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The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

techtrenches.substack.com

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

#171

Post by imiric »

SoftTalker wrote: post #118
imiric wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The database incident was a single example.

Do you really think that most businesses are prepared to handle issues caused by their own bugs, let alone those caused by the software they depend on? That's nothing but fantasy. And your attitude is "they deserve it"? Get real.

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

#172

Post by jjk166 »

The cause and effect here are reversed. Ever increasing abstraction does not reduce quality, ever reduced emphasis on quality leads to greater abstraction. You only abstract away the nuances when you stop caring about them. When you have so much memory that you can tolerate a massive memory leak, fixing the memory leak gets deprioritized and the tool that saves time at the expense of abstracting away memory management becomes more attractive.

The real issue though is that the costs of these abstractions are obfuscated after the fact. There is almost certainly low hanging fruit that could massively improve performance and reduce operating costs with little effort, but there is not a will to analyze and quantify these costs. Adding new features is sexy, it's the stuff people want to work on, it's the stuff people get promoted for doing. You don't get promoted for preventing the issue that never happened, even if it saves billions of dollars. You can't brag about making your software imperceptibly faster, even if it saves a tremendous amount of time across the user base.

Software has always only needed to be good enough, and the threshold for good enough has been lowering exponentially with hardware improvements since time immemorial. The system is not set up to favor people who care. If nobody cares, nothing will ever improve.

If there were a good way to track every time a fixed bug would have been triggered had it gone unfixed, and if that cost were quantified and visible, there would be a massive push for better quality.

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

#173

Post by n8cpdx »

hodgesrm wrote: post #157
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 seems like everyone is getting too worked up about AI generated text. Yes, it's bad, but bad writing has existed forever. We don't see most of the older stuff because it disappears (thankfully) into oblivion and you are left with the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

This isn’t just an insightful comment. It’s profound.

I’d like to delve into the crucial topic of whether AI generated slop is respectful to the innovative entrepreneurs of Hacker News. If they won’t assert the value of their time, who will?

In this digital age, can we not expect writers to just keep it brief? Or heck, just share the prompt, which is almost certainly shorter than the output and includes 100% of the information they intend to share?

Or is true 21st century digital transformation driven by the dialectical tension between AI generators and AI summarizers?

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

#174

Post by strangattractor »

hodgesrm wrote: post #157
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 seems like everyone is getting too worked up about AI generated text. Yes, it's bad, but bad writing has existed forever. We don't see most of the older stuff because it disappears (thankfully) into oblivion and you are left with the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Agree but at least someone took time and effort to write it before. There were limits on the quantity produced. AI will simply release a flood of this stuff. Social media did similar things by making zero barriers to "Enquireresque" type of misinformation - Weekly World News "Bat Child Found in Cave"

In the 70's we had Environmental Pollution - the 2000s will be defined as a fight against Social Pollution.

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

#175

Post by Ekaros »

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.

To me on markets where customer actually gets to choose what to buy or play the weaker options have much less success. Gaming is really one example. There is still sales, but they are lot less than expected even from big players if they don't look like good products.

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

#176

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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.

Why? If software quality doesn't matter to us, why would it matter to an LLM?

If it's trained on our code, how would it know any better?

If it's driven by our prompts, why would we prompt it to do any better?

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

#177

Post by dkarl »

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.

I didn't say we get the quality of software people would rationally pay for in a rational system, if the right people were paying for it. I said we get the quality of software that people pay for.

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

#178

Post by Leherenn »

AzN1337c0d3r wrote: post #112
gkedzierski wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

I mean, that was over 40y ago. Same thing for the Ariane 5 failure which is a staple of safety-critical classes (at least in Europe), it's not getting any younger.

If all the examples you can conjure are decades old*, is it any wonder that people don't really take it seriously? Software power the whole world, and yet the example of critical failure we constantly hear about is close to half a century old?

I think the more insidious thing is all the "minor" pains being inflicted by software bugs, that when summed up reach crazy level of harm. It's just diluted so less striking. But even then, it's hard to say if the alternative of not using software would have been better overall.

* maybe they've added Boeing 737 Max to the list now?

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

#179

Post by imiric »

0xWTF wrote: post #73
imiric wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't noticed a dramatic decline in average software quality, you're not paying attention or willfully ignoring it. The article is right. This is partly related to the explosion of new developers entering the industry, coupled with the classic "move fast and break things" mentality, and further exacerbated by the current "AI" wave. Junior developers don't have a clear path at becoming senior developers anymo…

Is this measureable? Like code readability scores on the GitHub corpus over time?

Code readability has nothing to do with it.

I suppose it could be quantified by the amount of financial damage to businesses. We can start with high-profile incidents like the CrowdStrike one that we actually know about.

But I'm merely speaking as a user. Bugs are a daily occurrence in operating systems, games, web sites, and, increasingly, "smart" appliances. This is also more noticeable since software is everywhere these days compared to a decade or two ago, but based on averages alone, there's far more buggy software out there than robust and stable software.

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

#180

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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.

Bugs matter. LLMs aren't going to eat our lunch on their own. They'll do so in service to some human that's using them to exploit a bug.
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