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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

#221

Post by iamwil »

8s2ngy wrote: post #68
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…

I've been seeing this pattern of text crop up in many places. On LinkedIn, much of my feed is filled with posts of short sentences that follow this exact pattern. What's more, even the replies are obviously AI-generated.

I hear people talk like this on the phone. The one I hear a lot is: "It's not about X, it's about Y1. It's about Y2. It's about Y3." Where Y is usually something humanizing.

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

#222

Post by mpalmer »

yojo wrote: post #134
pdntspa wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't want to take the time writing up a cogent response to an article someone didn't bother taking the time to write. With this particular article, there were a couple of points I wanted to respond to, before I realized there was no human mind behind them. I've always liked the HN community because it facilitates an intelligent exchange of ideas. I've learned a lot trawling the comments on this site. I don't want…

I have thought like this since the slop wave hit, but hadn't yet put it into words. Gratified to see someone else do it

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

#223

Post by karakot »

yojo wrote: post #134
pdntspa wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't want to take the time writing up a cogent response to an article someone didn't bother taking the time to write. With this particular article, there were a couple of points I wanted to respond to, before I realized there was no human mind behind them. I've always liked the HN community because it facilitates an intelligent exchange of ideas. I've learned a lot trawling the comments on this site. I don't want…

I wonder how it's different from when a collegue sends you an llm PR.

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

#224

Post by surgical_fire »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #100
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see working for most of my employers as "artistic." I do see it as more of a craft than a typical trade. There are just too many ways to do things to compare it to e.g. an electrician. Our industry does not have (for better or for worse) a "code" like the building trades or even any mandated way to do things, and any attempts to impose (cough cough Ada, etc.) that have been met with outright defiance and cont…

I don't see this as really disproving my point. If we look at most trades historically: - Electricians in the 1920s? Infinite ways to do things. DC vs AC wars. Knob-and-tube vs conduit vs armored cable. Every electrician had their own "creative" approach to grounding. Regional variations, personal styles, competing philosophies. Almost all of those other ways are gone now. Early attempts to impose codes on electricia…

While I agree with the general point of treating coding as any other craft or tradeskill, I disagree that in 40 yers non-technical people will be able to evaluate on system design or data breaches. Programming is too arcane and esoteric for non technical people. It all happens too behind the scenes for people to connect the dots.

I always say that code quality should be a requirement as any other. Many businesses are fine with rough edges and cut corners if it means things are sort of working today rather than being perfect tomorrow. Other businesses have a lower tolerance for fail and risk.

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

#225

Post by AzN1337c0d3r »

Leherenn wrote: post #178
AzN1337c0d3r wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If all the examples you can conjure are decades old

They're not ALL the examples I can conjure up. MCAS would probably be an example of a modern software bug that killed a bunch of people.

How about the 1991 failure of the Patriot missile to defend against a SCUD missile due to a software bug not accounting for clock drift, causing 28 lives lost?

Or the 2009 loss of Air France 447 where the software displayed all sorts of confusing information in what was an unreliable airspeed situation?

Old incidents are the most likely to be widely disseminated, which is why they're most likely to be discussed, but that doesn't mean that the discussion resolving around old events mean the situation isn't happening now.

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

#226

Post by surgical_fire »

imiric wrote: post #62
ealexhudson wrote: post #3

I don't want to sound too dismissive, but all these arguments have been brought up time and again. The move from assembler to high level languages. The introduction of OOP. Component architecture / COM / CORBA / etc. The development of the web browser. The introduction of Java. 2018 isn't "the start of the decline", it's just another data point on a line that leads from, y'know, Elite 8-bit on a single tape in a few…

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…

Eh, after 20 years in the industry, I think that the overall quality of software is roughly the same. Matter of fact, my first job was by far the worst codebase I ever worked at. A masterclass in bad practices.

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

#227

Post by SoKamil »

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…

LLMs like to repeat same pattern over and over again. This is my text flag.

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

#228

Post by imiric »

SoftTalker wrote: post #209
imiric wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I never said they deserve it. But if you have a business, and don't have continuity and recovery plans for software disasters, that's like not having fire insurance on your facility. Fire insurance (and backups/disaster recovery plans) doesn't mean there won't be disruption, but it makes the disaster survivable, whereas without it your business is probably ended. And losing a database or a major part of one is as…

> No, I never said they deserve it.

That's the gist of your argument. They're not a "serious business", therefore it's their fault. Let's not mince words.

> It happens, I've helped recover from it, and it doesn't take an AI running amok to do it.

Again, losing a database is not the issue. I don't know why you fixated on that. The issue is that most modern software is buggy and risky to use in ways that a typical business is not well equipped to handle. "AI" can only make matters worse, with users having a false sense of confidence in its output. Thinking otherwise is delusional to the point of being dangerous.

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

#229

Post by imiric »

heisenbit wrote: post #82
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.

Considering that LLM are fairly good at finding security relevant issues - the bugs that matter - there is certainly scope for them. I would not be surprised if not checking your code with an LLM will be considered negligent in the near future. This week I was forced by circumstances to triage a messed up nginx configuration. While not the focus of my work the LLM pointed out two issues where configuration was not fo…

LLMs are not a silver bullet. They're just as likely to point out non-issues, as they are to hallucinate fixes for them.

Their output is only as valuable as the human using them. If they're not a security expert to begin with, they can be easily led astray and lulled into a false sense of security.

See curl, for example. Hundreds of bogus reports rejected by an expert human. One large report with valuable data, that still requires an expert human to sift through and validate.

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

#230

Post by wseqyrku »

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…

Path forward

Accept that we will going to see more and more of these to the point that it's pointless to point out

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