371–380 of 719 posts
I suppose that because we trained llm’s on code with bugs in it will write code with bugs in
I feel like we need a name for this error. Pretraining fallacy? Coding ability is all about RL.
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But maybe that’s bad? Maybe keeping everyone just on the verge of leaving or getting hurt isn’t a good place for society to settle?
Given doing better costs money, and people don't want to pay for better, leaving that place is hard. We've seen the same play out with physical goods - the cheapness of just-good-enough-but-right-now-cheaply outcompetes quality, which costs and takes time. We as society are choosing to be in that place.
Software is a market for lemons. There are huge costs for switching, and it's typically very hard to tell what is good. That and with the rate software is updated you have no clue if it will remain good. There are high motivations for short term gains with enshittification all over the market.
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Uncle Bob already became part of the problem by some of the stuff he wrote in Clean Code (like using mutable instance fields instead of method parameters). Luckily he isn’t perceived as very relevant anymore.
Or ever. If we want to some colleague to tell us what is good code and what isn't, can we please pick someone who at least once demonstratably delivered good software? Bonus points if it was a group effort, and if it was on time. Common for all these "industry leaders" is that they all write books and give speeches. I'd rather listen to someone who designed successful software such as git or OpenSSH than someone who…
I was never a fan of TDD, but ironically I think it may finally be a good development strategy now with agentic/LLM coding since LLMs do so much better they they have a verifiable goal like passing tests.
> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it wh…
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Or ever. If we want to some colleague to tell us what is good code and what isn't, can we please pick someone who at least once demonstratably delivered good software? Bonus points if it was a group effort, and if it was on time. Common for all these "industry leaders" is that they all write books and give speeches. I'd rather listen to someone who designed successful software such as git or OpenSSH than someone who…
> Did we learn nothing from the TDD nonsense in the 00s? I was never a fan of TDD, but ironically I think it may finally be a good development strategy now with agentic/LLM coding since LLMs do so much better they they have a verifiable goal like passing tests.
I agree that software becoming worse (in some sense) but I don't blame AI. My experiences as a user haven't really changed. Streamers fail to cast to TVs. Browsers are devices which reliably and efficiently propagate red console text and 500s from companies to you. I still see bluescreens on public touchscreens. Uncle Bob nailed one reason why the industry isn't getting better: the growth of programmers is exponentia…
I generally agree that software has been getting worse, and AI isn't the cause, necessarily, but certainly is accelerating the decay. Maybe a corollary to the growth of programmers is that pride/artisanship in the work decreases. Bugs happen more when the engineers dgaf, or aren't as dedicated to the craft. Software was pretty solid when I was a teenager (I'm thinking Windows, MSN Messenger, Flash, CDs, general web u…
Past software was just as horrible, we just tended to use it for less things and incorporated its failures into our lives transparently. We'd reboot Windows every day so problems wouldnt stack up. We'd use less of the features, and use far less multimedia components like video and sound in the software. Flash was always a giant insecure piece of crap, it may have been better than other similar software but its issues were legion.
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Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish. NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 mi…
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…
Games on Windows just work. It's not even a question. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle around to get a game to work properly, but it was probably 20+ years ago.
On Linux? Might as well play a slot machine. You might score a jackpot and the game has a native Linux port that works flawlessly out of the box. You might have a decent win with a non-native but works well with Proton. But there's a good chance it either won't work at all, or requires significant fussing to make it work.
The same reason computers keep getting faster but software keeps getting slower.
Which is?
> What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away
Author seems to be blaming the hammer for the house not getting built right. Software is increasing in complexity, and perhaps is outpacing testing.
> 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…
Yep, this 100%. When I see a "pending update" notification or icon somewhere, the first thing I think is "I don't want to update, they're just going to break something new". I _hate_ updates now. Doesn't matter what software it is, with the small exception of video games. (Except Dead By Daylight. Behavior, the devs, are the most hilariously incompetent devs on the planet, but at least their incompetence is confined…
Not universal though. Besides your example, even for single player games patches can be basically malicious. I've had Fallout 4 locked on updates for like 3 years at this point, everything Bethesda has added has degraded the experience for zero upside. But I can't think of any software besides a game where I have been anything but dreading an update in years. Slack wants to update? Great, it'll probably break/degrade my work flow in some minor way, and they're one of the lesser offenders on my work machine.