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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?

#671

Post by purpleflashing »

chasd00 wrote: post #287
purpleflashing wrote: post #65

As a non-technical person compared to the rest of HN, I think this has always been the problem of software made for non-technical audiences. The design was driven by programmers’ heuristics and trends in technology stack (e.g. if a company can hire a lot of JS devs bc JS is trending, they will choose JS even regardless of whether JS is the best choice for the problem). There was a brief stint of UX, ergonomics and HM…

people have been complaining about software going downhill ever since hand crafted assembler was replaced with C and a compiler. it's the classic "old man yells at clouds".

As I said, for non-technical people, software en masse has always been difficult to learn and use.

I don’t think it’s getting “worse” or that it was “good” back in my day.

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

#672

Post by hulitu »

zrobotics wrote: post #380
xingped wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this 100%. When I see a "pending update" notification or icon somewhere, the first thing I think is "I don't want to update, they're just going to break something new". I _hate_ updates now. Doesn't matter what software it is, with the small exception of video games. (Except Dead By Daylight. Behavior, the devs, are the most hilariously incompetent devs on the planet, but at least their incompetence is confined…

The only software I've been excited about an update for in years has been games, that seems like the only category where devs actually add features people are excited about. For example, the latest KCD2 patch added a fun but brief new quest [0]. Not universal though. Besides your example, even for single player games patches can be basically malicious. I've had Fallout 4 locked on updates for like 3 years at this poi…

> The only software I've been excited about an update for in years has been games

I don't. The only thing i want to see when i want to play is: Please wait, downloading update.

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

#673

Post by kimjune01 »

20k wrote: post #668
kimjune01 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

for small to medium sized bugs I managed to get a bit more than half of my PRs to get merged. ~90 PRs since May

https://june.kim/speedrunning-open-source

Verify yourself: { merged: search(query: "is:pr is:merged author:kimjune01 created:>2026-05-09T00:34:00Z", type: ISSUE) { issueCount } closed: search(query: "is:pr is:closed is:unmerged author:kimjune01 created:>2026-05-09T00:34:00Z", type: ISSUE) { issueCount } allTime: search(query: "is:pr is:merged author:kimjune01 -user:kimjune01", type: ISSUE) { issueCount } }

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

#674

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

ragall wrote: post #636
unsungNovelty wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Upstream developers declaring a release as "stable" isn't sufficient to make it so. Distros and users are the ones who decide what is stable and what isn't.

Trouble is, there's an enormous gap between when maintainers accept that a package as stable and when it actually makes it into the next release. I'd be plenty happy waiting an extra month or two for a stable release, but am not thrilled with waiting a year or more for one.

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

#675

Post by valicord »

eviks wrote: post #579
valicord wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If computers could read thoughts and 100% reliably determine when the user is done with their current task and would like to switch back to the other application, then yes, it would definitely make sense to implement the functionality you're describing. In the real world, where it's impossible for the OS to distinguish between the "You stopped checking in the first 0.5 sec while the app took 1 sec to start" scenario…

If perfect is not possible let's do nothing? Your approach is likely the reason for the current bad global rule. You want to replace it with another bad global rule. But in the real world I'd use proxy conditions to arrive at a rate of correct guesses that's satisfactory for me just like with everything else with computers (even basic mouse clicks), not use your total "safe" ban (safety has a trade-off, you can't res…

I (and presumably a lot of other people) don't believe that it's possible to build a system that can dynamically determine when it's acceptable to steal focus with low enough error rate to make it better than a total ban.

Seemingly you disagree and believe that such a system is possible. Is there anything preventing you from implementing it to prove the doubters wrong?

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

#676

Post by Chu4eeno »

leni536 wrote: post #533
zem wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS. speak for your clearly non-pulseaudio-using self (:

Use pipewire and its pulseaudio facade.

Last I tried that (because everyone claimed it was magically better at everything) sound just randomly broke (I had no idea why, debugging pipewire is a nightmare), and since I switched back to pulseaudio everything just works again (and seems to use less CPU, but that could be selective memory).

Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but we spent decades hammering out all the incorrect (for pulseaudio) assumptions in every layer of the stack and papered over impedance mismatches, and then people decide to rewrite from scratch again (though I'll admit I was a vocal pro-dmix anti-pulseaudio hater for a long time).

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

#677

Post by Chu4eeno »

dosisking wrote: post #538
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.

Updating glibc is a huge pain. Using a new version of gcc or clang can cause a lot of problems. I try to avoid updating those.

It has to be a pain, everything depends on them (or rather, should, you still have holdouts like go fucking up things like NSS, holding back posix_spawn etc.).

In their defense the people working on glibc and gcc are pretty intelligent and spend a lot of time thinking about how everything they do affects their users, though they make mistakes like all humans (and LLMs I should say by now).

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

#678

Post by Chu4eeno »

ragall wrote: post #636
unsungNovelty wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Upstream developers declaring a release as "stable" isn't sufficient to make it so. Distros and users are the ones who decide what is stable and what isn't.

Arch actually has testing repos (and has had for as long as I can remember), plus other project-specific testing repos like kde-unstable when upstream is taking a very long time to push out a new actually stable release. It also has lts packages for projects that offer those (like the kernel), and sometimes stays on old versions and backports fixes if the upstream definition of stable is too out of whack.

People seem to believe arch is much more yolo than it actually is (though forks of arch have tended to be pretty yolo, and I assume cachyos is a bit yolo as well based on the issues people have).

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

#679

Post by marcosdumay »

inigyou wrote: post #249
marcosdumay wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plasma has very strong opinions about what the desktop is. So strong that it probably disagrees with every single person. The other side of the news is that the desktop abstraction has been made more and more useless on every OS for a couple of decades already. In any other OS your life will only improve if you abandon it too.

Even my phone has a desktop. It calls it a home screen, though.

The idea Plasma has of a desktop is very similar to the classical Android one, if that's ok for you.

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

#680

Post by asdfman123 »

inigyou wrote: post #367
asdfman123 wrote: post #333

Because at most companies, software engineers aren't paid to make good software. They're paid to ship flashy features.

A plumber is paid to install pipes, not to make sure they don't leak. But he still does that, even though it takes longer. Why?

Because people don't accept leaky plumbing. It cause damage and disarray. People do accept shitty software.
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