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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

#41

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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…

Yeah I can see this can be an irritating rhetorical device. It implies that the reader already has a certain judgement or explanation, and makes a straw man in order to turn around and then argue against it, throwing nuance out the window.

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

#42

Post by firmretention »

bibelo wrote: post #29
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's not raging against AI, it's raging against AI to create consistent code to me, it's OK to use AI to check grammar and help you for some creative stuff, like writing a text

When you copy and paste whole sentences provided to you by the AI, you're not just getting help—you're compensating for fundamental writing failures.

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

#43

Post by bigfishrunning »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #27
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…

I think another part of this, is that Tech is perhaps the only industry that hasn't quite gotten over itself yet. Writing code is artistic the same way plumbing is artistic. Writing code is artistic the same way home wiring is artistic. Writing code is artistic the same way HVAC is artistic. Which is to say, yes, there is satisfaction to be had, but companies don't care as long as it gets the job done without too man…

> 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.

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

#44

Post by gkedzierski »

creativeSlumber wrote: post #26
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.

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.

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

#45

Post by spankibalt »

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.

One could easily imagine the analogy, e. g. the amount of commercial software (in critical infrastructure) that "leaked kBytes and MBytes of memory", as well as embarassing "Computer Science 101 error handling" fuck-ups of the day with billion dollar consequences, but I believe you got it surrounded...

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

#46

Post by gjsman-1000 »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #43
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think another part of this, is that Tech is perhaps the only industry that hasn't quite gotten over itself yet. Writing code is artistic the same way plumbing is artistic. Writing code is artistic the same way home wiring is artistic. Writing code is artistic the same way HVAC is artistic. Which is to say, yes, there is satisfaction to be had, but companies don't care as long as it gets the job done without too man…

> 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't that companies make these tradeoffs. It's that we pretend we're not in the same boat as every other trade that deals with 'good enough' solutions under real-world constraints. We're not artists, we're tradesmen in 1920 arguing about the best home wiring practices. Imagine what it would be like if they were getting artistic about their beautiful tube-and-knob installations and the best way to color-code a fusebox; that's us.

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

#48

Post by ericskiff »

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 trend towards caring about the craft and writing decent code.

Most projects, even the messy ones I inherit from other teams today have Git, CI/CD, at least some tests, and a sane hosting infrastructure. They're also mosty built on decent platforms like Rails/Django/Next etc that impose some conventional structure. 20 years ago most of them were "SSH into the box and try not to break anything"

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

#49

Post by TimorousBestie »

LostMyLogin wrote: post #9

> Every 10x increase in model size requires 10x more power Does it? I’ll be the first to admit I am so far behind on this area, but isn’t this assuming the hardware isn’t improving over time as well? Or am I missing the boat here?

Hardware isn’t improving exponentially anymore, especially not on the flops/watt metric.

That’s part of what motivated the transition to bfloat16 and even smaller minifloat formats, but you can only quantize so far before you’re just GEMMing noise.

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

#50

Post by sunaookami »

firmretention wrote: post #42
bibelo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not raging against AI, it's raging against AI to create consistent code to me, it's OK to use AI to check grammar and help you for some creative stuff, like writing a text

When you copy and paste whole sentences provided to you by the AI, you're not just getting help—you're compensating for fundamental writing failures.

You are absolutely right.
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