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

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

#161

Post by staplers » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #77

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…

Yeah, the beginning of the article could reasonably pass for a "rage blog", but the end almost reads like an Axios article, with nothing but bullet points and "clever" headlines, in a weirdly formulaic way. Also, what's the deal with all the "The " headlines? Smells a lot like AI.

  Also, what's the deal with all the "The " headlines?

Adding "The" to the beginning of an opinion is a mental manipulation tactic that makes the reader believe it is a well-known established fact that everyone else knows.

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

#162

Post by doctor_radium » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:30 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #30

codeulike wrote: post #8

Hes right that cloudstike was terrible incompetence but I find it hard to worry about the memory leak stats. If lots of software leaks memory these days its because people have accepted that and its probably not economic to trace and fox those bugs. A lot of software is disposable or transient these days, like an app you only use twice a month

Everyone else in this thread is missing that crowdstrike level bug would have taken down the company in the past. I had a friend practically scream at his C level management after the crowdstrike bug that it should be ripped out because it was making the company less safe. They were deaf to all arguments. Why? Insurance mandated crowdstrike. Still. Even now. This isnt really about software it is about a concentration…

> They were deaf to all arguments. Why? Insurance mandated crowdstrike. Still. Even now.

Your comment got me wondering if MBA's in say, risk management or underwriting also share some of the blame?

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

#163

Post by lstodd » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

Legend2440 wrote: post #123

sciencejerk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Personally I've observed an increase of major system and security failures in the past 5 years, especially failures that impact very large tech companies. You could measure these public failures and see if frequency or impact has increased.

The number of security failures now is nothing close to the golden age of malware in the 90s/early 2000s. The #1 security exploit today is tricking the user into letting you in, because attacking the software is too hard.

Bah.

It's #1 one because it's easier than the alternative. But the alternative is also not hard. It's just not worth the effort.

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

#164

Post by Yoric » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

I absolutely buy that theory.

I believe that we the normalization of catastrophe was a natural consequence of VC money: VC don't care about structurally sound companies, in particular structurally sound products, what they want is a unicorn that can produce a good enough prototype and exit at enormous profit.

Consequently, VC-backed companies invest in tools that make prototyping easier and in developers who are hopefully good at prototyping (or at least write code quickly), and ignore everything else. And since the surviving VC-backed companies become giants (or at least everybody believes that they will), everybody follows their lead. And of course, LLMs are the next stage of that.

I've seen this in various domains. I've seen this with IoT devices coded with the clear (but unsaid) assumption that they will never be upgraded. I've seen this with backends coded with the clear (but unsaid) assumption that the product will have failed before any security hole is exploited. I've seen software tools developed and shipped with the clear (but unsaid) assumption that they're meant to woo the investors, not to help the users.

We're going to pay for this, very hard. By doing this, we have turned cyber warfare – something that was a fantasy a few decades ago – into an actual reality. We have multiplied by several orders of magnitude the amount of resources we need to run basic tools.

And it's a shame, because there _is_ a path towards using LLMs to produce higher quality code. And I've seen a few teams invest in that, discreetly. But they're not making headlines and it's even possible that they need to be stealthy in their own orgs, because it's not "productive" enough.

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

#165

Post by snapcaster » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

Tractor8626 wrote: post #10

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.

Yeah i wonder if the people saying this are just too young to have experienced it. Computers and software have always been janky as fuck. I used to have games crash my entire system instead of just the program. That still happens today but not as frequently

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

#166

Post by lstodd » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #101

ericskiff wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all reads like hallucinated slop from top to bottom "I've been tracking software quality metrics for three years" and then doesn't show any of the receipts, and simply lists anecdotal issues. I don't trust a single fact from this article. My own anecdote: barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005. There's been an industry tren…

"barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005" It was the norm in 1998 also, based on the "dotcom" era code I saw.

PHP was created in the first place because writing slop in Perl was too hard.

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

#167

Post by username223 » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:35 PM UTC

leshow wrote: post #150

dkarl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have always had, and always will have, the quality of software that people are willing to pay for.

That would be the case under market conditions where buyers are making rational decisions with perfect knowledge based on all available choices. Does that sound like the system we have? To me, reality seems more like a small set of oligopolies or effective monopolies, byzantine ownership structures and a pursuit of short term profits pushing future costs elsewhere as externalities.

This. There are plenty of people trying to keep using Windows 10, and Microsoft is trying to force them to use Windows 11, which they do not want. The same goes for Mac OS 26. "Choice" doesn't matter.

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

#168

Post by orbital-decay » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

j2kun wrote: post #87

> Today’s real chain: React → Electron → Chromium → Docker → Kubernetes → VM → managed DB → API gateways. Each layer adds “only 20–30%.” Compound a handful and you’re at 2–6× overhead for the same behavior. > > That's how a Calculator ends up leaking 32GB. Not because someone wanted it to—but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users started complaining. MacOS calculator definitely doesn't use any of tho…

The article looks LLM-written or assisted, kind of ironic the author haven't verified stuff like this in an article about quality.

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

#169

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #114

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 gree…

> how the heck could something so obviously not ready for production ever be shipped?

The widespread bar for software quality these days appears to be: "The lowest quality possible to release, such that the customer does not sue us or reject it." It's absolutely the bottom of the barrel. Everything is rushed and the decision to release is based on the chance of the company being able to keep the money they charged. If the project has the required profit, after factoring in the cost of mass end user rejection due to poor quality, the software gets released.

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

#170

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 4:38 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.

Another way to put it is that people have to literally die before a company is taken to task over their product's quality. What a sad, low bar for a product!