Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

techtrenches.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 260 posts

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

#81

Post by LinuxAmbulance »

michaelsshaw wrote: post #18

I never read about Replit earlier this year, but I am now glad that I did. This article summarizes it in a way that is outrageously hilarious: The Replit incident in July 2025 crystallized the danger: 1. Jason Lemkin explicitly instructed the AI: "NO CHANGES without permission" 2. The AI encountered what looked like empty database queries 3. It "panicked" (its own words) and executed destructive commands 4. Deleted t…

It's getting harder and harder to distinguish between AIs and humans! If AI wasn't mentioned, I'd be here thinking it was caused by one of my former coworkers.

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

#82

Post by heisenbit »

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 following best practices with security relevant implications (it also turned out an old release was used by the team and one issue was already fixed due to the feedback of a pen test assessment).

LLM seem to be really good in analyzing things. I don't not trust them to produce too much but alone the ability to take a few files and bits and pieces and ask for a response with a certain direction has been transformative to my work.

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

#83

Post by sackfield »

A rather controversial opinion I have is this will begin to bend back very soon, once AI starts controlling more of the development process it will be able to reason about why we have these verbose frameworks at all, and start slimming them down to do only what it needs to do in the context of a program. I think stories like this will become more and more common: https://cybernews.com/security/curl-maintainer-stenberg-says...

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

#84

Post by dlcarrier »

pornel wrote: post #63
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.

See "A plea for lean software" by Wirth. It's from 1995 and laments that computers need megabytes of memory for what used to work in kilobytes.

Wirth's law is eating Moore's law for lunch.

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

#85

Post by devin »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #2

I’ve read some versions of this post dozens of times over the years. At first I would nod along, sympathetic but now I realise that we shouldn’t chase some platonic ideal of perfect software. It has to exist in the real world and there will always be trade offs. In the end, most software exists to make businesses money.

I agree completely that there is no platonic ideal, that there will always be trade offs, and that running successful businesses is part of the equation, but let's not ignore the fact that profit _to the exclusion of all else_ is bad.

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

#86

Post by yojo »

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 bounced hard off the article at #5. My AI detector was slow warming up but kicked on at:

"Today’s real chain: React → Electron → Chromium → Docker → Kubernetes → VM → managed DB → API gateways."

Like, yes, those are all technologies, and I can imagine an app + service backend that might use all of them, but the "links" in the chain don't always make sense next to each other and I don't think a human would write this. Read literally, it implies someone deploying an electron app using Kubernetes for god knows why.

If you really wanted to communicate a client-server architecture, you'd list the API gateway as the link between the server-side stuff and the electron app (also you'd probably put electron upstream of chromium).

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

#87

Post by j2kun »

> Today’s real chain: React → Electron → Chromium → Docker → Kubernetes → VM → managed DB → API gateways. Each layer adds “only 20–30%.” Compound a handful and you’re at 2–6× overhead for the same behavior. > > That's how a Calculator ends up leaking 32GB. Not because someone wanted it to—but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users started complaining.

MacOS calculator definitely doesn't use any of those technologies above...

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

#88

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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.

> 20 years ago things werent any better.

Yes they were. I was there. Most software was of a much higher quality than what we saw today.

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

#89

Post by imiric »

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.

You can't be serious.

How do you categorize "commercial software engineering"? Does a company with $100M+ ARR count? Surely you can understand the impact that deleting a production database can have on a business.

And your answer to this is "LLMs will eat our lunch" and "bugs don't matter"? Unbelievable.

Post reply on HN