you could say the same of AI-generated images, sound or video used in advetising, or any field where AI generation offers a shortcut. The problem is always that you need to produce as much results as fast as possible and quality is not the objective. The problem is always the KPI.
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  fer
  > I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.I still don't understand how a full focus stealability debounce is not the norm. If I am in the middle of writing, or interacting with one UI bit in any way, no other app should be able to steal focus, full stop. Add an annoying popup if you want, make angry computer noises, flash icons, I don't care. 99.9, if not 100% of the time, it's completely unrelated to what I'm doing and can absolutely wait. While some OSs have something along these lines, they also give the tools to bypass it (I'm looking at you, Cisco AnyConnect! Being connected after clicking on connect is not an emergency!)Imagine you're working in a terminal and an app decides to steal STDIN. Why do we accept that for a GUI?
• ensemblehq
  While there is increased complexity on top of all the software thats being built today, I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years. When business schools and tech leaders prioritize the idea that we need to be more agile and every sprint needs to be a production release, these are the results we get.
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  mrkeen
  I agree that software becoming worse (in some sense) but I don't blame AI.My experiences as a user haven't really changed. Streamers fail to cast to TVs. Browsers are devices which reliably and efficiently propagate red console text and 500s from companies to you. I still see bluescreens on public touchscreens.Uncle Bob nailed one reason why the industry isn't getting better: the growth of programmers is exponential, such that half of all programmers have less than n years experience (5?).I offer two additional reasons:Firstly, you hone your skills doing individual algorithms on a single thread, where it's OK to get it wrong and change it as many times as you like.When you get a job, you don't even realise you're in a distributed system and the getter/setter model you practiced on is woefully inadequate for interacting with partner systems, cqrs, event-sourcing, auditability, idempotency or whatever else is required.In short, 10 years of practicing writing for-loops and data-structures will not translate into building a system that customers can access via their phone and multiple tabs of a browser, at the same time as a database schema is being updated.Secondly, while I don't think there is any realistic alternative to agile development, it seems that nontechnical POs have captured the software lifecycle. 'Focus on happy path only, for the MVP' is how you build buggy software. Good developers can learn that this will guarantee the need for a rewrite in the future, but POs never will.It seems like the languages have been increasingly targeting the beginner segment (C++ -> Java -> JS -> Python), while the tasks have been getting more complicated (b2b distributed systems, 24/7 uptime, millions of users, resistance to hackers, machine learning, etc.)
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  fhd2
  Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience.Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now. Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? Or is support not that key and we should invest into being the most reliable? The most enjoyable to use?One can hope.
• purpleflashing
  As a non-technical person compared to the rest of HN, I think this has always been the problem of software made for non-technical audiences. The design was driven by programmers’ heuristics and trends in technology stack (e.g. if a company can hire a lot of JS devs bc JS is trending, they will choose JS even regardless of whether JS is the best choice for the problem).There was a brief stint of UX, ergonomics and HMI getting traction in enterprise, and, imo, the biggest technological achievements in consumer software has been in the realm of UX in twenty first century. But it lost its importance, I suppose, as you don’t need to make good software to make money off consumers.Whatever capabilities AI gives to programmers in terms of speed of development, etc, doesn’t change the fundamental behavior —- commercial software is not developed for humans. It is developed for investors, markets, around operational needs, based on CEOs whims, developers’ personal itches, relying on approximation of human experience that gets regurgitated through layers of commercial processes of product managers, UX researchers (who, if present at all, often don’t get invited to the conversation until there are buttons to move in a GUI of an already existing product). Where human experience is considered, it’s from the perspective of our natural weaknesses with the goal to exploit them to maximize profits. Hence why 21st century tech gave us all the dark patterns, feeds, social media, LLM chatbots, etc.Even when I talk to individual engineers who are committed to creating something good, wholesome, something that they can be proud of -— many think and reason about the problem in a way that sounds like they are trying to engineer human experience the same way one would engineer instructions for machines.It will never get better, IMO. AI only exemplifies what already exists.
• ricardobayes
  To add to author's point, I did work at an organization that decided focus on bugfixing for a full release cycle, and the PM was sacked after that.
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  hibikir
  A lot of the product misses come from large product teams where nobody owns anything, and where there's minimal internal goal alignment. I know that, at work, what I am incentivized to do has nothing to do with what I consider the most important work I could do.... and I also know that the maze I would have to cross to be allowed to do the better work is just not worth it.The smaller the org, the better the chances of having only reasonable levels of misalignment... but without taking on high risk, it's just better pat to work on a large, worse org. Frustrating.
• ricardobayes
  I'm doing the exact opposite: I'm maxing out my PTO and taking long holidays. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be in this field in five years time so why bother. It's time to figure out what other passions I have apart from programming.Programming is going to be like ceramics or pottery: you can grab a nice set of bowls at IKEA for $10. We are doing the artisanal pottery that no one really wants or cares for.
• prologic
  Software has neither gotten worse nor become any better. All you're seeing is the cost of writing code approach near zero. As that happens the speed at which you see defects increases. Software is by its very definition "malleable". It is without (or very few) constraints. So it is very hard to get "prefect". That is why IMO Site Reliability Engineering will be one of the few fields that will remain, because until we build an _actual_ goodness to gracious Intelligent System that can think critically, including how systems can fail (which includes humans), software will be what is hat always been "soft".
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  Jtarii
  Software quality has been declining for long before AI was a thing.Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is.The incentives are large companies are fundamentally not in align with making high quality software people actually enjoy interacting with.
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  Hugsbox
  Just a little gripe, but near the end of the article he links to a site for something called "Omarchy" which appears to be a Linux distribution. If you click on the link, the only information available is in the form of a video.If you're making a Linux distro, please don't do this. I will not watch your video. I was interested, and now I'm not.
• RugnirViking
  Complexity + a lack of incentives to take time to get things right.Imo we know the tools (social, + technical) to make good software that works. But in the face of massive complexity, people just want the next feature, the next thing sales can use as a winAnd yeah I agree with the other commenter here - I don't think this is AI. We had terrible software before, even declining quality.
• elendilm
  <They were congratulating themselves on what an amazing job they had done. I keep thinking about that post every time I have to fight their product.>This is hilarious.
• eviks
  > There’s no denying that these new tools have already revolutionized how we create and use software. They have raised upper management’s expectations for team output. They may haveExpectations is neither about creation not use. "May" isn't a revolution outside of the historic calendar, so on both counts it's trivial to deny an ungrounded statement.> So why does software keep getting worse across the board?Because the premise on which the expectation is built is wrong?Also plenty of the issues are prehistoric with all the past meat bag generations to blame, case in point: > Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from GhosttySo who stopped that huge fruit corpo from doing the very basics of managing user experience in the past few decades minus a few AI years?
• localhost3000
  > This quarter, we won’t be releasing any new features, and we have no plans to redesign anything — we will exclusively focus on fixing bugs.IME this happens more often than people think. If you’re leading a team part of your job is to manage the expectations of those around you and explain your choices. If you do that well you can absolutely have quarters where you only pay down debt, it doesn’t require some huge attitude shift in the industry. Just explain why it’s the right thing and then do it.
• dminik
  This is probably going to sound elitist, but it is how I've been seeing this whole LLM thing play out.I don't necessarily believe in 10x devs, but there is a very clear output difference between various developers. During my career I've been both in a position where I was delivering much higher quality code at a similar pace to other coworkers and also mediocre code at a slower pace. Sometimes at the same time.Now, AI itself is a force multiplier. Depending on the task, your setup, your skill level (both as a developer and with LLMs), the weather, the model and so on, it can range anywhere from actively hindering you, to solving the entire thing for you. Let's say that on average you get a 20% productivity boost.If you take a 0.8x developer and give them a 1.2 force multiplier LLM, you get a 0.96x developer. Worse, the axis that has moved is speed, not quality.All this to say that if you let a below average developer vibecode, you get a much higher volume of slop. You can make an agent create good code, but this developer didn't care before so why should they now?*Note that this is from experience. I've started getting feature PRs from our devops team. It's been a very enlightening experience.
• luciana1u
  turns out the bottleneck was never doing things faster, it was doing things correctly, and we optimized away the people who knew the difference
• anon
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• nope1000
  My assumption is that AI-generated code explodes the flaws in your existing codebase. If your architecture is bad or not documented, your docs are out of date or the goal of the feature request is vague, how should the AI (or even a good human developer) develop high quality software?
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  jwr
  I have the same impression when I use things that are around me every day. Everything is broken and seemingly nobody cares. It seems that the teams developing software never use it themselves and do not care about bugs and terrible usability problems. It seems the management does not use any of the products that their businesses produce. And it seems that the ubiquitous breakage is just accepted as the status quo.This extends to any device which has software or firmware: banking websites, banking apps on mobile phones, car firmware, etc.I find it very depressing, especially when I think of the people who design, develop and deploy these apps. We are talking about large companies and teams of people. Entire chains of well-paid people designed, looked at, developed, tested, and then accepted these apps. And yet they break in the most obvious ways, or fail to be usable, instead pestering us with pop-ups and useless drivel and forgetting their state at every point.These problems are not subtle. To take a glaring example from my everyday life, in my car there are buttons for moving windows up and down. Sometimes when you press the button to move the window down, it will actually start moving up. We are talking about a simple button that moves a window. And seemingly everybody thinks this is fine?I don't know what to do about this.
• graemep
  > Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler.I think that points do the solution. We should not make stuff more complex than we can the level of complexity at which we can make it reliable.
• Biologist123
  > As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis.I work in mediation and have recently seen a few cases where I’ve wondered if the participants were suffering from AI psychosis as related to their claims: where they’d constructed their legal cases hand-in-hand with an LLM and had become absolutely convinced despite a contestable set of facts.People have always been subject to delusion, but in these cases, all documentation submitted was obviously created by chatbots.
• st-keller
  That’s why i‘m using claude to literally write everything for myself! I cannot fix software-problems in my car or my fridge or my heat-pump. But I can start by replacing my own infrastructure!
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  gchokov
  It was always like this.
• fragmede
  Use open source everything. If you have the source to something, you can change it. If you can change it, you can fix it. Run Linux and Firefox. Fork every last damn program and have AI fix every papercut that you don't like.
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  hasbot
  This post and the comments so far reminded me of 1984's two minutes of hate. When is Hate Week?
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  AussieWog93
  I remember noticing the same thing a decade ago. I don't think it has anything to do with AI.
• hypfer
  Those two twitter links with people that got hospitalized might just be people trying to get their 5 seconds of internet fame by (pretending to be) doing something dumb.So taking it at face value is kinda part of the problem here.The only way this can get better is by completely suffocating it off attention. It doesn't exist. It's not real.
• xg15
  > If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?I mean, he has given the answer in the article: Because "coding has been solved" is from the perspective of upper management, not devs or users - and that cares about software quality and usability (as standalone metrics) about as much as the McDonald's board cares about nutrition value.
• anon
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  smikhanov
  God, those "software is getting worse everywhere" takes are tedious.Let's have a look at a few rarely quoted examples from the last decade, shall we?Just six years ago, a big company rolls out a line of new chips so good that geeks and technology experts all get ecstatic and can't stop churning endless raving reviews. Those chips are fast, small and consume little energy. On top of that, the big company reworks their entire OS (OS!), the whole suite of software it has for it, the developer suite with compilers and SDKs and god knows what else and also ensures that everything ever written for that OS for the old chips continues to work and it indeed does.Then there's another big company that launched a file storage service around 20 years ago. Back then it was reliable and only gotten better over the years. They started offering their storage for a nanocent per gajibyte and twenty years of hard work allowed them to lower that cost to a picocent per gajibyte. They don't lose data, they are highly available, half of the internet stores their data at their servers.And then there's a -- gasp! -- consortium of big companies (fools would reply to this with an XKCD standards strip) that works on improvements to a shared set of standards for 4G, one of the most widely used technology stacks in the world, agrees on it, calls it 5G and rolls it out across the world and the whole spectrum of hardware and software vendors in a manner that resembles replacing a wing of an aircraft mid-flight so that not a single pasta strand falls from the forks of the business class customers.And here we have someone who thinks that a customer support page for his fridge (fridge!) thrown together by a low-paid second-grade developer in a third-world country is indicative of the whole industry decline."Nothing works", my hairy bum. Get real.
• micoti
  MacOS contstant trolling with tab switching. I regret each day of life I need to use this shitty OS because of corporate. In linux these things will never happen
• TacticalCoder
  > I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.Back when I was using IRC from Emacs (with erc) I had written a safeguard in elisp against that. Haven't been on IRC in a while but this helped me prevent sending to the "group chat" (the IRC channel) a great many private infos.Same for my real name for example: I had a filter where anything containing my actual name would be blocked.I think a great many software where you "chat" with "groups of people" would benefit from having both default and configurable filters that catch obvious mistakes. Say you probably want a confirmation before attaching a private SSH key, or before sending a password in the clear (which could be filtered by blocking words matching the hash of the password), etc.Not that it solves the fundamental problem TFA is talking about: nothing works.But that is a given: that's why we need safeguards.
• anon
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• iLoveOncall
  I've also noticed so many pieces of software becoming worse and worse, either with useless features (basically any new thing on Slack in the past year) or with a huge amount of large bugs, over the past year.It's glaringly obvious that poorly checked, AI-written, code is the culprit, I'm just wondering when companies will wake up.Nobody gives a flying fuck about resiliency, good practices, security or any of that now that AI is there. All anyone cares about is pure output of features.Any and all "productivity" gains attributed to AI efficiency are actually due to the complete disregard for any care or standard in the software industry in the past 2 years. Yeah you can output more shit when you don't give a fuck, big surprise, AI doesn't change anything here.
• HackerThemAll
  > So why does software keep getting worse across the board?The issue is only partially within those who code. They get directions from those in charge, and they are just making idiotic decisions. And those who code, for some reason don't stand against those idiotic decisions in defense of a common sense and a great UX.A blatant, exaggerated parallel would be: you are designing your kitchen and you've chosen a place for your washing machine such as that it will be unable to open its door. When inviting a professional, you expect them to correct such wrong decisions and explain to you that it won't work. But in programming, those who program, calling themselves "software engineers", would just place this washing machine where they're told, because it's "not my job". It's not a feature of an "engineer". It's being a coder lemming.
• Imbiss
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• themgt
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• edifierxuhao
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• throw84949849
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• dsjoerg
  Customers speak with their wallets, and OP doesn't like what they're saying.