If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

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.

I've heard the meme that Omarchy is for people who would like to use Arch but don't want to read the documentation or follow the installation guide. Having a video and no text sounds like it would align with that target audience. If you want information and not a video you'd want to look at Arch instead, it has an excellent wiki and the best documentation of any OS I've ever used.

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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.)

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.