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....

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 still get Windows 11 BSOD. That definitely hasn't gone away!

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

“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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Everything used to be horrible.

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. 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.

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.