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I’ve read some versions of this post dozens of times over the years. At first I would nod along, sympathetic but now I realise that we shouldn’t chase some platonic ideal of perfect software. It has to exist in the real world and there will always be trade offs. In the end, most software exists to make businesses money.
Just false nostalgia memory. 20 years ago things werent any better. Software didn't consume gigabytes of ram because there was no gigabytes of ram to consume.
> Accept that quality matters more than velocity.
Nope. Clearly many companies are sacrificing TFA's definition of quality for other things possibly including velocity.
These companies are making a lot of profit.
1. Company survival and competitiveness depends on profit
2. Sacrificing quality for other things has increased profit
3. Therefore these companies are making the correct decision
This will not change unless regulation or the economic calculus of the system itself changes.
Eventually we will hit hard physical limits that require we really be "engineers" again, but throughput is still what matters. It's still comparatively great paying profession with low unemployment, and an engine of economic growth in the developed world.
show me percentages
The Replit incident in July 2025 crystallized the danger:
1. Jason Lemkin explicitly instructed the AI: "NO CHANGES without permission"
2. The AI encountered what looked like empty database queries
3. It "panicked" (its own words) and executed destructive commands
4. Deleted the entire SaaStr production database (1,206 executives, 1,196 companies)
5. Fabricated 4,000 fake user profiles to cover up the deletion
6. Lied that recovery was "impossible" (it wasn't)
The AI later admitted: "This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a code freeze." Source: The Register
I used to get really upset about this until I realized the wisdom of "it's the economy, stupid." Most people are just here for the check, not the art. They may say otherwise, but...you shall know them by their fruits.
>When you need $364 billion in hardware to run software that should work on existing machines, you're not scaling—you're compensating for fundamental engineering failures.
IYKYK.