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

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

#191

Post by KronisLV »

> Until this attitude changes, the great software quality decay will continue.

It won’t change cause nobody cares to do anything other than complain, I don’t see developers quitting en masse from companies that refuse to pause feature churn and focus on quality. Why should they? They get a paycheck, everyone ships crap, the world moves on. The people making the frameworks and now even runtimes are of the same cloth, overworked and underfunded.

If we cared we’d treat software like real engineering. We don’t and therefore we’re quite cooked. Just be happy that airplanes aren’t as bad as your average CRUD. For someone who does care, look at the SQLite codebase, every project should be like that even if development cycles would be 3–10x longer, but that’s delusional to say out loud.

AI just revealed that - with slop being produced at increasing pace and test coverage and verification methods of things working properly across all states and inputs being nowhere to be found.

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

#192

Post by inigyou »

hypfer wrote: post #23
danlitt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Omarchy is basically just Arch with a bunch of configuration. It's not a particularly useful project, and the author is noted fascist DHH. So probably not worth your time.

I think more precise terminology would go a long way here. What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things. As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him. ___ So to fix that: DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them.…

Nothing on this list screams explicitly nazi to me, but this is a long list for things that are believed mostly by neo-nazis. Like heavily complaining that London isn't racillly pure enough. And supporting a prominent political figure who believes every Muslim is a terrorist. And complaining about "woke" all the time.

so it depends if you believe that everyone who supported the nazi party was a nazi, or only the people who actually did the holocaust.

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-...

https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...

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

#193

Post by dijksterhuis »

brazzy wrote: post #18
fhd2 wrote: post #12

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? That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out. Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost…

the key differentiator is whether your business is aiming to provide a quality service, or is desperate to eek out as much profit as possible.

my example: A&A — uk internet service provider.

costs like twice as much as a normal service per month. but if i have a super technical query im on the phone with a fully fledged engineer in about 2 minutes flat. the kind of engineer that can discuss complex dns issues. i’ve had one help me debug a dns issue from a work site. it turned out quite quickly it was nothing to do with them but he hung around on the phone for 10 minutes anyway.

the first support person i ever spoke to was michael from wales. if i had to call up he was the first voice i would hear for years. he recently moved on and i was sad. we’d have a decent chat. big up michael from wales.

so, as it applies to at least one existing business — you are dead wrong. it might be twice as expensive as the people trying to maximise their profit margins, but it’s definitely not 10x more.

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

#194

Post by inigyou »

penguin_booze wrote: post #184

A garden needs a gardener. It's the end when people stop caring or when starts chasing superficial metrics and tawdry toys.

That's a good description of some roles actually. Instead of describing myself as a developer or maintainer of some backend system I might call myself a gardener of it.

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

#195

Post by 1718627440 »

eviks wrote: post #172
1718627440 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible For that it suffices if the window comes to the foreground, but it does not need to steal the focus.

So you want to continue typing, but in an invisible field hidden by a different foreground app?

It's not what I would call invisible, but yeah that's the behaviour I would expect. That's also similar, to what already happens when I type in one window, while I scroll in another.

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

#196

Post by trentor »

cmiller1 wrote: post #143
frameset wrote: post #37

> 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 wh…

I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the…

Focus management has never been Quartz's strong suit.

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

#197

Post by inigyou »

rightbyte wrote: post #40
hypfer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more precise terminology would go a long way here. What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things. As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him. ___ So to fix that: DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them.…

One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user. Fascist is not just a silly label. The political collapse of neoliberalism made a lot of closet fascists emerge and they seem quite common among what was earlier thought of as "techno libertarians". E.g. the VPN provider owner (forgot which) just lately. If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matte…

It was one of the Mullvad owners.

We should probably ask ourselves why there aren't more Mullvads. I think the answer is twofold - first, developers can't business, and second, running something like that carries massive political risk which that type of person is more willing to shoulder. If one doesn't feel afraid to help found a Nazi party they sure won't be afraid to run a VPN service.

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

#198

Post by eviks »

inigyou wrote: post #182
eviks wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your specific example is just repeating what I've said, but your generic point is wrong: let's say you have an important task in an app with unavoidable interruptions, during which you switch to your browser to mindlessly scroll. You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible because that scrolling is just a time filler because you can't do anything productive. So you don't need any notification…

Windows XP has a solution to this: the taskbar flash

That "solution" is just as bad as the Mac's bouncing icons described in the article - while it doesn't steal keyboard focus, it does steal user focus

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

#199

Post by alexjplant »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #155
ndriscoll wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish. NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 mi…

I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough. Every game install was chased by an hour of debugging with Claude to figure out which version of proton to use, which launch arguments to use, which between-system-and-gpu shim profile to use. I grant: The process is much more enjoyable than doing similar things on Windows. Kubuntu treats…

> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on

This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc:

- "Something went wrong"

- "It's not you - it's us :-("

- "An error occurred"

- "Uh-oh..."

- "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable]

People used to make jokes about cryptic error messages with alphanumeric codes but cryptic beats cutesy and completely uninformative every day of the week. The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

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

#200

Post by inigyou »

Hugsbox wrote: post #57
Kiro wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad advice considering the success Omarchy has had in marketing it. Whatever they're doing other distros should take note.

I mean, I'm an everyday Linux user and half the content I consume daily is about the Linux/FOSS world and today is my first time hearing of it. And all the information I have about it is from replies to my comment, because its website doesn't actually offer any details. Genius marketing.

It's by the same guy who started a Rails conference because he was kicked out of a different Rails conference, so that he wouldn't be kicked out of this one.
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