Nothing works and everyone is euphoric

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 when I have to use my work mac or windows computers.

See here for docs, under "Focus stealing prevention" - https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehavi...

I still don't understand how a full focus stealability debounce is not the norm. If I am in the middle of writing, or interacting with one UI bit in any way, no other app should be able to steal focus, full stop. Add an annoying popup if you want, make angry computer noises, flash icons, I don't care. 99.9, if not 100% of the time, it's completely unrelated to what I'm doing and can absolutely wait. While some OSs have something along these lines, they also give the tools to bypass it (I'm looking at you, Cisco AnyConnect! Being connected after clicking on connect is not an emergency!)

Imagine you're working in a terminal and an app decides to steal STDIN. Why do we accept that for a GUI?

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 exponential, such that half of all programmers have less than n years experience (5?).

I offer two additional reasons:

Firstly, you hone your skills doing individual algorithms on a single thread, where it's OK to get it wrong and change it as many times as you like.

When you get a job, you don't even realise you're in a distributed system and the getter/setter model you practiced on is woefully inadequate for interacting with partner systems, cqrs, event-sourcing, auditability, idempotency or whatever else is required.

In short, 10 years of practicing writing for-loops and data-structures will not translate into building a system that customers can access via their phone and multiple tabs of a browser, at the same time as a database schema is being updated.

Secondly, while I don't think there is any realistic alternative to agile development, it seems that nontechnical POs have captured the software lifecycle. 'Focus on happy path only, for the MVP' is how you build buggy software. Good developers can learn that this will guarantee the need for a rewrite in the future, but POs never will.

It seems like the languages have been increasingly targeting the beginner segment (C++ -> Java -> JS -> Python), while the tasks have been getting more complicated (b2b distributed systems, 24/7 uptime, millions of users, resistance to hackers, machine learning, etc.)

Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now. Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? Or is support not that key and we should invest into being the most reliable? The most enjoyable to use?

One can hope.

There was a brief stint of UX, ergonomics and HMI getting traction in enterprise, and, imo, the biggest technological achievements in consumer software has been in the realm of UX in twenty first century. But it lost its importance, I suppose, as you don’t need to make good software to make money off consumers.

Whatever capabilities AI gives to programmers in terms of speed of development, etc, doesn’t change the fundamental behavior —- commercial software is not developed for humans. It is developed for investors, markets, around operational needs, based on CEOs whims, developers’ personal itches, relying on approximation of human experience that gets regurgitated through layers of commercial processes of product managers, UX researchers (who, if present at all, often don’t get invited to the conversation until there are buttons to move in a GUI of an already existing product). Where human experience is considered, it’s from the perspective of our natural weaknesses with the goal to exploit them to maximize profits. Hence why 21st century tech gave us all the dark patterns, feeds, social media, LLM chatbots, etc.

Even when I talk to individual engineers who are committed to creating something good, wholesome, something that they can be proud of -— many think and reason about the problem in a way that sounds like they are trying to engineer human experience the same way one would engineer instructions for machines.

It will never get better, IMO. AI only exemplifies what already exists.

If you're making a Linux distro, please don't do this. I will not watch your video. I was interested, and now I'm not.

IME this happens more often than people think. If you’re leading a team part of your job is to manage the expectations of those around you and explain your choices. If you do that well you can absolutely have quarters where you only pay down debt, it doesn’t require some huge attitude shift in the industry. Just explain why it’s the right thing and then do it.

Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is.

The incentives are large companies are fundamentally not in align with making high quality software people actually enjoy interacting with.

The smaller the org, the better the chances of having only reasonable levels of misalignment... but without taking on high risk, it's just better pat to work on a large, worse org. Frustrating.

Imo we know the tools (social, + technical) to make good software that works. But in the face of massive complexity, people just want the next feature, the next thing sales can use as a win

And yeah I agree with the other commenter here - I don't think this is AI. We had terrible software before, even declining quality.

I would actually recommend disabling SIP. https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2024/2/3.html

> So why does software keep getting worse across the board?

Because good software requires the exact opposite of what LLMs provide: care and empathy.

> Software has always had bugs, and the nostalgia for the good old macOS Snow Leopard era when everything was stable is mostly the product of selective memory.

The Snow Leopard era was very long. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was released 22 months after 10.5.0, and 10.7.0 was released 23 months after 10.6.0. The last version of Snow Leopard 10.6.8 v1.1 was also released 23 months after 10.6.0.

The higher quality that everyone remembers came after a long succession of minor bug fix updates with no major updates. 10.6.0 was quite buggy, as all major updates are, with a number of really bad problems. If you look back fondly at Snow Leopard, you're probably remembering the later versions.

The difference between then and today is that everything changes so fast now, there's never enough time to achieve stability. The major update release schedule has been accelerated to twice as fast, and moreover, new features keep getting added even in "minor" updates. It's become practically "Agile" development, one of the worst ideas ever IMO. Constant change, no stability, the hamster wheel spins.

Something else worth noting: back in the day, major Mac OS X updates were delivered via physical discs. You had to go to the store to buy it. Thus, uptake was much slower. Nowadays, major updates are free and relentlessly pushed on us, sometimes via dark patterns. I would pay not to have to update.

This is hilarious.

Expectations is neither about creation not use. "May" isn't a revolution outside of the historic calendar, so on both counts it's trivial to deny an ungrounded statement.

> So why does software keep getting worse across the board?

Because the premise on which the expectation is built is wrong?

Also plenty of the issues are prehistoric with all the past meat bag generations to blame, case in point: > Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty

So who stopped that huge fruit corpo from doing the very basics of managing user experience in the past few decades minus a few AI years?

I don't necessarily believe in 10x devs, but there is a very clear output difference between various developers. During my career I've been both in a position where I was delivering much higher quality code at a similar pace to other coworkers and also mediocre code at a slower pace. Sometimes at the same time.

Now, AI itself is a force multiplier. Depending on the task, your setup, your skill level (both as a developer and with LLMs), the weather, the model and so on, it can range anywhere from actively hindering you, to solving the entire thing for you. Let's say that on average you get a 20% productivity boost.

If you take a 0.8x developer and give them a 1.2 force multiplier LLM, you get a 0.96x developer. Worse, the axis that has moved is speed, not quality.

All this to say that if you let a below average developer vibecode, you get a much higher volume of slop. You can make an agent create good code, but this developer didn't care before so why should they now?

*Note that this is from experience. I've started getting feature PRs from our devops team. It's been a very enlightening experience.

I think that points do the solution. We should not make stuff more complex than we can the level of complexity at which we can make it reliable.

I work in mediation and have recently seen a few cases where I’ve wondered if the participants were suffering from AI psychosis as related to their claims: where they’d constructed their legal cases hand-in-hand with an LLM and had become absolutely convinced despite a contestable set of facts.

People have always been subject to delusion, but in these cases, all documentation submitted was obviously created by chatbots.

This extends to any device which has software or firmware: banking websites, banking apps on mobile phones, car firmware, etc.

I find it very depressing, especially when I think of the people who design, develop and deploy these apps. We are talking about large companies and teams of people. Entire chains of well-paid people designed, looked at, developed, tested, and then accepted these apps. And yet they break in the most obvious ways, or fail to be usable, instead pestering us with pop-ups and useless drivel and forgetting their state at every point.

These problems are not subtle. To take a glaring example from my everyday life, in my car there are buttons for moving windows up and down. Sometimes when you press the button to move the window down, it will actually start moving up. We are talking about a simple button that moves a window. And seemingly everybody thinks this is fine?

I don't know what to do about this.

I mean, he has given the answer in the article: Because "coding has been solved" is from the perspective of upper management, not devs or users - and that cares about software quality and usability (as standalone metrics) about as much as the McDonald's board cares about nutrition value.

So taking it at face value is kinda part of the problem here.

The only way this can get better is by completely suffocating it off attention. It doesn't exist. It's not real.

Back when I was using IRC from Emacs (with erc) I had written a safeguard in elisp against that. Haven't been on IRC in a while but this helped me prevent sending to the "group chat" (the IRC channel) a great many private infos.

Same for my real name for example: I had a filter where anything containing my actual name would be blocked.

I think a great many software where you "chat" with "groups of people" would benefit from having both default and configurable filters that catch obvious mistakes. Say you probably want a confirmation before attaching a private SSH key, or before sending a password in the clear (which could be filtered by blocking words matching the hash of the password), etc.

Not that it solves the fundamental problem TFA is talking about: nothing works.

But that is a given: that's why we need safeguards.

Let's have a look at a few rarely quoted examples from the last decade, shall we?

Just six years ago, a big company rolls out a line of new chips so good that geeks and technology experts all get ecstatic and can't stop churning endless raving reviews. Those chips are fast, small and consume little energy. On top of that, the big company reworks their entire OS (OS!), the whole suite of software it has for it, the developer suite with compilers and SDKs and god knows what else and also ensures that everything ever written for that OS for the old chips continues to work and it indeed does.

Then there's another big company that launched a file storage service around 20 years ago. Back then it was reliable and only gotten better over the years. They started offering their storage for a nanocent per gajibyte and twenty years of hard work allowed them to lower that cost to a picocent per gajibyte. They don't lose data, they are highly available, half of the internet stores their data at their servers.

And then there's a -- gasp! -- consortium of big companies (fools would reply to this with an XKCD standards strip) that works on improvements to a shared set of standards for 4G, one of the most widely used technology stacks in the world, agrees on it, calls it 5G and rolls it out across the world and the whole spectrum of hardware and software vendors in a manner that resembles replacing a wing of an aircraft mid-flight so that not a single pasta strand falls from the forks of the business class customers.

And here we have someone who thinks that a customer support page for his fridge (fridge!) thrown together by a low-paid second-grade developer in a third-world country is indicative of the whole industry decline.

"Nothing works", my hairy bum. Get real.

It's glaringly obvious that poorly checked, AI-written, code is the culprit, I'm just wondering when companies will wake up.

Nobody gives a flying fuck about resiliency, good practices, security or any of that now that AI is there. All anyone cares about is pure output of features.

Any and all "productivity" gains attributed to AI efficiency are actually due to the complete disregard for any care or standard in the software industry in the past 2 years. Yeah you can output more shit when you don't give a fuck, big surprise, AI doesn't change anything here.

The issue is only partially within those who code. They get directions from those in charge, and they are just making idiotic decisions. And those who code, for some reason don't stand against those idiotic decisions in defense of a common sense and a great UX.

A blatant, exaggerated parallel would be: you are designing your kitchen and you've chosen a place for your washing machine such as that it will be unable to open its door. When inviting a professional, you expect them to correct such wrong decisions and explain to you that it won't work. But in programming, those who program, calling themselves "software engineers", would just place this washing machine where they're told, because it's "not my job". It's not a feature of an "engineer". It's being a coder lemming.

Now with AI new superior people can actually produce compilable code, and ship it to production!