I call this software "products", and not in a good sense. A product isn't necessarily designed by someone who cares about, or even understands, the problem at hand.
What do you call a product that is?
If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
351–360 of 719 posts
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#352These tools combined with silicon valley motto of moving fast and breaking stuff fast created the perfect storm
> They have raised upper management’s expectations for team output.
That is the worse part, it's not great at all dealing with this kind of expectations
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#353For me, the problem was never the writing of the code. Building something takes care and rigor. Software development got where it is through years of accumulated practice: habits first, then safeguards, then structures that had actually been proven. Now people set the code aside and just describe their problem, and they have no real sense of what comes back, because nobody can review output produced that fast. Nobody…
> Nobody is even keeping up with the systems we built to help us keep up. So we ship without quite knowing what we shipped, and the sloppiness follows from that.
NPM left-pad incident was a decade ago. Supply chain attacks have been a thing for longer than that (one of the first proposed SBOM's was around that time).
Source forge was shoving adware into the software from their site.
Asking an AI to write code is not worse than typing in PIP/NPM install (not to slight those tools) if you aren't going to code review either.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#354Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been. AI isn’t going to make someone care about writing robust software and that is why we don’t see better software all of a sudden. The market doesn’t rewards apps that don’t break on every update, it doesn’t reward cobbling together multiple independent solutions, as opposed to using Microsoft as a one stop shop. If people could have gotten away with…
But maybe that’s bad? Maybe keeping everyone just on the verge of leaving or getting hurt isn’t a good place for society to settle?
Given doing better costs money, and people don't want to pay for better, leaving that place is hard. We've seen the same play out with physical goods - the cheapness of just-good-enough-but-right-now-cheaply outcompetes quality, which costs and takes time.
We as society are choosing to be in that place.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#355Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been. AI isn’t going to make someone care about writing robust software and that is why we don’t see better software all of a sudden. The market doesn’t rewards apps that don’t break on every update, it doesn’t reward cobbling together multiple independent solutions, as opposed to using Microsoft as a one stop shop. If people could have gotten away with…
"Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been."
Yes -- but. The market is irrational especially in a time of mania or panic. The AI phase we are in has mania, bubble aspects. There is no rational calculation about what is happening to software quality and is that good for customers or the industry (or individual businesses). We are too far into FOMO. It won't stop until it STOPS. Uh oh.
A friend of mine works in a niche software field at a small company. It was recently acquired and the whole technical team was laid off because the new director of engineering determined that they could replace the whole team with AI. All of the people who wrote the product were dumped as well as the whole cohort they had trained. Everyone.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
What else do you expect though? You launched a long running task. It is done. Microwave goes ding.
My expectation is described in the comment you replied to and side comments Microwave's ding is also bad UI, especially when it's repetitive as it's just useless noise. But even the first ding - what value does it have if you already have exactly the same notification category - audio cue - built right there in the process: the machine noise disappears when it stops working.
Waiting for noise to stop is less reliable because of how brains work, and also has a much smaller range. The microwave ding is useful.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#357You can build software fast, but the more time you take the more you can be confident about it being correct. This was true already before AI code generation, but AI code generation means the definition of “fast” has shifted like crazy. An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week. But it (right now) does nothing for the confidence about being correct - you still have to put in t…
> An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week. From what I've seen, I don't think so if we're talking about like-for-like quality. Maybe as an absolute best case scenario, but more typically it's more like you can build in an hour with AI whereas without AI it might take you 2 or 3. Even thats highly task dependant, and doesn't scale as you'd expect (eg 1 hour == 2 hours, but 1…
Totally agree. But we're in such minority that it's super depressing
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#358Software will always be as bad as users world allow it to. Applies to every good and service.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#359> We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse. I actually relate to that. It used to be cool and exciting to update to see what new things are coming for free. I was just looking up what Fedora Workstation 45 might bring. Updates on phones, TV's, cars and non-Linux operating systems on PC's/lap…
The only way something can be “solved” if it is eliminated. Otherwise it is never solved.
Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
#360You can build software fast, but the more time you take the more you can be confident about it being correct. This was true already before AI code generation, but AI code generation means the definition of “fast” has shifted like crazy. An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week. But it (right now) does nothing for the confidence about being correct - you still have to put in t…
> You can build software fast, but the more time you take the more you can be confident about it being correct. > ... > But it (right now) does nothing for the confidence about being correct - you still have to put in the extra time to ensure the software is correct to your desired degree of confidence. You're partially correct - what gives confidence is duration in the field. No matter how long you take to build som…
And break ux for users often and piss them. There are short reversibile decision that can be taken fast, important decision requires a lot of thinking before changing to often and alienating your users