If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse? • Hacker News Board

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

#501

Post by rbalicki » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

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…

My "favorite" aspect of the Slack web app, which might have been fixed, as I haven't seen it recently, is if you typed up -> r (I believe it's r) to open the emoji picker, typed a few characters (e.g. "eyes") and pressed enter. Well, if the emojis hadn't loaded by then (and apparently they're loaded fresh every time), they would pop in and often, the a different emoji would be picked than the one that was visibly highlighted when I pressed enter.

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

#502

Post by therealdrag0 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

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…

Why would engineers as a class be better at product than product people as a class?

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

#503

Post by TZubiri » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

maybe once software in a certain category is solved, it no longer has incentive to improve User eXperience, but to improve the Asset Owner eXperience.

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

#504

Post by defrost » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:17 AM UTC

therealdrag0 wrote: post #502

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…

Why would engineers as a class be better at product than product people as a class?

That's a function of choice of "better" metric.

Traditional engineers are "better" at making things work in a functional sense (eg: aircraft) whereas product people are optimised to make "better" selling products (eg: Labubus - functionally useless but Black Friday riot desirable)

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

#505

Post by alliao » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

if coding is free, the number 1 issue that need to be resolved is separating features so people can roll back any part they don't like and the magic would be resolving all the gory consequences of such action well enough

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

#506

Post by CTDOCodebases » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

Grombobulous wrote: post #485

mancerayder wrote: post #277

> 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 funny thing is that there’s a relatively high amount of hype this year around iOS and macOS being a stability and performance release with very few features, on purpose. Look up some beta impressions or try the public beta yourself. Apps launch faster and a whole bunch of random stuff is fixed and smoothed out. So not only are we getting a really great performance and stability release in the height of the AI era…

I agree with you but I think it's worth pointing out that this is a new occurrence.

It's not just the performance of software but the UI and features themselves. The constant UI redesigns leave legacy users disoriented. It seems like they often just change things for the sake of changing things. On iOS three main pain points for me that used to be better are:

1. Search. It finds the settings for an app but not the app itself. Or the search doesn't even find the setting even though I have typed the name of the setting in word for word.

2. The timer. Previously I would set a timer and see the result on the lock screen. Perfect. Then they added a control to stop the timer from the lock screen. So timers are accidentally stopped after brushing the lock screen by accident.

3. Turning Caller ID on and off. Sometimes it just lags out and doesn't do anything.

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

#507

Post by chongli » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:25 AM UTC

customguy wrote: post #470

risyachka wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way something can be “solved” if it is eliminated. Otherwise it is never solved.

You can solve a puzzle, but what would "eliminating" a puzzle even mean?

Soak it in nitric and sulfuric acid, let it dry, then light it on fire?

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

#508

Post by Dead3 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:26 AM UTC

afavour wrote: post #408

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…

> The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. It’s not surprising that this sentiment is popular on a message board filled with engineers but I’m not so convinced by it. Nor do I think the current state of tech companies is acceptable, to be clear. But there needs to be some level of management outside of the engineers themselves. A lot…

The OP is right most production code is full of errors, and suffers from code bloat and feature creep that impacts UX.

Is this really the best we can do? It strikes me as unacceptable to ship errors to production, yet it's commonplace.

Code quality matters, and being in touch with users/dogfooding matters. But that can only address the underlying problem by eliminating the low-talent developers who win by numbers.

How to solve the relevant problems is not something hiring and recruiting teams can assess. So, hiring process uses proxy metrics like having a HS and CS degree, years of experience, brand name companies, list of tools, "best practices", trends, etc.

Teams of self-congratulating code monkeys using all the latest 'industry standard' libraries and tools, don't accept responsibility for their errant code. Instead, they blame (the user, his browser, the library), make excuses, minimize "all software has bugs". They can't fix the bugs they've created for themselves, but it can't be their fault, after all, they're doing what everyone else is doing.

The answer is to send them packing. Hire by talent, not by proxy of a hiring team (who don't know how to think/use the aforementioned proxy metrics to gauge talent).

Intelligence cannot be taught, but it can and is discriminated against. That is another problem with these faux 'team-player' follower types. Anyone on the team pointing out the code is a disaster and an attitude to fix it is not going to last. He'll be fed pushback of the same crap excuses for why things must be done the way they're done.

When a talented developer does deep dive analysis to identify root causes, most on the team don't get it. The scary bugbear of coherence is too hard and threat to the team's shared narrative.

Again, the only way to solve that problem is to send them packing.

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

#509

Post by Dead3 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:33 AM UTC

rdedev wrote: post #430

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…

> The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. They don't need to do anything other than give their opinions, and use the product every day. Put them in a room with your top engineers, and the software will mysteriously get better. This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it. Otherwise y…

> This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it.

Simple things should work. The types of errors described in the article about feature creep and errors with simple user flows are all too common.

Just surf the web with the developer console open. It's not just "an error was thrown", but the kinds of errors and how they manifest. A rejected promise after localStorage access was blocked, after user clicked a submit button on a form that went through twenty seven delegation calls of Angular js using backspace-escaped method names to handle invalid HTML, and now the form can't submit because they did it using the latest tools, as per their resume. Crap like that. The level of quality of production web code is the cause of the poor user experience and outright failures. It is unacceptable and its cause is directly traceable to the design decisions and skills employed in its production.

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

#510

Post by casey2 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 4:34 AM UTC

"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." - Adam Smith on overspecialization.

These products are bad because noone who works on them understands the whole system infact

"The only trades which it seems possible for a joint-stock company to carry on successfully... are those of which all the operations are capable of being reduced to what is called a Routine, or to such a Uniformity of method as admits but little or no variation." - Adam Smith

CPUs, dams, can be designed with software. Plenty of programs can be designed with software but most useful, interesting, valuable ones cannot. Plenty of programs are designed with software, or more generally a routine, and they are incomprehensible as a result, and clearly their programmers are the most stupid and ignorant people around.