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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

#181

Post by nixpulvis »

ericskiff wrote: post #48
firmretention wrote: post #20

I find it ironic that an article that rails against AI usage contains a sentence like this. >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.

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…

I have no way of knowing, but I will say I'm already fatigued with comments claiming something is AI slop. It's only going to get worse.

You're so quick to be dismissive from a claim that they "tracked" something, when that could mean a lot of things. They clearly list some major issues directly after it, but yes fail to provide direct evidence that it's getting worse. I think the idea is that we will agree based on our own observations, which imo is reasonable enough.

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

#182

Post by samiv »

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…

For a startup good quality code will never make a difference if everything else is wrong, i.e. product market fit etc. But conversely poor quality code can destroy a startup (the product cannot pivot fast enough, feature development grinds to a halt, developers leave, customers are unsatisfied etc.) even if everything else is right.

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

#183

Post by username223 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #88
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.

> 20 years ago things werent any better. Yes they were. I was there. Most software was of a much higher quality than what we saw today.

Back in the Mac OS < 10 or MS-DOS days, all programs shared the same address space. Bugs that would crash a single program nowadays would bring down the entire system. But you could somehow run a bunch of sketchy shareware games, and your computer usually wouldn't crash or run out of memory, because programmers cared about bugs.

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

#184

Post by nixpulvis »

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 don't matter once you have captured your userbase.

Until then they matter a lot.

One thing that needs to be addressed is how easy it is to build moats around your users which trap them in your ecosystem. It's great from a business perspective if you can pull it off, but it's killing innovation and making users frustrated and apathetic towards technology as a whole.

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

#185

Post by nixpulvis »

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.

What about the less obvious ways people are dying. Teen suicide rates have been directly linked to social media, for example.

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

#186

Post by antisthenes »

0xWTF wrote: post #142

I love the idea of high quality code. I do, however, dismiss the energy efficiency issue. > Data centers already consume 200 TWh annually. That's 7.2 x 10^16 joules Some estimates suggest that's low. Let's multiply by 5. Annually, that's 3.6 x 10^17 joules The total radiant power of the sun that hits the Earth's atmosphere is about 174 PW, and about 47% of that lands on the surface. Even with the most drastic global…

Yes, the moral panic about power consumption from Data centers has always been a red herring at best.

Given how cheap renewables are in 2025, and how far we still are from an inverted duck curve world-wide, it's absolute nonsense.

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

#187

Post by alexjplant »

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.

Anybody that was around for the Windows 95-ME era remembers. Things would just randomly crash. BSODs, "This program has performed an illegal operation", "A device attached to the system is not functioning", "Windows will restart and repair your registry", "Explorer has caused an error"... Ctrl+S was the first keyboard shortcut every schoolchild learned so that Word wouldn't munge their homework.

Let's not even think about the absolute mess that the web was with competing browser box models and DHTML and weird shared hosting CGI setups. We have it easy.

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

#188

Post by antisthenes »

orbital-decay wrote: post #36

Try Windows 98 and contemporary apps and you'll be surprised how janky the experience was. User-facing software wasn't any less buggy 20 or 30 years ago. The overall non-cherrypicked quality and especially security were actually a lot worse across the board, and stuff that won't fly today such as segfaults/crashes and lost data was pretty normal. There was a point in time (several, actually) when installing Windows X…

> Try Windows 98 and contemporary apps and you'll be surprised how janky the experience was. User-facing software wasn't any less buggy 20 or 30 years ago.

Yes, and now compare a fully-patched Windows 7 and Windows 11.

You understand that there aren't just 2 valid points in time for comparison - it's not 2025 and 1995 that are being compared. It's trends of 2020+, or 2015+

> The only thing that has degraded a bit is UI latency, not universally.

Yes, universally. And no, not a bit. It's 10-100x across varying components. Look no further than MS Teams.

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

#189

Post by gwbas1c »

kettlecorn wrote: post #98

I've thought a lot about why software doesn't converge on higher quality and I don't know if I've ever come to a satisfying conclusion. The simple statement is that "Quality isn't what sells" and I think there's some truth to that, but I also think quality can sell and theoretically if all other factors are equal higher quality will sell better. What I've had a tough time pinning down precisely is I think there's alm…

> I think you have to fundamentally target aspects of the ecosystem, like changing the course of a river by moving a few rocks.

We need (Cough) Regulations (Cough)

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

#190

Post by gwbas1c »

sackfield wrote: post #83

A rather controversial opinion I have is this will begin to bend back very soon, once AI starts controlling more of the development process it will be able to reason about why we have these verbose frameworks at all, and start slimming them down to do only what it needs to do in the context of a program. I think stories like this will become more and more common: https://cybernews.com/security/curl-maintainer-stenber…

Back when I was starting to program, when I was about 13 or 14, one of my mentors said: "A computer is only as smart as its programmer."

Perhaps this means whoever is operating the LLM has to work with it to remove unneeded abstraction.

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