The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

I suspect when Moore‘s law ends and we cannot build substantially faster machines anymore.

We have a vastly different software culture today. Constant churning change is superior to all else. I can't go two weeks without a mobile app forcing me to upgrade it so that it will keep operating. My Kubuntu 24.04 LTS box somehow has a constant stream of updates even though I've double-checked I'm on the LTS apt repos. Rolling-release distros are an actual thing people use intentionally (we used to call that the unstable branch).

I could speculate on specifics but I'm not a software developer so I don't see exactly what's going on with these teams. But software didn't used to be made or used this way. It felt like there were more adults in the room who would avoid making decisions that would clearly lead to problems. I think the values have changed to accept or ignore those problems. (I don't want to jump to the conclusion that "they're too ignorant to even know what potential problems exist", but it's a real possibility)

On top of that many things were simply hard to use for non-specialists, even after the introduction of the GUI.

They were also riddled with security holes that mostly went unnoticed because there was simply a smaller and less aggressive audience.

Anyways most people's interaction with "software" these days is through their phones, and the experience is a highly focused and reduced set of interactions, and most "productive" things take a SaaS form.

I do think as a software developer things are in some ways worse. But I actually don't think it's on a technical basis but organizational. There are so many own goals against productivity in this industry now, frankly a result of management and team practices ... I haven't worked on a truly productive fully engaged team in years. 20-25 years ago I saw teams writing a lot more code and getting a lot more done, but I won't use this as my soapbox to get into why. But it's not technology (it's never been better to write code!) it's humans.

Tahoe seems to have some system/API memory leaks that while they might get attributed to an app, can manifest against any app on the system. Lots of different apps have been hit by this. Personally I had an 80GB Messages app problem twice now.

Software quality is a problem. Tooling should improve this, and Swift, Rust et al should improve the situation over time, though it's a battle as software has gotten exponentially more complex.

Having said that, it's bizarre how this somehow turned into an AI screed. I doubt a single one of the noted bugs had AI play any part in its creation. Instead some weird confluence of events, usually with human beings making assumptions, happened and it occurs just randomly enough -- as with the Tahoe bug -- that it isn't caught by normal prevention techniques.