Live data from Hacker News

If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

ptrchm.com

341–350 of 719 posts

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#341
For me, the problem was never the writing of the code. Building something takes care and rigor. Software development got where it is through years of accumulated practice: habits first, then safeguards, then structures that had actually been proven. Now people set the code aside and just describe their problem, and they have no real sense of what comes back, because nobody can review output produced that fast. Nobody is even keeping up with the systems we built to help us keep up. So we ship without quite knowing what we shipped, and the sloppiness follows from that.

Isn't that how it's gone before, though? People used to make beautiful furniture by hand and leave something of themselves in it. Now it comes out of a factory, nobody knows exactly which part they made, they just fit pieces together, and it isn't built to last. Software is at that same point: nobody knows exactly what they've made or how. They describe the problem, assume they've found the solution, ship it, and there is no undoing it. The sloppiness will keep compounding. But that is also the point where people start thinking much harder about how to make it good again. A cycle, I suppose.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#342

> We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse. I actually relate to that. It used to be cool and exciting to update to see what new things are coming for free. I was just looking up what Fedora Workstation 45 might bring. Updates on phones, TV's, cars and non-Linux operating systems on PC's/lap…

> > We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse. You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS. Proprietary software isn't built for users anymore. But (some) FOSS still is.

Richard Stallman was right all along.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#343

> If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse? Because the premise that coding has been solved is false. :-)

I'd say "coding" has been solved, but that was never the bottleneck.

Coding is cheap. It has been for a long time. Ten years ago my company was outsorcing all its coding to the cheapest people they could find in India. But most of these people can't solve problems. They can't even identify problems, much less design solutions.

Code is a liability. You want as little as you can to solve the problems you actually have. That takes an engineer. Maybe AI will get there someday, but it certainly isn't today.

Engineers can certainly use AI to generate code when they need it... but in my experience I don't need much code to do my job, so AI coding doesn't help me much. My personal experience is that by the time I've reviewed the output and corrected the mistakes, I may as well have written it myself.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough. Every game install was chased by an hour of debugging with Claude to figure out which version of proton to use, which launch arguments to use, which between-system-and-gpu shim profile to use. I grant: The process is much more enjoyable than doing similar things on Windows. Kubuntu treats…

> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc: - "Something went wrong" - "It's not you - it's us :-(" - "An error occurred" - "Uh-oh..." - "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable] People used to…

I remember when BugZilla reported "Zarro boogs found". My reaction was to ask that we switch to some software that didn't act like it was a 13 year old nerd.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is here, time to create something new and shiny.

> AI is here, time to create something new and shiny. The AI we have in 2026 cannot do that or it'd have already been done. I use AI daily: it saves some time. But it produces an infinite amount of insecure, unnecessary, sloppy-pasta. And that sloppy-pasta doesn't make software any better.

AI is fine, if the thing you want to produce is relatively small and self-contained.

But as soon as you have real, complex project is falls apart. Perhaps when we reach 10M tokens context this will change.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#347
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to say that AI amplifies our abilities, but it needs to be in the hands of people that know what they are doing. If developers are producing garbage to begin with, chances are they still produce garbage just at an accelerated rate.

But that defeats the whole point of AI, as far as business is concerned. You could describe most programming languages as working the same way and having the same limitation. If this is true, then AI will simply mean you'll have very highly paid AI experts (who know how to do X with AI) that you absolutely need to hire or your competition will run at 10x your speed.

Business incentives is to maximize money, which requires some quality. But these days, not a lot.

Customers ideally maximize value, which lies on some spectrum of cost and quality. Part of the reasons businesses act with disregard for quality is that the consumer ultaimtely doesn't punish them for it. Whether that's due to true consumer preference or a market lock-in is a discussion left to the reader.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#348
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse. You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS. Proprietary software isn't built for users anymore. But (some) FOSS still is.

> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS. speak for your clearly non-pulseaudio-using self (:

Pulseaudio has been painless for like a decade and a half. Yes, it has a rough start and was probably made default in many distros before it ought to, but it's fine.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#350
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out. Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost…

Software's absurd margins was like the whole pitch.

Yeah, and companies want to put those margins into their pockets, not give it back to the business/product.
Post reply on HN