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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?

#491

Post by bikelang »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #377
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Anecdotes like yours are why I'll probably remain on Windows for the foreseeable future. Games on Windows just work . It's not even a question. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle around to get a game to work properly, but it was probably 20+ years ago. On Linux? Might as well play a slot machine. You might score a jackpot and the game has a native Linux port that works flawlessly out of the box. You might…

That really isn’t true anymore. I’ve been using Bazzite for 9 months now and haven’t needed to boot windows once for a game. I don’t even bother checking protondb anymore. Games just work and peripherals just work has been my lived experience. I think it’s probably a lot of work to get a random old distro to support gaming - but there are several distros which make it flat out easy with modern hardware (Bazzite, Cachy, SteamOS, and likely others too).

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

#492

Post by teaearlgraycold »

bodge5000 wrote: post #322
gyomu wrote: post #291

You 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…

Really depends on the engineer, domain and circumstances. I find the best multiplier from AI when working with tech I’m familiar with, in a specialty I’m less familiar with, on a brand new project. I have the vocabulary to describe what I want and how to do it but the details I’d need to spend hours learning are handled for me.

There are absolutely projects I’d done in a week a few years ago that could be done in 3 hours now. But if you need to work with that code for the foreseeable future you’ll need to actually read the generated code.

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

#493

Post by Rury »

alphazard wrote: post #388

The answer, of course, is that the taste-making apparatus inside the typical tech company is now entirely imposters (non-technical, non-power-users), who continue to LARP as visionaries. The people who notice broken or degraded behavior (devs and power users) and conceive of good designs are not in charge of what goes into the product. So you shouldn't expect it to get better, only to continuously change so that the…

Yup. This is basically what Steve Jobs argued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and championed as a philosophy. Adopting it, took Apple from being a struggling tech company on the verge of bankruptcy, to the dominant personal consumer technology maker it is today.

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

#494

Post by ludston »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #487
bhaak wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch is bleeding edge. Breakage is expected there. It breaks so others can be stable. Thank you for your service.

Arch is not "bleeding edge" . It's latest stable version of packages/software.

The fact that Arch is bleeding edge has been an explicit part of the Arch philosophy for as long as I've been using it (for 20 years now). It breaks a lot less frequently than it used to.

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

#495

Post by nektro »

tedggh wrote: post #464

I don’t think we can objectively say software is getting worse. I don’t expect an appliance website, a car infotainment system and a banking app to be the beacons of software quality and user experience. All those things would probably suck at any point in time.

no, all three of those softwares should be exceptional and help me do exactly what i'm trying to do with no distractions or bugs

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

#496

Post by diddid »

Coding has been solved in the same way that writing has been solved. Putting the sentences together is now easier, but having something interesting to say? That’s a lot harder. With the barrier to entry lower there is a lot of things that look good at the surface, but when you dig deeper, aren’t quite right. The nouns are in the right place and it has all the things school taught you a paragraph should have, but it’s just not an interesting story. That’s where all this software stuff is right now. It removed a barrier, but just like visual programming doesn’t solve it, AI can’t solve it either. It lowers the barrier but doesn’t solve the essence (is that a silver bullet reference? I’m not sure). AI can extrapolate and interpolate what’s already been done in fascinating ways but I need to see something new to really believe. Asking it to rewrite something it trained on (like SQLite or a browser) into a language that it was also trained on (rust or go) isn’t all that interesting from a software advancement perspective. I want to see imagination and so far I haven’t. But I have my required ai ticket like everyone else and maybe one day I’ll look out the window and be satisfied.

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

#497

Post by archargelod »

Large companies are on the path of replacing people who are bad at coding, with systems that are emulating humans who are bad at coding.

Coding has been solved in the sense that, per dollar spent, companies can get 10x or even 100x the amount of code of roughly the same terrible quality.

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

#498

Post by unsungNovelty »

We are not using LLMs to solve the issues. We are using LLMs for speed. Like we were using VC funded speedruns for "speed". Quality was never even in the picture. We just added LLMs to the current setup for speed. Neither the structures, architectures or decision makings changed. We just added another thing.

I keep thinking about another thing as well. Software development might be the only place were stability is punished. If your software works swellingly well, there is less people needed. You'll lose your job when the software is stable. So you either need a new project or the software needs to be crappy enough. And the companies don't give a damn about you.

Keep in mind we did have WhatsApp created with just 32 engineers until facebook bought it. Lichess.org has 2 people working on it serving to the number of people it does (millions?). It's the way we are making it. "Move fast and break things"is the shittiest way to make software.

All of the above works when the desired outcome is money. Not when it is quality of the product.

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

#500

Post by therealdrag0 »

amoorthy wrote: post #390
alphazard wrote: post #388

The answer, of course, is that the taste-making apparatus inside the typical tech company is now entirely imposters (non-technical, non-power-users), who continue to LARP as visionaries. The people who notice broken or degraded behavior (devs and power users) and conceive of good designs are not in charge of what goes into the product. So you shouldn't expect it to get better, only to continuously change so that the…

Mostly agree and would add that product managers should be responsible for the commercial success of their products. That means spending more time deciding what market to be in, how to differentiate, how to price, how to drive adoption. For the most part these are not strengths for devs and power users.

Are they not? Where I work PMs are closely tied to and own business outcomes.
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