All of these are examples of the physical performance of software or hardware limitations at the time. I find that software's reliability has increased a thousandfold in my lifetime, but its actual controllability/feel/UI-UX has been rapidly declining for about a decade.
i think crafting software has turned into something like making music. consider the movie Trolls World Tour, where there used to be one way of making it, then it splintered off into a ton of different styles.
everybody only likes their own style, and has trouble dealing with other people’s style.
maybe that’s what you mean by the total net feel/experience decreasing. in my world, it’s still harmonious, but it’s possible queen barb hasn’t showed up here yet
“Software is degrading for obvious reasons” is just painfully lazy. Where are the metrics of degradation? Where are the claims of specific reasons, and the evidence of causality?
If the complaint is vibe coding makes bad software, I largely believe it, but I absolutely believe that vibe arguing makes tissue paper arguments. “Everyone knows” and “it’s obvious” are flimsy things to rest arguments on.
I’m writing dramatically better software for all the reasons this post says obviously make worse software.
Testing has gotten much easier, and bug fixing has gotten much easier. I looked at a pre-AI project I did a couple of years ago: test to code LOC was 0.15:1. The projects I work on now are around 1.3:1. The old project had no accessibility considered at all, the new ones are nicely done aria and beyond. Old project is stuck on old libraries because upgrading is a major pain. New projects take new libraries (after cooldown) no matter the effort.
So I’m left thinking that perhaps some people, too lazy to use the new powers of new tools, churn out the same or worse quality code/essays.
But I am seeing a lot of very high quality software that simply wouldn’t have been possible before, and I believe the same could be done with essays by leveraging these tools to research and find real data beyond “it’s obvious”. But that does take a lot more work.
Dawg, you clearly haven't used any consumer-grade software in the past 5 years. Everything across the board is a worse experience and there in some cases are limitations that make no sense. Use any app such as Spotify or Uber Eats, its a worse experience than it was 5 years ago, hands down. Everyone outside of our bubble knows it.
No one designs for users any more. It's all gas no breaks on the path to enshitification. A lot of this is the motivation of the people building software.
Raise your hand if you ever saw a PM get promoted for removing a bunch of bad and/or unused features?
IME, nobody reads the tests in code review either. They just see "looks like it has tests" *check*. Many times, I've caught LLMs writing completely vacuous tests for configurations of components that were impossible. But coverage number go up, so those tests get written.
IMO it's a bit more nuanced than what the author portrays it as. Broadly, software used to be much worse on the micro-level but better on the macro-level i.e. architecture.
Since it was much harder to make stuff, you really had to architect it well or otherwise it would simply fall apart. For example in assembler you need discipline in your calling conventions, layout and so on, otherwise it just corrupted, you needed to follow sensible naming conventions otherwise it degenerated into unreadable label spaghetti and so on.
Nowadays it's the other way around, the micro level is so much better due to libraries, code reuse, LLMs and better languages/tools, you can use highly sophisticated data structures and functions at your fingertips. In exchange, you can afford to skimp on architecture because computers are fast anyway, and the programming languages don't let you make a huge mess. (Most don't have unstructured goto/jumps, can't corrupt memory accidentally, etc.)
However, this has the cost of making larger programs a nightmare to maintain and systems suffering from a "death of thousand cuts" i.e. on the micro level all is well but when you look at the entire system it's a sprawling unreliable mess. This is where rewrites often happen ;)
Counterpoint - lots of old systems have atrocious architectures.
Those downsides existed, but then that’s just how lots of stuff is or was.
Larger systems are not imo any worse to manage now, but the scale of what is possible and expected dramatically changes what we consider a large system these days.
I think this is like looking back at a few hits and being nostalgic for some decade of music forgetting all the terrible songs of the time. Or perhaps if the volume has increased seeing on YouTube all the school bands that you’d never have seen before because recording was expensive and distribution reserved for the very few.
Not disagreeing, but I feel there is something to be said about how the tools we use nudge us to do things a certain way.
Similar to how using lambda functions and some document DB is easy and fast, but it often times leads to shit architecture as you don't have to think about it anymore, bolt on whatever cloud service X and Y for features and you have a mess.
AI is similar to cloud in that way, it's so forgiving that it pushes you towards a shit architecture as it "doesn't matter anymore".
Funnily enough AI makes the cloud mess easier to manage. These opinions are based on my own experience and most importantly, vibes.
Probably the most annoying bug I ever encountered was in Quark Xpress 7 when in a two-column layout, placing a discretionary hyphen in a paragraph on the right-hand column caused a preceding paragraph on the left-hand column to reflow to a different number of lines. I tried to get Quark to look into it (it was perfectly repeatable) --- when they wouldn't, I pulled a couple of all-nighters over a weekend and shifted the entire project to InDesign.
That said, as a counter-point, there were also applications such as WriteNow which was ~100,000 lines of hand-coded assembly, which was quick and performant even on an 8MHz 68000 Mac Plus --- it flew on a 25MHz NeXT Cube (it was originally developed as a possible advanced MacWrite/replacement for it if it didn't ship, then was contracted by NeXT to make a bundled word-processor)
It was simply a magical thing in the early days, and one wonders how things would have turned out if for instance we had had MacBasic instead of HyperCard:
There is simply too much software out there. Too many websites, apps, ui choices, frameworks. Impossible to keep track of it all and with AI accelerating release quantities, I already feel a fatigue of just keeping up with the news, not too mention using any of it to even a small extent. It will only get worse.
Definitely rose-tinted glasses when people look back at Windows XP and earlier in particular. So many HN posts waxing poetic about how great the UIs were then. No! They were ugly, unreliable, inconsistent, and slow. It was a bad OS. Being gray and having small buttons doesn’t make it automatically more powerful or functional.
I agree, people are too nostalgic about old UIs. But I think modern UIs also invent square wheels, such as invisible scrollbars, too large margins, etc. For example, Windows 7 had the best UI (maybe needed a handful of small additions for year 2026, such as ability to scroll without focus). Later versions of Windows significantly degraded user experience. Windows 11 has somewhat improved look, but it's too bloated and inefficient (that famous desktop context menu opening in 2-3 seconds, jeez).
Everything used to be horrible and IS horrible, more than it should be.
The biggest companies in the world with hundreds of employees and billions of dollars still can't fix their software.
Google is still anal about dark mode if you're not signed in. Some other major apps don't even have dark mode even though it's been almost a decade since major operating systems supported it.
YouTube still hinders iOS's picture-in-picture feature.
Facebook still doesn't have iPad-native versions of their apps.
There's so much shit in apps with millions of users that hasn't been fixed for years.
And goobers act as if AI could possibly make it worse.
The headline makes not much sense though. If the software used to be horrible, and now is getting worse, then what is the result? Abysmal software? In the light of this decrease of quality, the "but" seems misplaced, as if it indicated, that it is not so bad, while in fact software getting _even_ worse, will make some software unimaginably bad and we should worry even more.
My understanding of the headline is that software used to be horrible long ago, got better for a while and now is getting worse again (but is still better than horrible?).
I had to think about this one for a bit. Programming by hand took ALOT of time and, yes, software invariably had errors and edge cases that weren't noticeable until after release. BSOD, buffer overflows, etc.
If anything, software 'may' be getting worse due to non-programmers (vibe coders) releasing things they have no business making in the first place.
I built this extremely heavy drag and drop editor in one giant typescript file a year ago, then I had to go back to check something and to my surprise, vscode just choked on everything. Syntax highlighting became a rainbow and required restarting vscode, intellisense took 3 seconds to suggest anything useful.
The code I wrote was ugly yes, but vscode back when I wrote it was nowhere near that miserable.
The other day google docs started freezing, It got stuck on the creating sheet state.
Youtube is making my fans spin recently just because I am hovering over the play button.
God forbid you use a lesser known SaaS tool. I started a trial on a platform and it kept asking me to start trails because I suppose the modal system was just trash.
The list is endless.
Things just don't work as intended and I know hn gets very offended when you're critical of AI but I couldn't care less honestly because I have my own data. Vibe code slop is slop no matter how good you are with your "orchestration". Oversight is a side effect of vibes and no ambition.
The real issue is it was secure just by human hacking skill cap and not a wide adaptation of Internet early. now with AI everybody just needs compute and can just run their own hacking operation.
Commonly that isn't a software issue though, that's a hardware problem being [correctly] indicated by software. With three notable exceptions:
- Windows 1.0 through ME era: Legitimately an unstable OS due to dangerous memory model/lack of memory isolation.
- Windows NT through XP: Before KPP was added, software was monkey-patching the kernel, and it was causing instability (particularly multiple trying to over-patch each other). For example during that era it wasn't UNCOMMON for antivirus to do so as a matter of course.
- Windows Vista Specific: They made significant changes to the driver model of several popular device types, and manufacturers weren't ready. So a lot of driver-related failures.
But since then, it has mostly be smooth sailing. If you see a BSOD, you can trace it down, and more often than not the source will be underlying hardware failure which is why BSOD exists and isn't a software bug or problem.
No Internet for us back in the day with its myriad of issues. Just BBSs and screaming at the family when the carrier dropped and you wanted to know who picked up the phone.
This largely deals with Windows 9x, and seems to imply that agents improved the software, while all the improvements he mentions (what he considers to be improvements) happened way before LLMs.
If it's getting worse, one can logically deduce that it used to be better
If it used to be better, why are you saying it used to be much worse? You cannot have it both ways unless AI already fried your brain.
...and if we are actually heading the wrong direction, why does it matter that we haven't regressed fully quite yet. AI is pushing us towards regressing fully. It's only a few miserable humans ranting about wanting a future filled with hope
Everything used to be horrible and IS horrible, more than it should be.
The biggest companies in the world with hundreds of employees and billions of dollars still can't fix their software.
Google is still anal about dark mode if you're not signed in. Some other major apps don't even have dark mode even though it's been almost a decade since major operating systems supported it.
YouTube still hinders iOS's picture-in-picture feature.
Facebook still doesn't have iPad-native versions of their apps.
There's so much shit in apps with millions of users that hasn't been fixed for years.
And goobers act as if AI could possibly make it worse.
All of these are examples of the physical performance of software or hardware limitations at the time. I find that software's reliability has increased a thousandfold in my lifetime, but its actual controllability/feel/UI-UX has been rapidly declining for about a decade.
I think you and I align closer to Robert Pirsig's ideas on quality. It feels worse, so it is and you can't really measure it.
i think crafting software has turned into something like making music. consider the movie Trolls World Tour, where there used to be one way of making it, then it splintered off into a ton of different styles.
everybody only likes their own style, and has trouble dealing with other people’s style.
maybe that’s what you mean by the total net feel/experience decreasing. in my world, it’s still harmonious, but it’s possible queen barb hasn’t showed up here yet
“Software is degrading for obvious reasons” is just painfully lazy. Where are the metrics of degradation? Where are the claims of specific reasons, and the evidence of causality?
If the complaint is vibe coding makes bad software, I largely believe it, but I absolutely believe that vibe arguing makes tissue paper arguments. “Everyone knows” and “it’s obvious” are flimsy things to rest arguments on.
I’m writing dramatically better software for all the reasons this post says obviously make worse software.
Testing has gotten much easier, and bug fixing has gotten much easier. I looked at a pre-AI project I did a couple of years ago: test to code LOC was 0.15:1. The projects I work on now are around 1.3:1. The old project had no accessibility considered at all, the new ones are nicely done aria and beyond. Old project is stuck on old libraries because upgrading is a major pain. New projects take new libraries (after cooldown) no matter the effort.
So I’m left thinking that perhaps some people, too lazy to use the new powers of new tools, churn out the same or worse quality code/essays.
But I am seeing a lot of very high quality software that simply wouldn’t have been possible before, and I believe the same could be done with essays by leveraging these tools to research and find real data beyond “it’s obvious”. But that does take a lot more work.
> I looked at a pre-AI project I did a couple of years ago: test to code LOC was 0.15:1. The projects I work on now are around 1.3:1.
Lines of code is a poor metric for measuring, both for application code and testing code
> I looked at a pre-AI project I did a couple of years ago: test to code LOC was 0.15:1. The projects I work on now are around 1.3:1.
Goodhart's law etc.
lazy low context response to a comment about lazy arguments.
Dawg, you clearly haven't used any consumer-grade software in the past 5 years. Everything across the board is a worse experience and there in some cases are limitations that make no sense. Use any app such as Spotify or Uber Eats, its a worse experience than it was 5 years ago, hands down. Everyone outside of our bubble knows it.
Isn't it just the consequence of enshittification? https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
It does not affect Debian, Fedora, or Qubes OS.
> worse experience
This too is subjective.
No one designs for users any more. It's all gas no breaks on the path to enshitification. A lot of this is the motivation of the people building software.
Raise your hand if you ever saw a PM get promoted for removing a bunch of bad and/or unused features?
Test cases doesn't mean shit works. It means test cases pass.
About 50% of the test cases I've ever seen are pointless.
IME, nobody reads the tests in code review either. They just see "looks like it has tests" *check*. Many times, I've caught LLMs writing completely vacuous tests for configurations of components that were impossible. But coverage number go up, so those tests get written.
> But I am seeing a lot of very high quality software that simply wouldn’t have been possible before
cite 1
Probably his own vibe coded stuff.
IMO it's a bit more nuanced than what the author portrays it as. Broadly, software used to be much worse on the micro-level but better on the macro-level i.e. architecture.
Since it was much harder to make stuff, you really had to architect it well or otherwise it would simply fall apart. For example in assembler you need discipline in your calling conventions, layout and so on, otherwise it just corrupted, you needed to follow sensible naming conventions otherwise it degenerated into unreadable label spaghetti and so on.
Nowadays it's the other way around, the micro level is so much better due to libraries, code reuse, LLMs and better languages/tools, you can use highly sophisticated data structures and functions at your fingertips. In exchange, you can afford to skimp on architecture because computers are fast anyway, and the programming languages don't let you make a huge mess. (Most don't have unstructured goto/jumps, can't corrupt memory accidentally, etc.)
However, this has the cost of making larger programs a nightmare to maintain and systems suffering from a "death of thousand cuts" i.e. on the micro level all is well but when you look at the entire system it's a sprawling unreliable mess. This is where rewrites often happen ;)
Architecture is still important for large systems. And there are tons of legacy systems with spaghetti code.
Counterpoint - lots of old systems have atrocious architectures.
Those downsides existed, but then that’s just how lots of stuff is or was.
Larger systems are not imo any worse to manage now, but the scale of what is possible and expected dramatically changes what we consider a large system these days.
I think this is like looking back at a few hits and being nostalgic for some decade of music forgetting all the terrible songs of the time. Or perhaps if the volume has increased seeing on YouTube all the school bands that you’d never have seen before because recording was expensive and distribution reserved for the very few.
Not disagreeing, but I feel there is something to be said about how the tools we use nudge us to do things a certain way.
Similar to how using lambda functions and some document DB is easy and fast, but it often times leads to shit architecture as you don't have to think about it anymore, bolt on whatever cloud service X and Y for features and you have a mess.
AI is similar to cloud in that way, it's so forgiving that it pushes you towards a shit architecture as it "doesn't matter anymore".
Funnily enough AI makes the cloud mess easier to manage. These opinions are based on my own experience and most importantly, vibes.
Probably the most annoying bug I ever encountered was in Quark Xpress 7 when in a two-column layout, placing a discretionary hyphen in a paragraph on the right-hand column caused a preceding paragraph on the left-hand column to reflow to a different number of lines. I tried to get Quark to look into it (it was perfectly repeatable) --- when they wouldn't, I pulled a couple of all-nighters over a weekend and shifted the entire project to InDesign.
That said, as a counter-point, there were also applications such as WriteNow which was ~100,000 lines of hand-coded assembly, which was quick and performant even on an 8MHz 68000 Mac Plus --- it flew on a 25MHz NeXT Cube (it was originally developed as a possible advanced MacWrite/replacement for it if it didn't ship, then was contracted by NeXT to make a bundled word-processor)
https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder....
Thank you for that link :-) I miss the old MacOS, often..
It was simply a magical thing in the early days, and one wonders how things would have turned out if for instance we had had MacBasic instead of HyperCard:
https://folklore.org/MacBasic.html
https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html https://www.folklore.org/Evolution_of_a_classic.html
(and it kind of kills me that there isn't a book on the history of HyperCard --- a quick search did turn up:
https://www.taskade.com/blog/hypercard-history
which seems promising (if a bit self-serving and possibly AI-generated.... will have to find time to read)
There is simply too much software out there. Too many websites, apps, ui choices, frameworks. Impossible to keep track of it all and with AI accelerating release quantities, I already feel a fatigue of just keeping up with the news, not too mention using any of it to even a small extent. It will only get worse.
Definitely rose-tinted glasses when people look back at Windows XP and earlier in particular. So many HN posts waxing poetic about how great the UIs were then. No! They were ugly, unreliable, inconsistent, and slow. It was a bad OS. Being gray and having small buttons doesn’t make it automatically more powerful or functional.
I agree, people are too nostalgic about old UIs. But I think modern UIs also invent square wheels, such as invisible scrollbars, too large margins, etc. For example, Windows 7 had the best UI (maybe needed a handful of small additions for year 2026, such as ability to scroll without focus). Later versions of Windows significantly degraded user experience. Windows 11 has somewhat improved look, but it's too bloated and inefficient (that famous desktop context menu opening in 2-3 seconds, jeez).
Everything used to be horrible and IS horrible, more than it should be.
The biggest companies in the world with hundreds of employees and billions of dollars still can't fix their software.
Google is still anal about dark mode if you're not signed in. Some other major apps don't even have dark mode even though it's been almost a decade since major operating systems supported it.
YouTube still hinders iOS's picture-in-picture feature.
Facebook still doesn't have iPad-native versions of their apps.
There's so much shit in apps with millions of users that hasn't been fixed for years.
And goobers act as if AI could possibly make it worse.
The headline makes not much sense though. If the software used to be horrible, and now is getting worse, then what is the result? Abysmal software? In the light of this decrease of quality, the "but" seems misplaced, as if it indicated, that it is not so bad, while in fact software getting _even_ worse, will make some software unimaginably bad and we should worry even more.
My understanding of the headline is that software used to be horrible long ago, got better for a while and now is getting worse again (but is still better than horrible?).
I had to think about this one for a bit. Programming by hand took ALOT of time and, yes, software invariably had errors and edge cases that weren't noticeable until after release. BSOD, buffer overflows, etc.
If anything, software 'may' be getting worse due to non-programmers (vibe coders) releasing things they have no business making in the first place.
I built this extremely heavy drag and drop editor in one giant typescript file a year ago, then I had to go back to check something and to my surprise, vscode just choked on everything. Syntax highlighting became a rainbow and required restarting vscode, intellisense took 3 seconds to suggest anything useful.
The code I wrote was ugly yes, but vscode back when I wrote it was nowhere near that miserable.
The other day google docs started freezing, It got stuck on the creating sheet state.
Youtube is making my fans spin recently just because I am hovering over the play button.
God forbid you use a lesser known SaaS tool. I started a trial on a platform and it kept asking me to start trails because I suppose the modal system was just trash.
The list is endless.
Things just don't work as intended and I know hn gets very offended when you're critical of AI but I couldn't care less honestly because I have my own data. Vibe code slop is slop no matter how good you are with your "orchestration". Oversight is a side effect of vibes and no ambition.
The real issue is it was secure just by human hacking skill cap and not a wide adaptation of Internet early. now with AI everybody just needs compute and can just run their own hacking operation.
I still get Windows 11 BSOD. That definitely hasn't gone away!
Commonly that isn't a software issue though, that's a hardware problem being [correctly] indicated by software. With three notable exceptions:
- Windows 1.0 through ME era: Legitimately an unstable OS due to dangerous memory model/lack of memory isolation.
- Windows NT through XP: Before KPP was added, software was monkey-patching the kernel, and it was causing instability (particularly multiple trying to over-patch each other). For example during that era it wasn't UNCOMMON for antivirus to do so as a matter of course.
- Windows Vista Specific: They made significant changes to the driver model of several popular device types, and manufacturers weren't ready. So a lot of driver-related failures.
But since then, it has mostly be smooth sailing. If you see a BSOD, you can trace it down, and more often than not the source will be underlying hardware failure which is why BSOD exists and isn't a software bug or problem.
And even that got worse - now there's no driver name, exception address or stop codes, so you can't even web search for anything.
Personal anecode of course but last time I've seen one was around ~2010.
Since Windows 7, which was I think almost 20 years ago, I've seen a single BSOD.
I've seen more on MacOs/OSX in the same time frame.
I’ve seen them from AMD and Nvidia drivers.
Antivirus on my work Windows laptop has caused countless BSODs. VPN clients are often junk.
I had a KVM that could occasionally trigger one.
Windows itself seems to be pretty BSOD free. It is almost always something installed after or hardware.
I still see BSODs on random public displays all over the world while traveling.
There's got to be a subreddit for that I'm sure
Sure they might be using older unpatched Windows but it only reinforces its reputation of being crap and perpetuates the meme.
I feel this is an apt description of our times. It's getting worse but people forget how horrible the past was.
I, for my part, as much as I dig a little 70s and 80s retro stuff, would never ever want to go back.
Try out MVS-TK5, genius differently and opposite of horrible ;)
No Internet for us back in the day with its myriad of issues. Just BBSs and screaming at the family when the carrier dropped and you wanted to know who picked up the phone.
This largely deals with Windows 9x, and seems to imply that agents improved the software, while all the improvements he mentions (what he considers to be improvements) happened way before LLMs.
What????
If it's getting worse, one can logically deduce that it used to be better
If it used to be better, why are you saying it used to be much worse? You cannot have it both ways unless AI already fried your brain.
...and if we are actually heading the wrong direction, why does it matter that we haven't regressed fully quite yet. AI is pushing us towards regressing fully. It's only a few miserable humans ranting about wanting a future filled with hope
Everything used to be horrible and IS horrible, more than it should be.
The biggest companies in the world with hundreds of employees and billions of dollars still can't fix their software.
Google is still anal about dark mode if you're not signed in. Some other major apps don't even have dark mode even though it's been almost a decade since major operating systems supported it.
YouTube still hinders iOS's picture-in-picture feature.
Facebook still doesn't have iPad-native versions of their apps.
There's so much shit in apps with millions of users that hasn't been fixed for years.
And goobers act as if AI could possibly make it worse.
> And goobers act as if AI could possibly make it worse
Which it does