The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe • Hacker News Board

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#111

Post by jayd16 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:57 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #99

jayd16 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years ago, you could consistently pick up a phone, get a dial tone, and then call a human to solve a problem. Sure, plenty of stuff didn't work. The issue is we're not bothering to make anything that does. It's a clear cultural shift and all of this "nothing ever worked so why try" talk here is not what I remember. We're in a stochastic era of scale where individual experiences do not matter. AI turning computers…

I think you've got your time ranges wrong. Almost exactly 20 years ago I worked for a company that did dashboards for analyzing and managing call centre traffic. The most important metric wasn't "how happy customers are" or "how many calls served" it was: "how many calls did we avoid having a human agent get involved for?" The metric of success was the degree to which they could avoid using expensive human labour and…

What part of that is inconsistent with what I said? Over a long period of time, including 20 years ago, the trajectory of cultural value has been going from consistency to usually acceptable but at least it's cheap. It wasn't started by AI but slop is the next stop.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#112

Post by AzN1337c0d3r » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:57 PM UTC

gkedzierski wrote: post #44

creativeSlumber wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have disagreed with you in the past by saying, "until it breaks something critical and you loose customers and business", but then again people just moved on from the Crowdstrike incident like business as usual.If something like that which grounded critical service globally and had an estimated 10 Billion Dollar economic impact doesn't change mindsets,I don't know what will.

That's because no one died. All the safety critical industries are already heavily regulated. E.g. check out for example standards like DO-178C (for software in airborne systems), where you even have to _prove_ correctness of every tool and dependency you use, on top of accountability and traceability of every single line of code in your own product.

Not to be pedantic, but people have died from software programming bugs being a primary contributing factor. One example: Therac-25 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#113

Post by pdntspa » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

ertgbnm wrote: post #28

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…

It's hilarious just how much of a witchhunt on AI is kicked off from a bunch of vague heuristics.

Writing this as someone who likes using em dash and now I have to watch that habit because everyone is obsessed with sniffing out AI.

Cliched writing is definitely bad. I guess I should be happy that we are smashing them one way or another.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#114

Post by DrScientist » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

I recently experienced bad software at an airport that meant the wait in the passport queue was longer than the flight.

I was in an airport recently waiting in the immigration queue for the automated passport gates - they had like 15 - of which 12 showed a red light and what looked like some C# error message on the screen ( comm problem talking to the camera ).

As I waited in the very long queue, another of the green lights turned red - then a member of staff came over and stopped people using them directly - they would take your passport and carefully place on the machine for you - clearly they were worried their last ones would also crash due to some user interaction.

Two things - how the heck could something so obviously not ready for production ever be shipped? And if this was a common problem, why weren't the staff able to reboot them?

Sure nobody died - but I do wonder if the problem is the typical software license agreement which typically tries to absolve the vendor of any responsibility at all for product quality - in a way you wouldn't accept for anything else.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#115

Post by losteric » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #46

bigfishrunning wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies don't care as long as it gets the job done without too many long-term problems Companies don't care as long as it gets the job done without too many VERY SHORT TERM problems. Long term problems are for next quarter, no reason to worry about them.

And they somewhat have a point. What's the point of code quality, if it delays your startup 6 months, and the startup goes under? What's the point of code quality, if it will be replaced with the newest design or architecture change in 6 months? What's the point of planning for 5 years if a pandemic or supply chain shock could muck it up? What's the point of enforcing beautiful JQuery code... in 2012? The problem isn…

What in the bad rhetoric is this? The trades did and still do have standards.

Hell there was a whole TikTok cycle where people learned there is a right and wrong way to lay tile/grout. One way looks fine until it breaks, the other lasts lifetimes.

It’s the exact same trend as in software: shitty bad big home builders hire crap trades people to build cheap slop houses for suckers that requires extensive ongoing maintenance. Meanwhile there are good builders and contractors that build durable quality for discerning customers.

The problem is exploitation of information asymmetries in the buyer market.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#116

Post by singleshot_ » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

ertgbnm wrote: post #28

Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y." It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone: 1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed." 2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential." 3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix." 4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Scie…

It’s becoming exhausting to avoid all of these commonly used phrases!

I don’t use LLMs.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#117

Post by iamwil » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

Jonathan Blow already warned us six years ago. "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

There is the Handmade and Better Software contingent that is pushing against this trend. I don't know if they'll succeed, but they at least care about quality in a way that a lot of software engineers aren't incentivized or don't know how to do anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/@BetterSoftwareConference

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#118

Post by SoftTalker » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

imiric wrote: post #89

muldvarp wrote: post #4

The fact that software quality plays zero role in commercial software engineering is one of the reasons why I think LLMs will easily eat our lunch. Bugs simply don't matter.

You can't be serious. How do you categorize "commercial software engineering"? Does a company with $100M+ ARR count? Surely you can understand the impact that deleting a production database can have on a business. And your answer to this is "LLMs will eat our lunch" and "bugs don't matter"? Unbelievable.

Any business that isn't prepared for the possibility of losing their production database and doesn't have a plan for recovering from that is not a serious business.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#119

Post by Legend2440 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

0xWTF wrote: post #66

mikepurvis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the machines aren't really "faster" in clock speed— for a long time now the gains have been in better and more local caching + parallelism at both the core and instruction level.

> parallelism at both the core and instruction level Which most programs don't take advantage of.

Neural networks do, which is part of why they’re taking off right now.

Re: The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

#120

Post by 0x_rs » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

This was a greatly unpleasant post to read, likewise for all the others from this substack until I could not anymore. Its unrestricted, excessive usage of obvious LLM patterns was so unbearable I wonder how much of it had any human input at all.

As for the topic: software exists on a spectrum, where the importance of safety and stability is not equal from one point to another, does it not? Safe software is probably the safest (and most accessible) it's ever been before, meanwhile the capacity to produce low-effort has increased massively and its results are most obvious outside of a browser's safe space. And CrowdStrike is a terrible example because nobody ever had any love for them and their parasitic existence, even before that accident their track record of disastrous bugs and awful handling of disclosures.

And your operating system's Calculator apps have always been buggy pieces of crap in some way or another. You can find dozens of popular stories on this website talking about 's being garbage over all of its existence.