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Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#91

Post by grepex »

swed420 wrote: post #84
infamouscow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this relate to TFA or GP's reply?

How does impaired human memory and increased risk taking relate to software stability?

Respectfully, that's a bit of a stretch. Impaired human memory and increased risk taking are coefficients that would impact far more industries than software. I think the notion is that software, in particular, seems buggier. IF these side effects of repeated COVID infection have anything to do with software bugs, I would think it's contribution would be dramatically smaller than say LLM assisted coding, rapid merging of code, lack of human review.

Just a couple of examples:

- Linux kernel ai commits (https://lunduke.substack.com/p/ai-submissions-to-linux-hits-...)

- Omarchy 4 30k lines of ai generated code (https://x.com/dhh/status/2057907663967543618)

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#92

Post by swed420 »

grepex wrote: post #91
swed420 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does impaired human memory and increased risk taking relate to software stability?

Respectfully, that's a bit of a stretch. Impaired human memory and increased risk taking are coefficients that would impact far more industries than software. I think the notion is that software, in particular, seems buggier . IF these side effects of repeated COVID infection have anything to do with software bugs, I would think it's contribution would be dramatically smaller than say LLM assisted coding, rapid mergi…

False dichotomy. There's no reason it couldn't impact software as well as other things. Also, it's obviously not the only acting force.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#95

Post by taurath »

Its not you, it has gone up marketly. Microsoft and Google products are both subjectively far more prone to showstopping errors. There is no quantitative data for this so some will never be satisfied with this answer (or ANY answer unless it has some hand-picked statistics that look official and unbiased enough to trick them).

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#96

Post by taurath »

jakevoytko wrote: post #56

It's very simple; If you work 10x faster, you need to release 1/10th the bugs as before for the user's experience to have the same level of bugginess. And we're not incentivized for this; we're still exploring how to ship 10x faster and not exploring how to meet our users' needs 10x better (often conflating the two!) And I mean, go tell your leadership "Those projects that used to take us a full quarter? Now we can d…

That doesn't explain the observation of things that used to work breaking though, without any new features!

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#97

Post by lukasco »

jakevoytko wrote: post #56

It's very simple; If you work 10x faster, you need to release 1/10th the bugs as before for the user's experience to have the same level of bugginess. And we're not incentivized for this; we're still exploring how to ship 10x faster and not exploring how to meet our users' needs 10x better (often conflating the two!) And I mean, go tell your leadership "Those projects that used to take us a full quarter? Now we can d…

Shipping a lot faster definitely puts a big strain on the QA side of the house. But I'm not at all convinced that things have gotten worse even with "AI slop". CI/CD and releasing features more quickly has long been proven to make software more reliable rather than less. But to work, it requires much much better test coverage. CI/CD and AI code go hand in hand. It's all about the test coverage. Not enough tests, then exactly as you are saying: ship 10x the bugs (which actually means your software will fail catastrophically). And you mention leadership (and others did too). Here's my view: if your company leadership doesn't care about software quality, then it doesn't matter if you used Fable, or agile, or 10 year old agile, the software won't be great. You'll never have the time to do things well.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#98

Post by lioeters »

cheschire wrote: post #93
dgellow wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No room anymore, just a massive elephant

It's elephants all the way down.

The infinite tower of elephants is ringed by dancing worshippers wearing elephant masks and tusks, bowing with arms raised, then raising their faces up to the sky in ecstasy. "All hail, the Great Elephant of all existence! No room can contain your glory!"

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#99

Post by [deleted] »

rf15 wrote: post #34
david927 wrote: post #21

I thought about writing a comedy, set in the far future, where everything looks beautiful but nothing works right and it's just accepted (almost unnoticed) as a running gag throughout the film. Now I wonder how prescient that would be.

The Film Brazil, but the environment is designed by Apple.

[deleted]
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