Thread

1. sedan_baklazhan · 1790877775 · focus · HN ↗

   So what exactly is happening to the software industry? Why are we getting buggier than ever releases of major Operating Systems?

   For some reasons I can’t stop thinking about “AI”.

   1. simmerup · 1790878132 · focus · HN ↗

      I’ve noticed so many bugs in spotify after they tweeted about how little coding their devs do now

      1. sedan_baklazhan · 1790878945 · focus · HN ↗

         I am seeing this in all kinds of software. Quality is steadily declining.

         1. GlickWick · 1790880867 · focus · HN ↗

            It's in AAA games too. For example, Diablo 4 has incredibly degraded. Basic features are often broken, like dungeon exits sending you to the right locations, UI interfaces having things that can't be clicked under certain circumstances, unlockable season abilities simply not working, etc
         2. throw-the-towel · 1790883757 · focus · HN ↗

            But be wary of possible observation bias though. In my opinion, for one, the quality decline was going on long before AI.

            1. za3faran · 1790892180 · focus · HN ↗

               AI could have amplified it.
            2. sedan_baklazhan · 1790927351 · focus · HN ↗

               On the contrary: software quality was steady and improving in my observations back then.
      2. [deleted] · 1790879700 · focus · HN ↗

         [deleted]

   2. kjellsbells · 1790879262 · focus · HN ↗

      Software quality has been miserable for decades. And more and more of daily life depends on software working well, so we all feel it much more.

      This predates AI, eg recall Windows was gnarly before the third Service Pack, etc.

      Personally I blame outsourcing and its cousin offshoring. Not because Indians can't code or any such racist nonsense, but because relentless pressure to be the lowest bidder, no universal measurable standard of what quality actually means, and, above all, no practical way to exercise meaningful managerial control over a team you don't control or are ten timezones away makes quality impossible.

      I suspect that in the Wide World of Software, away from the 10x people here on HN who write SQLite clones for fun and send Fabrice PRs to fix his bugs, vibe coded software might actually be approaching the quality of what they get from their vendors today. That doesn't make it good, but it's at least equally meh. It's the Visual Basic era of 1994 all over again. We'd better get used to it, fast.

      1. valleyer · 1790880018 · focus · HN ↗

         As relevant here, basically none of macOS development is outsourced/offshored.
      2. Amekedl · 1790880735 · focus · HN ↗

         I observe this too. New platforms, like VR, had to replace a lot of the stack, and therefore new chances.

         Hard though from the idea initially too.

         The main stack is reasonably web, as broad as that is

   3. bluetomcat · 1790879325 · focus · HN ↗

      It's what happens when you substitute human causal understanding for probabilistic pattern matching that "solves" problems with layering more problems in a pile of cognitive debt beyond human comprehension. We are compromising our entire digital infrastructure with mindless slop that erodes decades of collective know-how and conceptual awareness about complex systems.

      1. ttoinou · 1790880468 · focus · HN ↗

         The reality is probabilistic, and engineering has always been about turning that into deterministic behavior and outcomes, in an industrial, repeatable, observable, debuggable way

         1. bluetomcat · 1790881047 · focus · HN ↗

            True, but with Gen AI, we are turning most digital products into unpredictable slush machines that appear to mostly work on the surface, while hiding an incomprehensible amount of behavioural and performance anomalies.
   4. 233mhz · 1790879700 · focus · HN ↗

      Complexity has to play a role, google chrome has more LOC than windows XP... At this point everything is a pile of piles of shit built on top of a gigantic pile of shit.

      Today I ran out of ram, the "teams" desktop app was taking 2 gigs just standing there doing nothing, you can run four whole windows Xp on the same amount of ram, comfortably. My inactive chatgpt chrome tab alone was taking 900mb

      1. ttoinou · 1790880405 · focus · HN ↗

         I wouldn’t call Chrome a pile of shit software. If anything else we should learn from this project

         And the web is the most advanced and open OS in the world. That all those features can be packaged into a 100MB binary is magic

         1. nullpoint420 · 1790880719 · focus · HN ↗

            Real. The Chrome rendering stack is such an inspiration for how to do high performance GUIs on multiple operating systems.

            1. RunSet · 1790896492 · focus · HN ↗

               > how to do high performance GUIs on multiple operating systems.

               By being a poorly-behaved process until you are caught red-handed.

               <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;why-google-took-years-to-address-a-battery-draining-bug-in-chrome&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;why-google-took-year...

               1. nullpoint420 · 1790898380 · focus · HN ↗

                  Did you mention this as some sort of gotcha? This article is over 12 years old.

                  Chrome has gone through almost two rewrites of their core rendering stack since then. It&#x27;s impressive work.

                  Although this itself is outdated, I remember enjoying &quot;Life of a Pixel&quot;[0] back when it came out.

                  [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=m-J-tbAlFic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=m-J-tbAlFic

      2. wuhhh · 1790881931 · focus · HN ↗

         I try to do more and more in the terminal, but even that isn’t immune to the same syndrome, programs tying up tons of threads and memory, terminal emulators themselves being GPU accelerated and performance intensive. Perhaps we will see a cultural hard fork and a trend towards small, simple, utilitarian programs in personal computing; if the price of basic components continues its upward trend, it may even be necessary. Devices that are purposefully limited, hacked, owned, customised, privvy to closed networks that follow the same philosophies.
   5. wetpaws · 1790880065 · focus · HN ↗

      [dead]

   6. o_m · 1790881118 · focus · HN ↗

      My theory is that the industry grew too much and too fast and this lead to even more feature creep, which turns into buggy software over time.

      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Feature_creep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Feature_creep

   7. glimshe · 1790882279 · focus · HN ↗

      My onboarding flow for MacOS 27 was abysmal. Worse than anything Microsoft ever did to me, with multiple authentications due to me having to accept new Terms for iCloud. I saw 2 show-stopper bugs in this flow where clicking on the messages did nothing. After repeating the same passwords several times, I was able to log in. A complete and ridiculous mess.
   8. fmajid · 1790933106 · focus · HN ↗

      Most Big Tech firms have shut down their QA teams and moved to CI only, a false economy with predictable effects on software quality.

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