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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?

#661

Post by jason_oster »

puchatek wrote: post #549
jason_oster wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone…

Don't blame it all on entrenchment and bureaucracy. Rather show me the engineers who want to become management. I have thought of the same solution myself before and came to the conclusion that I, for one, wouldn't want to be leading anything even if I had some ideas on why the product sucked.

> Rather show me the engineers who want to become management.

You're talking to one. Wanting agency and responsibility and having the drive to put in the work (for potentially brutal hours) is not exactly a common trait. It's a founding engineer attitude. It should be no surprise that I'm a founding engineer of an LLC of one. I understand that it is not for everyone.

But I'm pretty confident that the blame is well placed.

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

#662

Post by eluusive »

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 new "cloud" UI is wful. Who thought this was a good idea? I hate MacOS Tahoe.

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

#663

Post by zx8080 »

xorcist wrote: post #615
einsteinx2 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did we learn nothing from the TDD nonsense in the 00s? I was never a fan of TDD, but ironically I think it may finally be a good development strategy now with agentic/LLM coding since LLMs do so much better they they have a verifiable goal like passing tests.

How does that work? Does one agent write the tests from spec, and then another agent is told "make tests pass", or do you write the tests manually? It does sound like a possible way to parallelize agentic work, but I'd be surprised if the results are better than a non-TDD approach where the agent would write both tests and code from spec. I would expect the agent to suffer the same problems humans do with TDD, namely…

> How does that work?

It works well. For those who sell tokens.

As much as the (agentic) processes are more and more complex it guarantees that more tokens will be sold tomorrow. Sell tokens FTW!

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

#664

Post by kimjune01 »

20k wrote: post #392

If coding is a solved problem, where are all the high quality, open source PRs is what I want to know. Where's the flood of improvements for Curl? SFML? SDL? Godot? Linux? ImGui? VLC? Firefox? GNU tools? Rust? GCC? LLVM? Why can I find *no* evidence of this? If you look at the open source space and review the contribution of AI in it, you'd think that AI is barely able to create functional code and the people who ped…

the bottleneck for these open source repos is maintainer attention. AI seemingly does not yet improve that throughput.

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

#665

Post by SapporoChris »

daemin wrote: post #589
hamandcheese wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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. You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS. Proprietary software isn't built for users anymore. But (some) FOSS still is.

Ubuntu is still annoying with it's daily popups asking to update the system and then most times requiring a system restart. In some ways it is worse than Windows.

Software & Updates->Updates->Automatically Check for updates:{Daily,Every two days,Weekly,Every Two Weeks,Never} and Security Updates{Display Immediately,Download Automatically,Download and install automatically}

There are even more options you can select.

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

#667

Post by jwr »

sandblast wrote: post #119
jwr wrote: post #85

I have the same impression when I use things that are around me every day. Everything is broken and seemingly nobody cares. It seems that the teams developing software never use it themselves and do not care about bugs and terrible usability problems. It seems the management does not use any of the products that their businesses produce. And it seems that the ubiquitous breakage is just accepted as the status quo. Th…

What is that car, and could you make a video of it?

VW ID.4, and it's unlikely I can spare the time for making a video without a really good reason…

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

#668

Post by 20k »

kimjune01 wrote: post #664
20k wrote: post #392

If coding is a solved problem, where are all the high quality, open source PRs is what I want to know. Where's the flood of improvements for Curl? SFML? SDL? Godot? Linux? ImGui? VLC? Firefox? GNU tools? Rust? GCC? LLVM? Why can I find *no* evidence of this? If you look at the open source space and review the contribution of AI in it, you'd think that AI is barely able to create functional code and the people who ped…

the bottleneck for these open source repos is maintainer attention. AI seemingly does not yet improve that throughput.

I'd buy that if lots of high quality PRs were sitting around waiting to be merged, but they don't exist. There's barely any evidence that AI is even real in the open source world, other than the slop of course
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