> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.
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.
Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 minipc. I still found that to be annoying enough to look into why it seemed so slow (and learned about the loading issue). Can't imagine things taking so long that you actually switch to another task. The same minipc can easily handle my 4k 240hz HDR monitor as well, and the whole experience is completely smooth.
The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.
The problem is that I can't still buy a laptop at Media Markt, or similar consumer store, with a Linux distro pre-installed, and if I could, it would be OEM Linux, just like they do with Android, WebOS, Netbooks, whatever.
Outside Internet places like HN, most consumers aren't going to Tuxedo, System 76, or building their own Linux PC.
Thus commercial OS platforms keep winning, and the owners are anyway the ones that sponsor most FOSS projects.
Miss Windows 7 by the way, it was when I gave up on The Linux Desktop.
> It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
That's a pretty good description of it, I even have KDE laid out the same way I did on Windows 7 (or more accurately I guess on KDE going back even further since Linux has been my main OS since the 90's with Windows relegated to gaming).
To this day - Taskbar shows window titles, only shows window titles for windows on that screen, there is no grouping, there is no ordering except order opened etc.
I think autonomously in terms of which physical screen a window is on and when it was opened relative to others so I know exactly where to look/it'll be - the Mac style (and Linux/Windows style at least out the box) defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me, I have widescreens why do I want a doc that only takes up 40-50% of the horizontal space?.
Plasma has very strong opinions about what the desktop is. So strong that it probably disagrees with every single person.
The other side of the news is that the desktop abstraction has been made more and more useless on every OS for a couple of decades already. In any other OS your life will only improve if you abandon it too.
I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough. Every game install was chased by an hour of debugging with Claude to figure out which version of proton to use, which launch arguments to use, which between-system-and-gpu shim profile to use.
I grant: The process is much more enjoyable than doing similar things on Windows. Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on, and being able to copy the sometimes esoteric nonsense in those logs into Claude and get actionable information while not remotely understanding the underlying tech is fan-bloody-tastic.
That said it was death by a thousand cuts. Some friends I hadn't heard from in awhile asked if I wanted to get on Warhammer Space Marine 2 and luckily, I had it installed! ... and was able to play after a mere 35 minutes listening to other people have fun on the call, while I was trying to figure out why the game would only launch to a black screen.
So yeah, I wussed out and went back to Windows. I'll probably try again in a few months, and hope the GPU support is better. But that's also explicitly riding on nvidia to do, and they're busy selling shovels to the AI gold-rushers.
Hey may I suggest CachyOS + KDE? It’s very gaming oriented and you have a lot of great built in features. Everything just works.
So far in 6 months I ran into a single issue: On day 1 of the new Subnautica early access I had to do some debugging and downgrade nvidia drivers to a previous release. But this was fixed after about a week.
No other game gave any issue what so ever. I run everything on the cachy proton version. 4090, 5070 Ti, 5090. All work perfectly. DLSS, Frame gen, older titles too.
If you want to there’s convenience flags to auto upgrade things like DLSS to latest versions etc. It’s not something you have to use, but I found it really nice compared to the Windows equivalents.
I’m so beyond happy to have zero Windows left in the house. :)
> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on
This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc:
- "Something went wrong"
- "It's not you - it's us :-("
- "An error occurred"
- "Uh-oh..."
- "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable]
People used to make jokes about cryptic error messages with alphanumeric codes but cryptic beats cutesy and completely uninformative every day of the week. The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
> The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Oh, I wish...
We have a couple of applications where we used to show useful error messages that users could copy-paste to us when they opened a ticket. We had to remove them because they scared some users. Now, per our customer's request, we sometimes only show "ERROR". Yeah, that's better...
Also, in the ticketing system we have to hide technical messages when passing the ticket between teams because the user would interject telling us they don't understand (which is ok, to a point: they have all the context they need to understand we're not talking to them, but ok...) but some would get really angry and frustrated and complain to our customer's IT that they don't want to see the technical stuff.
Also, my parents that get scared if something in red with numbers shows up on their screens.
I think it was Woz that said something along the lines of 'the problem with making a computer that stupid people can use is that only stupid people will want to use it'. arrogant, no doubt, but also also rather prophetic now that we're in the era of "Whoopsydingdangdoodle, we made a booboo with your request" meaninglessness. I think we've traded being intimidated by computers for being completely agnostic as to how they work and just not caring. They've gotten easier and more reliable, sure, but they've also gotten more opaque, less transparent, less extensible and less fixable because of it. Those of us who grew up in the era where you had to become pretty intimate with the details of how a computer worked in order to get it to do anything at all developed a lot of skills for dealing with issues and now those skills are being intentionally obsoleted by design decisions that remove our ability to actually fix things ourselves by hiding everything about the apps we run except the interface.
May not be applicable to most, but this can be solved by multiple devices. I have three laptops (my work mbp, my personal mba and my daily driver which runs OpenBSD) and two mini computers (one is a server for file and misc. stuff and the other also runs OpenBSD).
I just switch devices depending on context and needs. If it were me, I'd just use the gaming PC as a console.
I've spent 6 months in KDE after years on Windows, and KDE is crap in both UX and number of bugs. I love the idea of open source, but there's a long journey ahead to even match the state of Windows 2000.
KDE has improved a lot in recent years, but yes I would agree that it still has plenty of rough edges and little unexpected (as in slightly jarring) differences in behavior from major commercial desktops.
I still prefer it over the bloated pile of upsells that Windows has become, but I think there’s still space in the Linux desktop world for a legally-distinct clone of Windows (sans the bad parts). KDE isn’t that, it’s its own thing and is best fit for long time Linux veterans.
It is interesting how Linux and FOSS in general is just providing a better UX these days. I have to think its because without profit motives, people do things for passion and maybe that leads people to write code the right way instead of the "it works" way.
This doesn't happen on Windows. Slack loads in the background and the taskbar icon just pulses when it's ready. I have to switch to it manually from whichever app I'm working in as Slack loads.
I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the user to give these inputs before their intention of opening the program is completed. Not saying it's any less bad from a user's perspective, but I think there's a difference in mindset here.
In my experience (admittedly a bit dated now) Mac apps always take a few "bounces" to launch and be ready. There are a lot of nice things about MacOS but snappy application launches isn't one that stands out for me.
They can open nearly instantly, but they need to be well-built native apps. Lumbering behemoths like Adobe CC or anything Chrome-based is going to be a bit slow, and even smaller apps that pull in a big foreign UI toolkit are going to take a tick or two longer to start.
It’s too bad that the art of building lightweight applications is becoming a lost art.
A fantastic feature, but unfortunately currently broken (as in over- rather than under-zealous) for prevention levels other than 'Low': https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509990
This is the absolute perfect encapsulation of the Linux problem and the Linux appeal:
Yes, it has the magical setting to fix all of your problems and frustrations, and yes it’s a finicky broken bitch to actually get working for your use case.
I am doing my best to implement a rule with apps where the third time in a single session you bother me about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the workflow I opened to app for, I uninstall the app. I don't want to update my spreadsheet app, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to tour the new features from the last update, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to sign in in order to access an AI companion (which I also don't want), I want to work on this spreadsheet. I damn sure don't want to leave a review in the app store for you and at this point you don't want me to either. You want me to work on this spreadsheet.
Between that and this insane thing MacOS does where when I click an app in the dock any random app opens up (and, per above, begins barraging me with things designed to "direct" my attention) I'm ready to switch to something whose primary feature is not acting like the dev team spent the last ten years trying to arbitrarily bump the number of features up and ending up with a giant pile of buggy features that nobody asked for.
And for my final gripe, at least for the next 15 minutes, trying to teach a computer how to do what I mean instead of what I say was a mistake. I learned computers back in the day where there was no attempt at interpretation of intent and instead the machine did exactly what I told it to, and that's how I prefer it because it simplifies the problem space when the machine is misbehaving. I told it to do the wrong thing. That's the only possible answer. But now there seem to be so many layers attempting to interpret meaning from actions that the problem space expands to make room for the idea that I told it to do the right thing, but it guessed that I meant something different and then did that instead. As an example, just trying to highlight something in my Mac's terminal app so that I can copy/paste it. I click the terminal app on the dock, and focus switches to that terminal app but also docker desktop, which is on top of the terminal and doesn't go away when I click into the terminal. Instead I have to interact with docker desktop. So I minimize the app I never asked for, and actually have access to the terminal. I'm using the built-in touchpad and have to select an entire line, so I start from the right with one finger, click and drag. But another finger, or perhaps the heel of my hand, gets close to the touchpad and MacOS is SO EXCITED TO HELP that it decides to interpret that as a right click which results in my selection getting interrupted halfway to bring up the right click menu, whereupon I'm presented with the option to do several things with this approximately 40% of a CLI command including: search for it in webster's dictionary, convert it to spoken word, convert it to Chinese (my choice of traditional or simplified), or try to open it in finder despite it being a portion of a command and not a file.
All of this points to a Goodhart's Law situation where someone decided the size of the pile of features was the measure of the quality of a piece of software, rather than how elegantly it does the job the user bought it for. AI has also significantly increased the speed with which a feature that no one asked for and that doesn't work correctly can be delivered.
That is definitely needed. On Mac it is really infuriating how stuff (auto update etc) just take focus/pop up crap. I am literally never interested in it and am confused why I cannot just say [x] Force apps to mind their own business. We have f’ing notifications for this; why does it need a dialog window?
Maybe it's a hazy memory, but from 2007-2011 my main computer was a MacBook Pro. I swear in that era, when an app wanted attention it would bounce in the dock endlessly.
That was annoying, but it let you finish doing what you were doing until you were ready to switch focus.
People say Microsoft has no UI taste, but they used to be decent. They had sensible guidelines and behaviors
For example for this case, the taskbar icon would blink three times and then remain highlighted. So it would grab your attention, but not hold it, and then you could still easily see at a glance which app it was
At some point, like many other things, it looks like this either was changed or broke/doesn't work consistently. But I thought it was a nice design
I never understood the OSes/desktop environments that stole focus by default. So many secrets/credentials have been shared because of that. Just give me a blinking notification that the app/window is available in the notification/taskbar/appdock area ffs. Yes that is one more click/alt-tab but that is much better imho. At least ask for preference on first ever login.
How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary. It's just in this case the user has made the decision to not wait for startup and switch to another app. Aggravating step - he was typing.
Is this workflow part of the Kwin settings? It's not interrupting typing part of the settings?
Any app should be ready to accept focus. It should never steal focus. When I start an app, and wait for it to launch, I am attempting to give it focus. I can withdraw that intent at any time by doing something else (e.g. switching apps) and the launching app should finish launching and wait in the background.
Your specific example is just repeating what I've said, but your generic point is wrong: let's say you have an important task in an app with unavoidable interruptions, during which you switch to your browser to mindlessly scroll.
You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible because that scrolling is just a time filler because you can't do anything productive. So you don't need any notification and extra action, just switch back asap and continue work with as little interruption as possible.
But even in the specific example that depends entirely on what you're switching from and to and for what reason. If it's for something quick non-interactive (I don't know, switch to a file browser to check the file name or something), then yes, you'd prefer to seamlessly be switched back to the main app to do the thing you launched it for.
But if it's not an important app, then yeah, you just want it to be ready for you and switch to it whenever you decide to avoid the launching delay later
Your example is wrong because the people who write apps always think they are the important work that should steal focus. The user on the other hand knows how to give focus to what they want to use when they want to use it and doesn't benefit from nondeterministic behavior.
My real presumption is that the user knows exactly what they want to happen, but can't encode that knowledge into OS configuration because people have no imagination for trivial use cases, so demand blanket bans. While another group is just as limited and encoded blanket allows
> Would I?
You would
> How do you know?
By being the omniscient being that came up with the conditions in the first place
Nope. I never want my front task just interrupted like that. Let's take your "check the filename or something" example, and while you're there, you realize you also need a new directory, so while you're typing the name, the other task steals focus and the character you're typing cancels the task - and now you have to start it again. This exact situation has happened so many times, and it's why focus stealing focus of any kind is a problem.
I don't care how important the app's developers think their app is. It's my computer, it's my decision how "important" something is.
Let's take the real example I've made up (which is also a situation that happened many times to warrant an automated solution to limit distraction), not a totally different one you've made up because you can't point how the original fails withotu changing the conditions.
Also, I've specifically mentioned typing as a different workfow/use case because that obviously requires different handling.
Fine. I'm checking the files as you say, focus changes while I'm still checking, now I have to switch back to finish checking. No. Do not want.
Also, no one else needs to be deciding how my "distractions need limiting" on my computer. I can handle that myself. Provide settings, an extension framework, whatever to allow people to manage their distractions, but don't force that on me and my device.
No, you're committing the exact same error again. You stopped checking in the first 0.5 sec while the app took 1 sec to start. If you're not capable of imagining a situation where this happens like some other commenters, that's ok, but that's a different argument.
> I don't get it, are you not capable of imagining a situation where
You're the one deciding that!!! That's what a properly designed system would allow you to do. But the system you advocate for does NOT. If decides for you that you'll never need it. Just like the current dumb systems decide for you that you always need it
It's not what I would call invisible, but yeah that's the behaviour I would expect. That's also similar, to what already happens when I type in one window, while I scroll in another.
My expectation is described in the comment you replied to and side comments
Microwave's ding is also bad UI, especially when it's repetitive as it's just useless noise. But even the first ding - what value does it have if you already have exactly the same notification category - audio cue - built right there in the process: the machine noise disappears when it stops working.
That! I don't want apps to steal focus in some conditions. I can't set it like that because the settings are too primitive. Why would I be satisfied with a primitive binary toggle when I want workflow-dependent conditions?
> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.
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?
Curiously, macOS is capable of putting a recently opened app out of focus. It happens consistently on my laptop when I haven't rebooted it for a while. It may be a bug, but it could be a feature, especially when it's conditioned by the user clicking in another window before launch completion.
You can't really debounce it easily due to how the OS event queue work across processes and windows. One fix could be to not bing the focus to newly open windows (like you could in X11) but that's not what users want.
You don't know that until you ask users. That would be a much more useful question than those boring "tour guide on first login" or "please activate cortana/copilot" or "do you want to sync to onedrive" stuff one gets notified on some major desktops.
My preference is focus follow mouse, no focus stealing on new window opening.
The users are trained on their exposure to behavior in Windows, MacOS and non-ancient Linux distros. Good luck changing the expectations of the world population. I believe the GIMP tried that for a few decades.
I agree that software becoming worse (in some sense) but I don't blame AI.
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.)
> '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.
And then when the MVP is done, it magically becomes the shippable product. Then just when the team is getting to grips with how to improve the product, management does a reshuffle and moves teams around. "EXCITING NEWS GUYS, congratulation to Jimmy Whatevs for being promoted to SENIOR Director, he will now head-up the cross-functional-operations team which will be folded under the product-support division."
> 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.
100% agreed on ProductManager-ism/MVPitis is a cause of so much of this.
One can "do agile" a bit less literally & stupidly.
For a lot of software infra or even user facing apps, you really can plan out more than a sprint or two. This might be the MVP, but there is prior art in the space / competitors / devs with experience on the team. You probably should think about what the app should be capable of 3/6/12 months out.
When you follow a GPS for directions, you generally take a look at the overview first, make sure it's not driving into a lake or taking you to a similar address in another state. My car even shows me the next 3 steps on the path as I go, I like that.
Agile should not mean blindly "take 1 step and only then contemplate what step 2 to take once you complete that 1 step". And yet that is how MANY shops implement it in practice.
Reddit on iOS safari has been getting incrementally, nearly unusable worse. It had some sharp edges before but it seems they are moving faster now with the same or greater defect rate and shit is getting bad:
- URLs commonly auto-link to the things behind them, even including spaces and words.
- Pinch to zoom on the homepage causes the page to reload. Forcing you to lose your place/content.
- I sometimes cannot click to play videos on the feed. I can click through the comments and then click play on the player.
- Comments pasted from perfectly valid markdown render as whitespace deleted garbage
- Clicking "reply" then tapping in the box makes it disappear. I literally cannot see what I'm typing. I have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.
- After typing into the comment box the "comment" button to submit it is not visible
- Being a mod: The dropdown for selecting a removal rule will not let me scroll past what shows on the initial dropdown.
- Rare but critical interfaces like banning a user (or managing an existing ban). Essentially cannot be used on mobile.
- When typing responses to people as a mod, depending on the box sometimes I "lose" the comment button.
With Reddit I think it's on purpose. They want to drive users to the mobile app. Maybe they aren't introducing bugs on purpose but not addressing them isn't a accident.
> Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler. ... The bar for “user experience” has kept rising, but everything has become increasingly fragile.
It was simpler, better, more stable, _and_ had better UX.
Complexity does not equal quality. In fact, it usually points to poor design. Programs used to be seen as utilities, which enabled the same kind of mentality you have to any specialised machinery: "Here's a thing that can make your life easier. Learn how to use it". Now programs try to be all-singing-all-dancing-all-the-time-changing.
> It was simpler, better, more stable, _and_ had better UX.
It had less features too.
Now, I do agree doing more doesn't mean that something is necessarily better... but I think the UX difficulty increases exponentially as more features are added.
I agree with the author. I think everybody has strong or at least mixed feeling agent agentic coding and to me, the argument is always focused on the product itself.
I come from sciences, where the problem of AI is more linked to AI-generated papers rather than coding. Again, the real underlying problem is the pressure to publish at all cost and the ranking grant system which rewards number of publication rather than quality.
I'm sure you could say the same of AI-generated images, sound or video used in advetising, or any field where AI generation offers a shortcut. The problem is always that you need to produce as much results as fast as possible and quality is not the objective. The problem is always the KPI.
As a non-technical person compared to the rest of HN, I think this has always been the problem of software made for non-technical audiences. The design was driven by programmers’ heuristics and trends in technology stack (e.g. if a company can hire a lot of JS devs bc JS is trending, they will choose JS even regardless of whether JS is the best choice for the problem).
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.
Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience.
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?
But that defeats the whole point of AI, as far as business is concerned. You could describe most programming languages as working the same way and having the same limitation. If this is true, then AI will simply mean you'll have very highly paid AI experts (who know how to do X with AI) that you absolutely need to hire or your competition will run at 10x your speed.
Can confirm. I just had a nightmare experience with a company where the customer service sent very ChatGPT-like replies and seemed very unreasonable and AI like. I had to threaten legal action to get my money back.
Role Collapse might work in this type of situation: prompt your own ChatGPT to decide a refund with a very permissive refund policy, copy its thinking, paste into the next support message after your prompt, and their ChatGPT may believe it's its own thinking.
The Role Collapse attack is that LLMs turn out to ignore role tags (input, output, thinking) and identify role using writing style alone.
Funny you say this. I _almost_ tried this. But it did feel like a person was doing some copy-and-pasting and watching closely, so it wasn't 100% automated.
> Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support?
That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out.
Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost no customer is willing to pay 10 times more for good support.
I disagree. I’m biased but the customer eng/support team we created at stainless was really good and that was a key differentiator during sales calls and post-sales. It’s expensive if you see it as an afterthought and just an expense you would prefer to avoid, but we approached it as an enabler role, a multiplier of sort: ensure customers feel they engage with peers, provide guidance to the eng teams, enable salespeople to engage meaningfully with technical teams, etc. For like a year it was basically just me and an awesome colleague handling the whole thing full time. We took the very explicit decision to have it as a very technical role and designed a culture that sees it as essential to the business (because it was), and that worked really well IMHO.
If you create a startup you really want to focus on a small audience that you understand and know really well, instead of chasing everyone. And for that a support team is one of the most important asset you have
the key differentiator is whether your business is aiming to provide a quality service, or is desperate to eek out as much profit as possible.
my example: A&A — uk internet service provider.
costs like twice as much as a normal service per month. but if i have a super technical query im on the phone with a fully fledged engineer in about 2 minutes flat. the kind of engineer that can discuss complex dns issues. i’ve had one help me debug a dns issue from a work site. it turned out quite quickly it was nothing to do with them but he hung around on the phone for 10 minutes anyway.
the first support person i ever spoke to was michael from wales. if i had to call up he was the first voice i would hear for years. he recently moved on and i was sad. we’d have a decent chat. big up michael from wales.
so, as it applies to at least one existing business — you are dead wrong. it might be twice as expensive as the people trying to maximise their profit margins, but it’s definitely not 10x more.
Apple has pretty stellar support in my experience, and while I don't buy Apple stuff for other reasons, this is a strong attractor. For B2B products/services, it can be a huge differeniator as well, in my experience. But it was really just an example, it might not be the call most companies make. Maybe most will still just invest in being faster or cutting costs. I just hope that's not how it's gonna be.
You gotta be joking. Apple has no support at all, and if you ever go into a shop at their "GeNiUs BaR" (after booking an appointment days in advance), you will get extremely poor service and incompetent support.
I never went into an Apple store, but the phone support issues I had (even a pretty complex bug on their end that locked me out of my account) where handled swiftly and well, and I spoke to humans that seemed to know what they're doing. I could say this should be the default and I shouldn't be impressed by it, but unfortunately it's top 10% based on my experience. I'm in Europe though, maybe they do things differently here.
Used to work at an AppleCare call centre. Apple has extremely high standards for their support advisors. I'm aware that the genius bars are terrible, though.
Counterpoint: Take a look at consumer cellular. I would say it’s drastically cheaper than verizon, at&t, or t-mobile, but the customer support is better than all 3.
Ting also has (had?) excellent customer service. Call the 800 number and the first thing you hear is “hello” from an actual human who has the ability to help you. They also didn’t charge a lot, which makes me think great customer service is a choice.
Last year I bought a book from Amazon for over $100 and they sent the wrong book. I contacted Amazon support, they said they will refund it, I don't need to send it back (throw it away if I want), and also give me a $20 credit for the inconvenience.
A month later, no refund. I contacted them again, they said unless the book is sent back, no refund. I told them about the previous conversation and they said that the CSR had lied to inflate his scores, and if I've thrown the book away I'm out of luck, he generated a return label. I complained and they threatened to close my account unless I send verification documents. I didn't, I just sent the book back and the refund processed automatically.
About a year before that I had a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon that it was only 6 months old and it was broken, and Samsung said I need to send it to Cyprus for some reason. Amazon said to send it back for a refund, I did, and I got a warning that I'd returned something "not in original condition" and next time I'll be banned.
Last week a package didn't arrive. I queried it and there was no longer the option to talk to anyone, just a link to phone numbers for the external courier.
So I would say that Amazon having stellar support 15 years ago, building a brand on it, and then choosing to stop doing that mostly proves how wrong you are. Sure, you can still sometimes speak to someone, but it's getting worse.
FYI you can sue them in small claims for this. This is one of the languages that companies really listen to. You would have to have actually thrown the book out in good faith, though, or commit perjury. Remember the airline LLM support bot and the bereavement fare?
Haha yeah, Uber, Amazon, Starlink, Hotels etc just send me stuff or refund without even asking anything. I use all of them all the time for everything; that indeed seems to help. Logical of course.
But that could just mean you are a more profitable customer. And that could be influencing how amenable the AI/agents are and how much money they are willing to write off to retain you.
> My banking app requires, on average, three FaceID logins before the 3D Secure confirmation view appears.
That's a different, equally big problem. Security mafia at every company will continue to rule everything and everyone. They do not have goals or constraints that are tied to productivity and user experience.
We are heading to a situation where the security teams are causing much more damage compared to the possible attack vectors. While this damage is real and certain, the damage due to attack vectors is only hypothetical.
Ofcourse, we do need security. But currently no one including CEO can dare to define how much security is needed. On top of that, regulators do their own share of damage, piling up regulations. No one takes any risk. They will ask you to tie yourself down until you can't move. Your mobility is not their problem.
That’s a hilarious comment in the world where companies are getting hacked left and right and consumer data is widely available from how many pieces of software have piss poor security. You might work at companies as where dumb bureaucrats have a tight grip on things, but in most of the world, security practices are not holding us back, they simply don’t exist.
Perhaps its a slight overcorrection but it's better than the past where an online shop I gave my credit card info to would reply to a forgotten password request with an e-mail with my password in it in plaintext. Security used to be awful and people suffered because of it.
I wonder how many accounts have ever actually been compromised by a MITM reading passwords out of plaintext emails. I would guess it's very, very small.
I believe the bigger failure mode in that scenario is the fact that the site was storing user passwords in plaintext (either directly or effectively). Users tend to reuse passwords, so when there's a breach, more than just the user accounts for that site would be compromised.
One thing you can do to fight back is show up at their branches with complaints. You can engineer this intentionally. Have a bank that doesn't support Graphene? Show up with your Graphene phone and be like "it says my phone isn't allowed. Fix this or I'm closing my account" and there's a 50% chance they will turn off phone hardware attestation for your account or give you a physical 2FA token and if they don't it will show up in their metrics.
While there is increased complexity on top of all the software thats being built today, I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years. When business schools and tech leaders prioritize the idea that we need to be more agile and every sprint needs to be a production release, these are the results we get.
> I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years.
I wonder how much of that is just what management always wanted. Peopleware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...), a VERY GOOD book about software development written in the 80s, talks about managers wanting to sacrifice quality an how corrosive that is. It's just that in the past technology forced them to pursue quality: Software shipped on disk needed to be bug-free, because it made bug-fixes almost impossible. Software written by a human needed a human that understands it, who might have some pride in his work.
But now, with the internet and LLMs, we get to live in the slop-world the management has always dreamed of. More tickets, closing faster! Less headcount, less talk! Artificial workers that don't talk back! Who cares about all the rest?
Just a little gripe, but near the end of the article he links to a site for something called "Omarchy" which appears to be a Linux distribution. If you click on the link, the only information available is in the form of a video.
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.
I've heard the meme that Omarchy is for people who would like to use Arch but don't want to read the documentation or follow the installation guide. Having a video and no text sounds like it would align with that target audience. If you want information and not a video you'd want to look at Arch instead, it has an excellent wiki and the best documentation of any OS I've ever used.
Omarchy is basically just Arch with a bunch of configuration. It's not a particularly useful project, and the author is noted fascist DHH. So probably not worth your time.
I think more precise terminology would go a long way here.
What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things.
As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him.
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So to fix that:
DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them.
Starting somewhere late-ish last year, however, he seems to have dropped deep through the alt-right pipeline and started babbling talking points basically copy-pasted as-is from other talking heads.
So, in essence, he kinda stopped being opinionated, because that would require having an own opinion, and instead started just being yet another person not doing all too well mentally on the internet.
I mean the guy suddenly started talking about "body counts". What's his age again?
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Of course, moral outrage happened but achieved absolutely nothing, because it's not the right tool for the job here.
Sorry to say, but that word probably has an equally low impact on regular people by now.
Worse if we look at what people actually think/vote/etc.
People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.
We do not actually want that, because (big surprise upcoming) racism is bad.
But I think we might need to remind people why that whole cluster of ideas is bad.
This shouldn't be too hard, given that it's objectively worse in many many aspects, but for that to be seen, I suppose we need to point out what makes it objectively worse.
The shorthand is unfortunately dead and got killed by twitter dot com.
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How that could be done is how I've demonstrated before you've regrettably dismissed it and tried returning to the shorthand
I edited my wording before I saw your reply to take the word fix out.
> People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.
I disagree. I do not get that feel at all in real life (in the UK, BTW). On Facebook you get that feel because it is full of ragebait and attracts nutters.
There are some people like that, but most people would be deeply ashamed to think themselves racist or be thought racist.
Edit, to add: DHH also seems to have a weird obsession with the UK. At least two of his racist blog posts about the UK. His first racist post that I was aware off is essentially "two many non-white people in London".
Hm. I mean I would wish that your observation is correct, but I kinda doubt it.
Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet.
But, regardless of that, I still believe that shorthand terms and indirection are a less clean solution, and, if possible, the cleaner one with less dependencies should be used.
> Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet.
Where are you? It makes a big difference. I am talking primarily about the UK, where I have lived in different areas and know a variety of people in many different places. It is, in my experience, a society where racism is relatively rare: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
I would not say there is nothing to worry about - I find the riots nasty and definitely worrying. There is definitely greater hostility towards certain groups: asylum seekers and Muslims for a variety of reasons. There are lots of complexities about this, and some genuine issues too that have not been dealt with, which creates an opportunity racists exploit.
However, I think its very much a minority view. Even Tommy Robinson's "Unite The Kingdom" protest which DHH blogged about and Musk backed etc. and was supposed to be the far right's big show of support was much smaller than many other protests for many other causes over the years (for and against Brexit, Gaza, etc.) in recent years. I also think it likely even a lot of those who joined the protest have far narrower causes (e.g. anti-illegal immigration) than being fully alt-right.
Nothing on this list screams explicitly nazi to me, but this is a long list for things that are believed mostly by neo-nazis. Like heavily complaining that London isn't racillly pure enough. And supporting a prominent political figure who believes every Muslim is a terrorist. And complaining about "woke" all the time.
so it depends if you believe that everyone who supported the nazi party was a nazi, or only the people who actually did the holocaust.
One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.
Fascist is not just a silly label. The political collapse of neoliberalism made a lot of closet fascists emerge and they seem quite common among what was earlier thought of as "techno libertarians". E.g. the VPN provider owner (forgot which) just lately.
If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.
> One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.
I guess so, but that's abstract and hard to grasp for most people.
"The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions" otoh is pretty easy to understand, signals effectively the same and side-steps basically all the drama.
> "The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions"
That isn't the problem though. Fascism isn't mental instability, it's an ideology. Someone going off the deep end and making bad decisions does so essentially at random, while someone driven by ideology messes things up in very specific ways. In the case of Fascist ideology, the specific ways they ruin things are specifically intended to harm specific groups of people, so I think the distinction matters. Writing it off as the guy having "lost it" obscures the specific goal he is working towards.
Dude I am trying _so hard_ to hammer the point home that no one cares anymore about all this twitter virtue signalling stuff.
Can we please stop and start doing _effective_ stuff before we actually all get right-wing ruling parties?
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My god. Third person to try to pull everything back to the thing that is proven to not work _at all_ against the current threat.
Are you even real? Is this just agentic AI?
I'm going to force myself to stop replying now before I start just degrading into agonizing screaming.
We should probably ask ourselves why there aren't more Mullvads. I think the answer is twofold - first, developers can't business, and second, running something like that carries massive political risk which that type of person is more willing to shoulder. If one doesn't feel afraid to help found a Nazi party they sure won't be afraid to run a VPN service.
>,If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.
There was not. I used to think they are crying wolf, but imo, it turned out they were correct all along.
They were paying attention to what these people were saying and doing. They then concluded these people are fascists. Then a bunch of us, not paying attention crowd, came in accused them of crying wolf.
Maybe, crying wolf is about a boy who sees a wolf, causes commotion and protects the village. Then they dont feel like going in one time, wolfs eats them. But, village just wont admit they were obviously wrong and blames the boy.
For example in his latest blog post he first describes problem of growing populations of wolves that are killing sheep and cannot be shot because they are protected by the state. And then starts to compare the situation with danish gypsies (Romani) in danish cities.
That's as close to fascism as you can get... it's pretty out there on the edge of legality.
I mean I used to respect his (at the time mainly technical) takes and I recommended Basecamp to so many organizations. How has this table turned so much I have no idea.
I went to his blog to have a look at his racist posts, and that (which is the last post on his site) is more unhinged than his previous posts. A definitely trend of getting worse.
They are commenting on Omarchy, not DHH other than as relates to Omarchy.
They also didn't recite a wikipedia entry to define what Arch is, or linux, or what distribution means.
I dont think "fascist" and "been a very opinionated guy" are mutually replacable. In fact, insistence on euphemisms like that harmed the discussion a lot and overall culture a lot.
I heard about it but since I also heard it was built by a white supremacist, I'd rather use one that is made by decent people, especially when the added value is only a preconfigured hyprland desktop.
I mean, I'm an everyday Linux user and half the content I consume daily is about the Linux/FOSS world and today is my first time hearing of it. And all the information I have about it is from replies to my comment, because its website doesn't actually offer any details. Genius marketing.
It's by the same guy who started a Rails conference because he was kicked out of a different Rails conference, so that he wouldn't be kicked out of this one.
A lot of the product misses come from large product teams where nobody owns anything, and where there's minimal internal goal alignment. I know that, at work, what I am incentivized to do has nothing to do with what I consider the most important work I could do.... and I also know that the maze I would have to cross to be allowed to do the better work is just not worth it.
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.
This is spot on. Also, many orgs build to the needs of the business or whims of stakeholders rather than customer needs. Good product strategy and product discovery remain difficult despite AI.
Software has neither gotten worse nor become any better. All you're seeing is the cost of writing code approach near zero. As that happens the speed at which you see defects increases. Software is by its very definition "malleable". It is without (or very few) constraints. So it is very hard to get "prefect". That is why IMO Site Reliability Engineering will be one of the few fields that will remain, because until we build an _actual_ goodness to gracious Intelligent System that can think critically, including how systems can fail (which includes humans), software will be what is hat always been "soft".
In fact, I am pretty sure most of the examples he lists predate AI. Mac OS apps stealing focus certainly does. Horrible laggy car infotainment systems--hard to say without any specifics, but I've certainly had the same experience pre-LLMs. I've navigated the LG website pre-LLMs and it was busted then too.
I think MS devs don't even use their windows OS. How do I know this? Because every week my favourite applications list gets reset. Why would anyone do that?
AI might have made things worse in the last few months but there have been a lot of bad trends on the desktop in the last decade, both software and hardware.
It is little appreciated how USB has regressed. If you have a full-size top-of-the-line desktop machine with plenty of I/O channels you have a huge number of USB 3 and USB C plugs and will have mostly a "just works" experience -- like you can plug in an external hard drive and not regret it. Try a laptop or a pint size machine (say a Mac Mini or a Dell Optiplex 1.5 l) and you'll discover there is no reliable USB 3 hub on the market Maybe you can plug in your keyboard and mouse, maybe, but plug in a USB DAC and a memory card reader and an external drive... "BONG!" "BONG!" "BONG!" Windows starts screaming that devices are dropping out and reattaching and God forbid there is a filesystem you care about on one of them. (MacOS is too smart for that shit, it just assumes the hub is crap and won't reconnect until you reboot)
Plug a cooler master keyboard into you dev workstation and you'll find it overloads the interrupt handling system and causes everything to be janky.
Probably the worst thing about Electron is that the #1 applications use it, instead of making a web application, is that they can't stand that you might be able to find the application and start it the way you start a usual application (or web page) or be able to find the window when you are using it or be able to close the application or move the application window like a normal application window or resize the application like a normal application window or that you might be able to see anything in the tray -- so applications like Slack automatically become crapplications by virtue of inhabiting your tray. It makes everything worse. It reminds me of the later 90's when every crapplet for your printer had to have a completely custom widget set and window chrome.
Agree with all of these gripes, they are everywhere and none of this golden age of SWE productivity seems to be making products better.
My other biggest pet peeve in this space is the annual iOS updates where Apple arbitrarily moves buttons back and forth between top and bottom of screen.
They really like to screw around with the photos app such that "show me my photos most recently taken in time order" is somehow different set of taps year to year.
You see flavors of this in most other apps/websites.
Complexity + a lack of incentives to take time to get things right.
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.
Since upgrading iOS, my iPhone (13) will:
- sometimes fail to open the camera
- make the bottom half of the screen blank when you do email searches
- use more battery
- become unusable if you turn on any transparency effects.
rant first: oh, I recently heard about you from a friend working in a company after I mentioned that I also got into photography. Nice work on pixelpeeper.com
to the article: Yeah, it's different world out there. We need to filter ideas instead of focusing on more features, as lack of staggering revenue growth suggests it might be that more doesn't equal better. The stability of apps is getting worse lately. I couldn't pair my sony camera and it was stuck on pairing screen :(
I'm doing the exact opposite: I'm maxing out my PTO and taking long holidays. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be in this field in five years time so why bother. It's time to figure out what other passions I have apart from programming.
Programming is going to be like ceramics or pottery: you can grab a nice set of bowls at IKEA for $10. We are doing the artisanal pottery that no one really wants or cares for.
Unlike IKEA pottery, programming has the zero replication cost thing. You can spend years working on a better bowl and still sell it for $10 at IKEA and make money. Heck, if your bowl is so much better, maybe IKEA will hire you as a supplier.
That's a good description of some roles actually. Instead of describing myself as a developer or maintainer of some backend system I might call myself a gardener of it.
> There’s no denying that these new tools have already revolutionized how we create and use software. They have raised upper management’s expectations for team output. They may have
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 have the same impression when I use things that are around me every day. Everything is broken and seemingly nobody cares. It seems that the teams developing software never use it themselves and do not care about bugs and terrible usability problems. It seems the management does not use any of the products that their businesses produce. And it seems that the ubiquitous breakage is just accepted as the status quo.
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?
> Until this attitude changes, the great software quality decay will continue.
It won’t change cause nobody cares to do anything other than complain, I don’t see developers quitting en masse from companies that refuse to pause feature churn and focus on quality. Why should they? They get a paycheck, everyone ships crap, the world moves on. The people making the frameworks and now even runtimes are of the same cloth, overworked and underfunded.
If we cared we’d treat software like real engineering. We don’t and therefore we’re quite cooked. Just be happy that airplanes aren’t as bad as your average CRUD. For someone who does care, look at the SQLite codebase, every project should be like that even if development cycles would be 3–10x longer, but that’s delusional to say out loud.
AI just revealed that - with slop being produced at increasing pace and test coverage and verification methods of things working properly across all states and inputs being nowhere to be found.
This is probably going to sound elitist, but it is how I've been seeing this whole LLM thing play out.
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.
That’s why i‘m using claude to literally write everything for myself! I cannot fix software-problems in my car or my fridge or my heat-pump. But I can start by replacing my own infrastructure!
My assumption is that AI-generated code explodes the flaws in your existing codebase. If your architecture is bad or not documented, your docs are out of date or the goal of the feature request is vague, how should the AI (or even a good human developer) develop high quality software?
AI is the private equity of software and digital media, it makes the first 80% way easier and the last 20% way harder. It’s the ultimate enshittification tool.
> This quarter, we won’t be releasing any new features, and we have no plans to redesign anything — we will exclusively focus on fixing bugs.
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.
> As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis.
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.
I think the flaws have moved. I remember Mac OS 7-8-9 (”Classic”) fondly and the suite of software I regularly used there.
It crashed, and crashed hard, a few times per week. That never happens today, maybe at most once a month.
However, what has changed in terms of quality is that there are 1000% more smaller bugs. I never felt that small annoyances or problems were even noticeable or even existent back then. Every feature seemed to actually work. Yet just so far today I have encountered over a dozen small problems in my operating system and apps I use.
It’s exhausting in a different way. Two decades ago I felt ”safe” from problems by frequently saving my files. Today I dread having to navigate a UI that keeps giving me a thousand paper cuts of small bugs.
It makes a difference to my experience as an end user and that is what I am talking about.
I work in development and programming and with all the modern tools and testing frameworks and QA engineers and analytics and modern language we seem to only have achieved less crashes and more non-crashing bugs. It annoys me and I am a bit ashamed at my own profession.
It probably comes down handing over power from the user to capital which is antagonostic in its nature to the users' needs.
Running non free software is essentially giving up our freedom. Before internet connectivity the problem wasn't too bad but nowadays there is always the temptation to squeeze the lusers.
Those two twitter links with people that got hospitalized might just be people trying to get their 5 seconds of internet fame by (pretending to be) doing something dumb.
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.
> If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
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.
Use open source everything. If you have the source to something, you can change it. If you can change it, you can fix it. Run Linux and Firefox. Fork every last damn program and have AI fix every papercut that you don't like.
MacOS contstant trolling with tab switching. I regret each day of life I need to use this shitty OS because of corporate. In linux these things will never happen
> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.
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.
I've also noticed so many pieces of software becoming worse and worse, either with useless features (basically any new thing on Slack in the past year) or with a huge amount of large bugs, over the past year.
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.
God, those "software is getting worse everywhere" takes are tedious.
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.
> So why does software keep getting worse across the board?
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.
> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.
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...
Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 minipc. I still found that to be annoying enough to look into why it seemed so slow (and learned about the loading issue). Can't imagine things taking so long that you actually switch to another task. The same minipc can easily handle my 4k 240hz HDR monitor as well, and the whole experience is completely smooth.
The computer also just obeys me. It does exactly what I tell it to, and nothing more.
The problem is that I can't still buy a laptop at Media Markt, or similar consumer store, with a Linux distro pre-installed, and if I could, it would be OEM Linux, just like they do with Android, WebOS, Netbooks, whatever.
Outside Internet places like HN, most consumers aren't going to Tuxedo, System 76, or building their own Linux PC.
Thus commercial OS platforms keep winning, and the owners are anyway the ones that sponsor most FOSS projects.
Miss Windows 7 by the way, it was when I gave up on The Linux Desktop.
> It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish.
That's a pretty good description of it, I even have KDE laid out the same way I did on Windows 7 (or more accurately I guess on KDE going back even further since Linux has been my main OS since the 90's with Windows relegated to gaming).
To this day - Taskbar shows window titles, only shows window titles for windows on that screen, there is no grouping, there is no ordering except order opened etc.
I think autonomously in terms of which physical screen a window is on and when it was opened relative to others so I know exactly where to look/it'll be - the Mac style (and Linux/Windows style at least out the box) defaults of hiding all windows for an application behind it's icon in the dock never made sense to me, I have widescreens why do I want a doc that only takes up 40-50% of the horizontal space?.
KDE has a much older and richer history than windows 7. It’s been trying to be a safe harbor for Windows users to land in Linux for a long time.
What they really meant is it's like Windows if Windows didn't enshittify.
I don't understand the plasma desktop though. Why can't I just drag a shortcut to the desktop.
Plasma has very strong opinions about what the desktop is. So strong that it probably disagrees with every single person.
The other side of the news is that the desktop abstraction has been made more and more useless on every OS for a couple of decades already. In any other OS your life will only improve if you abandon it too.
I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough. Every game install was chased by an hour of debugging with Claude to figure out which version of proton to use, which launch arguments to use, which between-system-and-gpu shim profile to use.
I grant: The process is much more enjoyable than doing similar things on Windows. Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on, and being able to copy the sometimes esoteric nonsense in those logs into Claude and get actionable information while not remotely understanding the underlying tech is fan-bloody-tastic.
That said it was death by a thousand cuts. Some friends I hadn't heard from in awhile asked if I wanted to get on Warhammer Space Marine 2 and luckily, I had it installed! ... and was able to play after a mere 35 minutes listening to other people have fun on the call, while I was trying to figure out why the game would only launch to a black screen.
So yeah, I wussed out and went back to Windows. I'll probably try again in a few months, and hope the GPU support is better. But that's also explicitly riding on nvidia to do, and they're busy selling shovels to the AI gold-rushers.
Hey may I suggest CachyOS + KDE? It’s very gaming oriented and you have a lot of great built in features. Everything just works.
So far in 6 months I ran into a single issue: On day 1 of the new Subnautica early access I had to do some debugging and downgrade nvidia drivers to a previous release. But this was fixed after about a week.
No other game gave any issue what so ever. I run everything on the cachy proton version. 4090, 5070 Ti, 5090. All work perfectly. DLSS, Frame gen, older titles too.
If you want to there’s convenience flags to auto upgrade things like DLSS to latest versions etc. It’s not something you have to use, but I found it really nice compared to the Windows equivalents.
I’m so beyond happy to have zero Windows left in the house. :)
Oooooo. Does it support HDR? Because that seemed to be entirely broken in KDE despite using Wayland.
> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on
This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc:
- "Something went wrong"
- "It's not you - it's us :-("
- "An error occurred"
- "Uh-oh..."
- "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable]
People used to make jokes about cryptic error messages with alphanumeric codes but cryptic beats cutesy and completely uninformative every day of the week. The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
> The days of people being intimidated by computers have been over for a while now so I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Oh, I wish...
We have a couple of applications where we used to show useful error messages that users could copy-paste to us when they opened a ticket. We had to remove them because they scared some users. Now, per our customer's request, we sometimes only show "ERROR". Yeah, that's better...
Also, in the ticketing system we have to hide technical messages when passing the ticket between teams because the user would interject telling us they don't understand (which is ok, to a point: they have all the context they need to understand we're not talking to them, but ok...) but some would get really angry and frustrated and complain to our customer's IT that they don't want to see the technical stuff.
Also, my parents that get scared if something in red with numbers shows up on their screens.
I think it was Woz that said something along the lines of 'the problem with making a computer that stupid people can use is that only stupid people will want to use it'. arrogant, no doubt, but also also rather prophetic now that we're in the era of "Whoopsydingdangdoodle, we made a booboo with your request" meaninglessness. I think we've traded being intimidated by computers for being completely agnostic as to how they work and just not caring. They've gotten easier and more reliable, sure, but they've also gotten more opaque, less transparent, less extensible and less fixable because of it. Those of us who grew up in the era where you had to become pretty intimate with the details of how a computer worked in order to get it to do anything at all developed a lot of skills for dealing with issues and now those skills are being intentionally obsoleted by design decisions that remove our ability to actually fix things ourselves by hiding everything about the apps we run except the interface.
May not be applicable to most, but this can be solved by multiple devices. I have three laptops (my work mbp, my personal mba and my daily driver which runs OpenBSD) and two mini computers (one is a server for file and misc. stuff and the other also runs OpenBSD).
I just switch devices depending on context and needs. If it were me, I'd just use the gaming PC as a console.
I've spent 6 months in KDE after years on Windows, and KDE is crap in both UX and number of bugs. I love the idea of open source, but there's a long journey ahead to even match the state of Windows 2000.
KDE has improved a lot in recent years, but yes I would agree that it still has plenty of rough edges and little unexpected (as in slightly jarring) differences in behavior from major commercial desktops.
I still prefer it over the bloated pile of upsells that Windows has become, but I think there’s still space in the Linux desktop world for a legally-distinct clone of Windows (sans the bad parts). KDE isn’t that, it’s its own thing and is best fit for long time Linux veterans.
It is interesting how Linux and FOSS in general is just providing a better UX these days. I have to think its because without profit motives, people do things for passion and maybe that leads people to write code the right way instead of the "it works" way.
This doesn't happen on Windows. Slack loads in the background and the taskbar icon just pulses when it's ready. I have to switch to it manually from whichever app I'm working in as Slack loads.
I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the user to give these inputs before their intention of opening the program is completed. Not saying it's any less bad from a user's perspective, but I think there's a difference in mindset here.
In my experience (admittedly a bit dated now) Mac apps always take a few "bounces" to launch and be ready. There are a lot of nice things about MacOS but snappy application launches isn't one that stands out for me.
Focus management has never been Quartz's strong suit.
As always, Apple has designed for the happy flow, and nothing else. Mac apps have never opened instantly, this is nothing new.
They can open nearly instantly, but they need to be well-built native apps. Lumbering behemoths like Adobe CC or anything Chrome-based is going to be a bit slow, and even smaller apps that pull in a big foreign UI toolkit are going to take a tick or two longer to start.
It’s too bad that the art of building lightweight applications is becoming a lost art.
On the current M series hardware, in my experience, it's rare for the icon to land from its first bounce before the software is up and ready.
A fantastic feature, but unfortunately currently broken (as in over- rather than under-zealous) for prevention levels other than 'Low': https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509990
This is the absolute perfect encapsulation of the Linux problem and the Linux appeal:
Yes, it has the magical setting to fix all of your problems and frustrations, and yes it’s a finicky broken bitch to actually get working for your use case.
I say this with love.
I am doing my best to implement a rule with apps where the third time in a single session you bother me about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the workflow I opened to app for, I uninstall the app. I don't want to update my spreadsheet app, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to tour the new features from the last update, I want to work on this spreadsheet. I don't want to sign in in order to access an AI companion (which I also don't want), I want to work on this spreadsheet. I damn sure don't want to leave a review in the app store for you and at this point you don't want me to either. You want me to work on this spreadsheet.
Between that and this insane thing MacOS does where when I click an app in the dock any random app opens up (and, per above, begins barraging me with things designed to "direct" my attention) I'm ready to switch to something whose primary feature is not acting like the dev team spent the last ten years trying to arbitrarily bump the number of features up and ending up with a giant pile of buggy features that nobody asked for.
And for my final gripe, at least for the next 15 minutes, trying to teach a computer how to do what I mean instead of what I say was a mistake. I learned computers back in the day where there was no attempt at interpretation of intent and instead the machine did exactly what I told it to, and that's how I prefer it because it simplifies the problem space when the machine is misbehaving. I told it to do the wrong thing. That's the only possible answer. But now there seem to be so many layers attempting to interpret meaning from actions that the problem space expands to make room for the idea that I told it to do the right thing, but it guessed that I meant something different and then did that instead. As an example, just trying to highlight something in my Mac's terminal app so that I can copy/paste it. I click the terminal app on the dock, and focus switches to that terminal app but also docker desktop, which is on top of the terminal and doesn't go away when I click into the terminal. Instead I have to interact with docker desktop. So I minimize the app I never asked for, and actually have access to the terminal. I'm using the built-in touchpad and have to select an entire line, so I start from the right with one finger, click and drag. But another finger, or perhaps the heel of my hand, gets close to the touchpad and MacOS is SO EXCITED TO HELP that it decides to interpret that as a right click which results in my selection getting interrupted halfway to bring up the right click menu, whereupon I'm presented with the option to do several things with this approximately 40% of a CLI command including: search for it in webster's dictionary, convert it to spoken word, convert it to Chinese (my choice of traditional or simplified), or try to open it in finder despite it being a portion of a command and not a file.
All of this points to a Goodhart's Law situation where someone decided the size of the pile of features was the measure of the quality of a piece of software, rather than how elegantly it does the job the user bought it for. AI has also significantly increased the speed with which a feature that no one asked for and that doesn't work correctly can be delivered.
That is definitely needed. On Mac it is really infuriating how stuff (auto update etc) just take focus/pop up crap. I am literally never interested in it and am confused why I cannot just say [x] Force apps to mind their own business. We have f’ing notifications for this; why does it need a dialog window?
Maybe it's a hazy memory, but from 2007-2011 my main computer was a MacBook Pro. I swear in that era, when an app wanted attention it would bounce in the dock endlessly.
That was annoying, but it let you finish doing what you were doing until you were ready to switch focus.
I think you’re right - macOS changed this behavior at some point.
People say Microsoft has no UI taste, but they used to be decent. They had sensible guidelines and behaviors
For example for this case, the taskbar icon would blink three times and then remain highlighted. So it would grab your attention, but not hold it, and then you could still easily see at a glance which app it was
At some point, like many other things, it looks like this either was changed or broke/doesn't work consistently. But I thought it was a nice design
I never understood the OSes/desktop environments that stole focus by default. So many secrets/credentials have been shared because of that. Just give me a blinking notification that the app/window is available in the notification/taskbar/appdock area ffs. Yes that is one more click/alt-tab but that is much better imho. At least ask for preference on first ever login.
How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary. It's just in this case the user has made the decision to not wait for startup and switch to another app. Aggravating step - he was typing.
Is this workflow part of the Kwin settings? It's not interrupting typing part of the settings?
Any app should be ready to accept focus. It should never steal focus. When I start an app, and wait for it to launch, I am attempting to give it focus. I can withdraw that intent at any time by doing something else (e.g. switching apps) and the launching app should finish launching and wait in the background.
Your specific example is just repeating what I've said, but your generic point is wrong: let's say you have an important task in an app with unavoidable interruptions, during which you switch to your browser to mindlessly scroll.
You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible because that scrolling is just a time filler because you can't do anything productive. So you don't need any notification and extra action, just switch back asap and continue work with as little interruption as possible.
But even in the specific example that depends entirely on what you're switching from and to and for what reason. If it's for something quick non-interactive (I don't know, switch to a file browser to check the file name or something), then yes, you'd prefer to seamlessly be switched back to the main app to do the thing you launched it for.
But if it's not an important app, then yeah, you just want it to be ready for you and switch to it whenever you decide to avoid the launching delay later
Your example is wrong because the people who write apps always think they are the important work that should steal focus. The user on the other hand knows how to give focus to what they want to use when they want to use it and doesn't benefit from nondeterministic behavior.
He's saying the setting exists and does what he wants, how can you say his example is "wrong"?
I can count with 0 hands when this is useful. You can make a noise sure but never, ever, ever, ever pop up and interrupt me.
I can also count with 0 hands when this is useful
So many strange assumtions, but the most striking is that you're presuming the user doesn't know what they want to happen.
"you'd prefer to seamlessly be switched back to the main app to do the thing you launched it for"
Would I? How do you know? Why do yo think so? This is such an odd thing to be sure about.
My real presumption is that the user knows exactly what they want to happen, but can't encode that knowledge into OS configuration because people have no imagination for trivial use cases, so demand blanket bans. While another group is just as limited and encoded blanket allows
> Would I?
You would
> How do you know?
By being the omniscient being that came up with the conditions in the first place
Nope. I never want my front task just interrupted like that. Let's take your "check the filename or something" example, and while you're there, you realize you also need a new directory, so while you're typing the name, the other task steals focus and the character you're typing cancels the task - and now you have to start it again. This exact situation has happened so many times, and it's why focus stealing focus of any kind is a problem.
I don't care how important the app's developers think their app is. It's my computer, it's my decision how "important" something is.
> so while you're typing the name
Let's take the real example I've made up (which is also a situation that happened many times to warrant an automated solution to limit distraction), not a totally different one you've made up because you can't point how the original fails withotu changing the conditions. Also, I've specifically mentioned typing as a different workfow/use case because that obviously requires different handling.
Fine. I'm checking the files as you say, focus changes while I'm still checking, now I have to switch back to finish checking. No. Do not want.
Also, no one else needs to be deciding how my "distractions need limiting" on my computer. I can handle that myself. Provide settings, an extension framework, whatever to allow people to manage their distractions, but don't force that on me and my device.
> while I'm still checking
No, you're committing the exact same error again. You stopped checking in the first 0.5 sec while the app took 1 sec to start. If you're not capable of imagining a situation where this happens like some other commenters, that's ok, but that's a different argument.
> I don't get it, are you not capable of imagining a situation where
You're the one deciding that!!! That's what a properly designed system would allow you to do. But the system you advocate for does NOT. If decides for you that you'll never need it. Just like the current dumb systems decide for you that you always need it
> Provide settings
So we agree again?
> You most likely want to return to the main task as soon as possible
For that it suffices if the window comes to the foreground, but it does not need to steal the focus.
So you want to continue typing, but in an invisible field hidden by a different foreground app?
It's not what I would call invisible, but yeah that's the behaviour I would expect. That's also similar, to what already happens when I type in one window, while I scroll in another.
Windows XP has a solution to this: the taskbar flash
That "solution" is just as bad as the Mac's bouncing icons described in the article - while it doesn't steal keyboard focus, it does steal user focus
What else do you expect though? You launched a long running task. It is done. Microwave goes ding.
My expectation is described in the comment you replied to and side comments
Microwave's ding is also bad UI, especially when it's repetitive as it's just useless noise. But even the first ding - what value does it have if you already have exactly the same notification category - audio cue - built right there in the process: the machine noise disappears when it stops working.
> How would that global app ban help? You do want the application to steal focus when necessary
Maybe you do. I don't. With this setting we can both be hapopy.
We can't both be happy because the setting does nothing for me.
What? You can set it to let apps steal the focus you want. I can set it to not allow any apps to steal focus. How are we not both satisfied?
I want the setting to steal YOUR focus
That! I don't want apps to steal focus in some conditions. I can't set it like that because the settings are too primitive. Why would I be satisfied with a primitive binary toggle when I want workflow-dependent conditions?
Did you read the documentation I linked? There's also high/medium/low settings that use XDG signals to determine if focus should change.
Did you read my comment? Which of these 3 settings allows focus steal, but not during typing?
Turing complete focus filter policy language and evaluator
I can not think of a single scenario where stealing focus would be desirable.
Also, the presumption that I'm going to wait around for 5+ seconds whilst an opens is unrealistic.
> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.
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?
Curiously, macOS is capable of putting a recently opened app out of focus. It happens consistently on my laptop when I haven't rebooted it for a while. It may be a bug, but it could be a feature, especially when it's conditioned by the user clicking in another window before launch completion.
You can't really debounce it easily due to how the OS event queue work across processes and windows. One fix could be to not bing the focus to newly open windows (like you could in X11) but that's not what users want.
> but that's not what users want.
You don't know that until you ask users. That would be a much more useful question than those boring "tour guide on first login" or "please activate cortana/copilot" or "do you want to sync to onedrive" stuff one gets notified on some major desktops.
My preference is focus follow mouse, no focus stealing on new window opening.
Well, I would want the new app to steal focus, but only if I haven't (re-)focused a different app while said app was launching.
The users are trained on their exposure to behavior in Windows, MacOS and non-ancient Linux distros. Good luck changing the expectations of the world population. I believe the GIMP tried that for a few decades.
> annoying popup if you want, make angry computer noises, flash icons, I don't care.
I do, this is also pretty bad. User focus is more valuable than that
I agree that software becoming worse (in some sense) but I don't blame AI.
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.)
> '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.
And then when the MVP is done, it magically becomes the shippable product. Then just when the team is getting to grips with how to improve the product, management does a reshuffle and moves teams around. "EXCITING NEWS GUYS, congratulation to Jimmy Whatevs for being promoted to SENIOR Director, he will now head-up the cross-functional-operations team which will be folded under the product-support division."
Product guys always optimizing for green status reports over actual working products that please customers.
> 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.
100% agreed on ProductManager-ism/MVPitis is a cause of so much of this.
One can "do agile" a bit less literally & stupidly.
For a lot of software infra or even user facing apps, you really can plan out more than a sprint or two. This might be the MVP, but there is prior art in the space / competitors / devs with experience on the team. You probably should think about what the app should be capable of 3/6/12 months out.
When you follow a GPS for directions, you generally take a look at the overview first, make sure it's not driving into a lake or taking you to a similar address in another state. My car even shows me the next 3 steps on the path as I go, I like that.
Agile should not mean blindly "take 1 step and only then contemplate what step 2 to take once you complete that 1 step". And yet that is how MANY shops implement it in practice.
Uncle Bob has fully embraced AI and is risking becoming part of the problem these days.
They made programming so simple any idiot could do it. So they do.
Reddit on iOS safari has been getting incrementally, nearly unusable worse. It had some sharp edges before but it seems they are moving faster now with the same or greater defect rate and shit is getting bad:
- URLs commonly auto-link to the things behind them, even including spaces and words.
- Pinch to zoom on the homepage causes the page to reload. Forcing you to lose your place/content.
- I sometimes cannot click to play videos on the feed. I can click through the comments and then click play on the player.
- Comments pasted from perfectly valid markdown render as whitespace deleted garbage
- Clicking "reply" then tapping in the box makes it disappear. I literally cannot see what I'm typing. I have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.
- After typing into the comment box the "comment" button to submit it is not visible
- Being a mod: The dropdown for selecting a removal rule will not let me scroll past what shows on the initial dropdown.
- Rare but critical interfaces like banning a user (or managing an existing ban). Essentially cannot be used on mobile.
- When typing responses to people as a mod, depending on the box sometimes I "lose" the comment button.
The pinch to zoom issue is actually a WebKit bug (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305622), although technically the root cause is Reddit using a ton of memory
With Reddit I think it's on purpose. They want to drive users to the mobile app. Maybe they aren't introducing bugs on purpose but not addressing them isn't a accident.
My conspiracy theory is that Reddit intentionally makes the iOS Safari experience awful to drive people to download the app.
I’m sure it works.
But for me, it drove me to stop using Reddit on my phone.
I presume that's in addition to all the intentional enshittification.
> Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler. ... The bar for “user experience” has kept rising, but everything has become increasingly fragile.
It was simpler, better, more stable, _and_ had better UX.
Complexity does not equal quality. In fact, it usually points to poor design. Programs used to be seen as utilities, which enabled the same kind of mentality you have to any specialised machinery: "Here's a thing that can make your life easier. Learn how to use it". Now programs try to be all-singing-all-dancing-all-the-time-changing.
> It was simpler, better, more stable, _and_ had better UX.
It had less features too.
Now, I do agree doing more doesn't mean that something is necessarily better... but I think the UX difficulty increases exponentially as more features are added.
I agree with the author. I think everybody has strong or at least mixed feeling agent agentic coding and to me, the argument is always focused on the product itself.
I come from sciences, where the problem of AI is more linked to AI-generated papers rather than coding. Again, the real underlying problem is the pressure to publish at all cost and the ranking grant system which rewards number of publication rather than quality.
I'm sure you could say the same of AI-generated images, sound or video used in advetising, or any field where AI generation offers a shortcut. The problem is always that you need to produce as much results as fast as possible and quality is not the objective. The problem is always the KPI.
As a non-technical person compared to the rest of HN, I think this has always been the problem of software made for non-technical audiences. The design was driven by programmers’ heuristics and trends in technology stack (e.g. if a company can hire a lot of JS devs bc JS is trending, they will choose JS even regardless of whether JS is the best choice for the problem).
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.
Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience.
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.
I think it's fair to say that AI amplifies our abilities, but it needs to be in the hands of people that know what they are doing.
If developers are producing garbage to begin with, chances are they still produce garbage just at an accelerated rate.
But that defeats the whole point of AI, as far as business is concerned. You could describe most programming languages as working the same way and having the same limitation. If this is true, then AI will simply mean you'll have very highly paid AI experts (who know how to do X with AI) that you absolutely need to hire or your competition will run at 10x your speed.
Can confirm. I just had a nightmare experience with a company where the customer service sent very ChatGPT-like replies and seemed very unreasonable and AI like. I had to threaten legal action to get my money back.
Bizarre experience.
Role Collapse might work in this type of situation: prompt your own ChatGPT to decide a refund with a very permissive refund policy, copy its thinking, paste into the next support message after your prompt, and their ChatGPT may believe it's its own thinking.
The Role Collapse attack is that LLMs turn out to ignore role tags (input, output, thinking) and identify role using writing style alone.
Funny you say this. I _almost_ tried this. But it did feel like a person was doing some copy-and-pasting and watching closely, so it wasn't 100% automated.
> Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support?
That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out.
Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost no customer is willing to pay 10 times more for good support.
I disagree. I’m biased but the customer eng/support team we created at stainless was really good and that was a key differentiator during sales calls and post-sales. It’s expensive if you see it as an afterthought and just an expense you would prefer to avoid, but we approached it as an enabler role, a multiplier of sort: ensure customers feel they engage with peers, provide guidance to the eng teams, enable salespeople to engage meaningfully with technical teams, etc. For like a year it was basically just me and an awesome colleague handling the whole thing full time. We took the very explicit decision to have it as a very technical role and designed a culture that sees it as essential to the business (because it was), and that worked really well IMHO.
If you create a startup you really want to focus on a small audience that you understand and know really well, instead of chasing everyone. And for that a support team is one of the most important asset you have
the key differentiator is whether your business is aiming to provide a quality service, or is desperate to eek out as much profit as possible.
my example: A&A — uk internet service provider.
costs like twice as much as a normal service per month. but if i have a super technical query im on the phone with a fully fledged engineer in about 2 minutes flat. the kind of engineer that can discuss complex dns issues. i’ve had one help me debug a dns issue from a work site. it turned out quite quickly it was nothing to do with them but he hung around on the phone for 10 minutes anyway.
the first support person i ever spoke to was michael from wales. if i had to call up he was the first voice i would hear for years. he recently moved on and i was sad. we’d have a decent chat. big up michael from wales.
so, as it applies to at least one existing business — you are dead wrong. it might be twice as expensive as the people trying to maximise their profit margins, but it’s definitely not 10x more.
I paid less for internet in the late 90s and had a good support to call. There is no way "absurd margins" are required.
Plenty of companies are willing to pick RHEL or paid Ubuntu for that very reason, even though they are infinity times more expensive than free Debian
Apple has pretty stellar support in my experience, and while I don't buy Apple stuff for other reasons, this is a strong attractor. For B2B products/services, it can be a huge differeniator as well, in my experience. But it was really just an example, it might not be the call most companies make. Maybe most will still just invest in being faster or cutting costs. I just hope that's not how it's gonna be.
You gotta be joking. Apple has no support at all, and if you ever go into a shop at their "GeNiUs BaR" (after booking an appointment days in advance), you will get extremely poor service and incompetent support.
I never went into an Apple store, but the phone support issues I had (even a pretty complex bug on their end that locked me out of my account) where handled swiftly and well, and I spoke to humans that seemed to know what they're doing. I could say this should be the default and I shouldn't be impressed by it, but unfortunately it's top 10% based on my experience. I'm in Europe though, maybe they do things differently here.
Used to work at an AppleCare call centre. Apple has extremely high standards for their support advisors. I'm aware that the genius bars are terrible, though.
Counterpoint: Take a look at consumer cellular. I would say it’s drastically cheaper than verizon, at&t, or t-mobile, but the customer support is better than all 3.
Ting also has (had?) excellent customer service. Call the 800 number and the first thing you hear is “hello” from an actual human who has the ability to help you. They also didn’t charge a lot, which makes me think great customer service is a choice.
The relevant mindset is "we can shrink our way to growth". Managers think by cutting employees and roles the company will get bigger. It won't.
Software's absurd margins was like the whole pitch.
If your product MSRP goes up 10x because of a single OPEX line-item, the failure isn't the product, it's the business leaders.
The fact that I can speak to a human to refund a $2 item on Amazon proves how wrong you are.
Last year I bought a book from Amazon for over $100 and they sent the wrong book. I contacted Amazon support, they said they will refund it, I don't need to send it back (throw it away if I want), and also give me a $20 credit for the inconvenience.
A month later, no refund. I contacted them again, they said unless the book is sent back, no refund. I told them about the previous conversation and they said that the CSR had lied to inflate his scores, and if I've thrown the book away I'm out of luck, he generated a return label. I complained and they threatened to close my account unless I send verification documents. I didn't, I just sent the book back and the refund processed automatically.
About a year before that I had a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon that it was only 6 months old and it was broken, and Samsung said I need to send it to Cyprus for some reason. Amazon said to send it back for a refund, I did, and I got a warning that I'd returned something "not in original condition" and next time I'll be banned.
Last week a package didn't arrive. I queried it and there was no longer the option to talk to anyone, just a link to phone numbers for the external courier.
So I would say that Amazon having stellar support 15 years ago, building a brand on it, and then choosing to stop doing that mostly proves how wrong you are. Sure, you can still sometimes speak to someone, but it's getting worse.
FYI you can sue them in small claims for this. This is one of the languages that companies really listen to. You would have to have actually thrown the book out in good faith, though, or commit perjury. Remember the airline LLM support bot and the bereavement fare?
I have 400 orders a year on Amazon and never have any of those weird issues. How strange!
My grandma smoked until she was 90 and she was absolutely fine!
Haha yeah, Uber, Amazon, Starlink, Hotels etc just send me stuff or refund without even asking anything. I use all of them all the time for everything; that indeed seems to help. Logical of course.
But that could just mean you are a more profitable customer. And that could be influencing how amenable the AI/agents are and how much money they are willing to write off to retain you.
My house never burned down once in 40 years.
and now without prime, amazon packages take two weeks to arrive! Total garbage
Bring back all the engineering rigor that people complained was too slow to keep up with VC-protected Silicon Valley competition.
And bring back change & configuration management processes and documentation reviews. All the boring slow stuff.
Except now make it part of your CI/CD pipeline.
> My banking app requires, on average, three FaceID logins before the 3D Secure confirmation view appears.
That's a different, equally big problem. Security mafia at every company will continue to rule everything and everyone. They do not have goals or constraints that are tied to productivity and user experience.
We are heading to a situation where the security teams are causing much more damage compared to the possible attack vectors. While this damage is real and certain, the damage due to attack vectors is only hypothetical.
Ofcourse, we do need security. But currently no one including CEO can dare to define how much security is needed. On top of that, regulators do their own share of damage, piling up regulations. No one takes any risk. They will ask you to tie yourself down until you can't move. Your mobility is not their problem.
That’s a hilarious comment in the world where companies are getting hacked left and right and consumer data is widely available from how many pieces of software have piss poor security. You might work at companies as where dumb bureaucrats have a tight grip on things, but in most of the world, security practices are not holding us back, they simply don’t exist.
Perhaps its a slight overcorrection but it's better than the past where an online shop I gave my credit card info to would reply to a forgotten password request with an e-mail with my password in it in plaintext. Security used to be awful and people suffered because of it.
I wonder how many accounts have ever actually been compromised by a MITM reading passwords out of plaintext emails. I would guess it's very, very small.
I believe the bigger failure mode in that scenario is the fact that the site was storing user passwords in plaintext (either directly or effectively). Users tend to reuse passwords, so when there's a breach, more than just the user accounts for that site would be compromised.
One thing you can do to fight back is show up at their branches with complaints. You can engineer this intentionally. Have a bank that doesn't support Graphene? Show up with your Graphene phone and be like "it says my phone isn't allowed. Fix this or I'm closing my account" and there's a 50% chance they will turn off phone hardware attestation for your account or give you a physical 2FA token and if they don't it will show up in their metrics.
While there is increased complexity on top of all the software thats being built today, I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years. When business schools and tech leaders prioritize the idea that we need to be more agile and every sprint needs to be a production release, these are the results we get.
> I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years.
I wonder how much of that is just what management always wanted. Peopleware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...), a VERY GOOD book about software development written in the 80s, talks about managers wanting to sacrifice quality an how corrosive that is. It's just that in the past technology forced them to pursue quality: Software shipped on disk needed to be bug-free, because it made bug-fixes almost impossible. Software written by a human needed a human that understands it, who might have some pride in his work.
But now, with the internet and LLMs, we get to live in the slop-world the management has always dreamed of. More tickets, closing faster! Less headcount, less talk! Artificial workers that don't talk back! Who cares about all the rest?
Product managers shipping burndown charts.
Just a little gripe, but near the end of the article he links to a site for something called "Omarchy" which appears to be a Linux distribution. If you click on the link, the only information available is in the form of a video.
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.
I've heard the meme that Omarchy is for people who would like to use Arch but don't want to read the documentation or follow the installation guide. Having a video and no text sounds like it would align with that target audience. If you want information and not a video you'd want to look at Arch instead, it has an excellent wiki and the best documentation of any OS I've ever used.
Omarchy is basically just Arch with a bunch of configuration. It's not a particularly useful project, and the author is noted fascist DHH. So probably not worth your time.
I think more precise terminology would go a long way here.
What is "a fascist" (in context of being labelled that on the interwebs). That could mean a lot of things.
As a reader, you learn basically nothing about DHH other than that some people might not like him.
___
So to fix that:
DHH has always been a very opinionated guy - with not all of those being agreed on, but there being usually some kind of point to them.
Starting somewhere late-ish last year, however, he seems to have dropped deep through the alt-right pipeline and started babbling talking points basically copy-pasted as-is from other talking heads.
So, in essence, he kinda stopped being opinionated, because that would require having an own opinion, and instead started just being yet another person not doing all too well mentally on the internet.
I mean the guy suddenly started talking about "body counts". What's his age again?
__
Of course, moral outrage happened but achieved absolutely nothing, because it's not the right tool for the job here.
He is simply racist.
I do not disagree with what your said, but I think it just boils down to that.
Fix to what?
Sorry to say, but that word probably has an equally low impact on regular people by now. Worse if we look at what people actually think/vote/etc.
People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.
We do not actually want that, because (big surprise upcoming) racism is bad. But I think we might need to remind people why that whole cluster of ideas is bad.
This shouldn't be too hard, given that it's objectively worse in many many aspects, but for that to be seen, I suppose we need to point out what makes it objectively worse.
The shorthand is unfortunately dead and got killed by twitter dot com.
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How that could be done is how I've demonstrated before you've regrettably dismissed it and tried returning to the shorthand
I edited my wording before I saw your reply to take the word fix out.
> People by now at large seem to be rather fine with both being called racist or just.. well.. being racist.
I disagree. I do not get that feel at all in real life (in the UK, BTW). On Facebook you get that feel because it is full of ragebait and attracts nutters.
There are some people like that, but most people would be deeply ashamed to think themselves racist or be thought racist.
Edit, to add: DHH also seems to have a weird obsession with the UK. At least two of his racist blog posts about the UK. His first racist post that I was aware off is essentially "two many non-white people in London".
Hm. I mean I would wish that your observation is correct, but I kinda doubt it.
Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet.
But, regardless of that, I still believe that shorthand terms and indirection are a less clean solution, and, if possible, the cleaner one with less dependencies should be used.
> Doesn't match what I am seeing outside of the Internet.
Where are you? It makes a big difference. I am talking primarily about the UK, where I have lived in different areas and know a variety of people in many different places. It is, in my experience, a society where racism is relatively rare: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
Uuuh idk man. I'm just seeing this stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riots
https://www.dw.com/en/racist-riots-break-out-across-united-k...
But glad to learn that there is actually nothing to worry about I guess.
I would not say there is nothing to worry about - I find the riots nasty and definitely worrying. There is definitely greater hostility towards certain groups: asylum seekers and Muslims for a variety of reasons. There are lots of complexities about this, and some genuine issues too that have not been dealt with, which creates an opportunity racists exploit.
However, I think its very much a minority view. Even Tommy Robinson's "Unite The Kingdom" protest which DHH blogged about and Musk backed etc. and was supposed to be the far right's big show of support was much smaller than many other protests for many other causes over the years (for and against Brexit, Gaza, etc.) in recent years. I also think it likely even a lot of those who joined the protest have far narrower causes (e.g. anti-illegal immigration) than being fully alt-right.
Nothing on this list screams explicitly nazi to me, but this is a long list for things that are believed mostly by neo-nazis. Like heavily complaining that London isn't racillly pure enough. And supporting a prominent political figure who believes every Muslim is a terrorist. And complaining about "woke" all the time.
so it depends if you believe that everyone who supported the nazi party was a nazi, or only the people who actually did the holocaust.
https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-...
https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.
Fascist is not just a silly label. The political collapse of neoliberalism made a lot of closet fascists emerge and they seem quite common among what was earlier thought of as "techno libertarians". E.g. the VPN provider owner (forgot which) just lately.
If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.
> One could argue that fascist run FOSS projects might be working against your interest as a user.
I guess so, but that's abstract and hard to grasp for most people.
"The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions" otoh is pretty easy to understand, signals effectively the same and side-steps basically all the drama.
Sure. You need to relate to the overton window to not seem like a tinfoil hat alarmist hysteric to normal people. I can agree on that.
It is really hard to keep your cool.
> "The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions"
That isn't the problem though. Fascism isn't mental instability, it's an ideology. Someone going off the deep end and making bad decisions does so essentially at random, while someone driven by ideology messes things up in very specific ways. In the case of Fascist ideology, the specific ways they ruin things are specifically intended to harm specific groups of people, so I think the distinction matters. Writing it off as the guy having "lost it" obscures the specific goal he is working towards.
Dude I am trying _so hard_ to hammer the point home that no one cares anymore about all this twitter virtue signalling stuff.
Can we please stop and start doing _effective_ stuff before we actually all get right-wing ruling parties?
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My god. Third person to try to pull everything back to the thing that is proven to not work _at all_ against the current threat. Are you even real? Is this just agentic AI?
I'm going to force myself to stop replying now before I start just degrading into agonizing screaming.
break;
I think this might be a case of "speak for yourself." Plenty of people don't want to support fascists.
Okay, no agentic LLM on the planet would suffer from reading comprehension this bad.
So thanks, I guess. Thanks for the proof of humanity. At what cost though.
I'm a different person (or at least, user account) than the other one you were talking to. So I suppose they could be AI.
It was one of the Mullvad owners.
We should probably ask ourselves why there aren't more Mullvads. I think the answer is twofold - first, developers can't business, and second, running something like that carries massive political risk which that type of person is more willing to shoulder. If one doesn't feel afraid to help found a Nazi party they sure won't be afraid to run a VPN service.
>,If there was too much crying wolf 15 years ago, doesn't really matter now anyways.
There was not. I used to think they are crying wolf, but imo, it turned out they were correct all along.
They were paying attention to what these people were saying and doing. They then concluded these people are fascists. Then a bunch of us, not paying attention crowd, came in accused them of crying wolf.
Maybe, crying wolf is about a boy who sees a wolf, causes commotion and protects the village. Then they dont feel like going in one time, wolfs eats them. But, village just wont admit they were obviously wrong and blames the boy.
To be fair DHH became exceedingly unhinged.
For example in his latest blog post he first describes problem of growing populations of wolves that are killing sheep and cannot be shot because they are protected by the state. And then starts to compare the situation with danish gypsies (Romani) in danish cities.
That's as close to fascism as you can get... it's pretty out there on the edge of legality.
I mean I used to respect his (at the time mainly technical) takes and I recommended Basecamp to so many organizations. How has this table turned so much I have no idea.
I went to his blog to have a look at his racist posts, and that (which is the last post on his site) is more unhinged than his previous posts. A definitely trend of getting worse.
They are commenting on Omarchy, not DHH other than as relates to Omarchy. They also didn't recite a wikipedia entry to define what Arch is, or linux, or what distribution means.
I dont think "fascist" and "been a very opinionated guy" are mutually replacable. In fact, insistence on euphemisms like that harmed the discussion a lot and overall culture a lot.
Bad advice considering the success Omarchy has had in marketing it. Whatever they're doing other distros should take note.
Is there any evidence of people actually using it?
Yeah I switched to Linux full time at home last year and never even heard of this distro in doing any research about it.
I heard about it but since I also heard it was built by a white supremacist, I'd rather use one that is made by decent people, especially when the added value is only a preconfigured hyprland desktop.
So good marketing? Hell no.
It has smooth graphics but an unfortunate tendency to annex the Sudetenland. 2 stars.
I mean, I'm an everyday Linux user and half the content I consume daily is about the Linux/FOSS world and today is my first time hearing of it. And all the information I have about it is from replies to my comment, because its website doesn't actually offer any details. Genius marketing.
It's by the same guy who started a Rails conference because he was kicked out of a different Rails conference, so that he wouldn't be kicked out of this one.
I'm a Linux user and this is the very first time I hear this name. Data set of one, which says don't base your marketing on that.
A lot of the product misses come from large product teams where nobody owns anything, and where there's minimal internal goal alignment. I know that, at work, what I am incentivized to do has nothing to do with what I consider the most important work I could do.... and I also know that the maze I would have to cross to be allowed to do the better work is just not worth it.
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.
This is spot on. Also, many orgs build to the needs of the business or whims of stakeholders rather than customer needs. Good product strategy and product discovery remain difficult despite AI.
Software has neither gotten worse nor become any better. All you're seeing is the cost of writing code approach near zero. As that happens the speed at which you see defects increases. Software is by its very definition "malleable". It is without (or very few) constraints. So it is very hard to get "prefect". That is why IMO Site Reliability Engineering will be one of the few fields that will remain, because until we build an _actual_ goodness to gracious Intelligent System that can think critically, including how systems can fail (which includes humans), software will be what is hat always been "soft".
Software quality has been declining for long before AI was a thing.
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.
> Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is.
I dunno what they needed, but Windows 11 was a lot less bad before they started using AI.
In fact, I am pretty sure most of the examples he lists predate AI. Mac OS apps stealing focus certainly does. Horrible laggy car infotainment systems--hard to say without any specifics, but I've certainly had the same experience pre-LLMs. I've navigated the LG website pre-LLMs and it was busted then too.
I think MS devs don't even use their windows OS. How do I know this? Because every week my favourite applications list gets reset. Why would anyone do that?
Maybe they always test from a fresh image.
AI might have made things worse in the last few months but there have been a lot of bad trends on the desktop in the last decade, both software and hardware.
It is little appreciated how USB has regressed. If you have a full-size top-of-the-line desktop machine with plenty of I/O channels you have a huge number of USB 3 and USB C plugs and will have mostly a "just works" experience -- like you can plug in an external hard drive and not regret it. Try a laptop or a pint size machine (say a Mac Mini or a Dell Optiplex 1.5 l) and you'll discover there is no reliable USB 3 hub on the market Maybe you can plug in your keyboard and mouse, maybe, but plug in a USB DAC and a memory card reader and an external drive... "BONG!" "BONG!" "BONG!" Windows starts screaming that devices are dropping out and reattaching and God forbid there is a filesystem you care about on one of them. (MacOS is too smart for that shit, it just assumes the hub is crap and won't reconnect until you reboot)
Plug a cooler master keyboard into you dev workstation and you'll find it overloads the interrupt handling system and causes everything to be janky.
Probably the worst thing about Electron is that the #1 applications use it, instead of making a web application, is that they can't stand that you might be able to find the application and start it the way you start a usual application (or web page) or be able to find the window when you are using it or be able to close the application or move the application window like a normal application window or resize the application like a normal application window or that you might be able to see anything in the tray -- so applications like Slack automatically become crapplications by virtue of inhabiting your tray. It makes everything worse. It reminds me of the later 90's when every crapplet for your printer had to have a completely custom widget set and window chrome.
Agree with all of these gripes, they are everywhere and none of this golden age of SWE productivity seems to be making products better.
My other biggest pet peeve in this space is the annual iOS updates where Apple arbitrarily moves buttons back and forth between top and bottom of screen.
They really like to screw around with the photos app such that "show me my photos most recently taken in time order" is somehow different set of taps year to year.
You see flavors of this in most other apps/websites.
Author seems to be blaming the hammer for the house not getting built right. Software is increasing in complexity, and perhaps is outpacing testing.
Complexity + a lack of incentives to take time to get things right.
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.
Since upgrading iOS, my iPhone (13) will: - sometimes fail to open the camera - make the bottom half of the screen blank when you do email searches - use more battery - become unusable if you turn on any transparency effects.
<They were congratulating themselves on what an amazing job they had done. I keep thinking about that post every time I have to fight their product.>
This is hilarious.
> Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler.
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.
rant first: oh, I recently heard about you from a friend working in a company after I mentioned that I also got into photography. Nice work on pixelpeeper.com
to the article: Yeah, it's different world out there. We need to filter ideas instead of focusing on more features, as lack of staggering revenue growth suggests it might be that more doesn't equal better. The stability of apps is getting worse lately. I couldn't pair my sony camera and it was stuck on pairing screen :(
thank you, I didn't expect to see pixelpeeper mentioned here :) feel free to reach out via email - I'm happy to nerd out about photography
To add to author's point, I did work at an organization that decided to focus on bugfixing for a full release cycle, and the PM was sacked after that.
check out The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules
A lot of this is about bureaucracy
I'm doing the exact opposite: I'm maxing out my PTO and taking long holidays. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be in this field in five years time so why bother. It's time to figure out what other passions I have apart from programming.
Programming is going to be like ceramics or pottery: you can grab a nice set of bowls at IKEA for $10. We are doing the artisanal pottery that no one really wants or cares for.
Unlike IKEA pottery, programming has the zero replication cost thing. You can spend years working on a better bowl and still sell it for $10 at IKEA and make money. Heck, if your bowl is so much better, maybe IKEA will hire you as a supplier.
A garden needs a gardener. It's the end when people stop caring or when starts chasing superficial metrics and tawdry toys.
That's a good description of some roles actually. Instead of describing myself as a developer or maintainer of some backend system I might call myself a gardener of it.
> There’s no denying that these new tools have already revolutionized how we create and use software. They have raised upper management’s expectations for team output. They may have
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 have the same impression when I use things that are around me every day. Everything is broken and seemingly nobody cares. It seems that the teams developing software never use it themselves and do not care about bugs and terrible usability problems. It seems the management does not use any of the products that their businesses produce. And it seems that the ubiquitous breakage is just accepted as the status quo.
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.
What is that car, and could you make a video of it?
> Until this attitude changes, the great software quality decay will continue.
It won’t change cause nobody cares to do anything other than complain, I don’t see developers quitting en masse from companies that refuse to pause feature churn and focus on quality. Why should they? They get a paycheck, everyone ships crap, the world moves on. The people making the frameworks and now even runtimes are of the same cloth, overworked and underfunded.
If we cared we’d treat software like real engineering. We don’t and therefore we’re quite cooked. Just be happy that airplanes aren’t as bad as your average CRUD. For someone who does care, look at the SQLite codebase, every project should be like that even if development cycles would be 3–10x longer, but that’s delusional to say out loud.
AI just revealed that - with slop being produced at increasing pace and test coverage and verification methods of things working properly across all states and inputs being nowhere to be found.
This is probably going to sound elitist, but it is how I've been seeing this whole LLM thing play out.
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.
That’s why i‘m using claude to literally write everything for myself! I cannot fix software-problems in my car or my fridge or my heat-pump. But I can start by replacing my own infrastructure!
turns out the bottleneck was never doing things faster, it was doing things correctly, and we optimized away the people who knew the difference
yep noticed a major decline in product stability over the last 5 months. I don't think explained by use of vibe coding but who knows.
My assumption is that AI-generated code explodes the flaws in your existing codebase. If your architecture is bad or not documented, your docs are out of date or the goal of the feature request is vague, how should the AI (or even a good human developer) develop high quality software?
AI is the private equity of software and digital media, it makes the first 80% way easier and the last 20% way harder. It’s the ultimate enshittification tool.
> This quarter, we won’t be releasing any new features, and we have no plans to redesign anything — we will exclusively focus on fixing bugs.
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.
we spent 40 years making computers faster so that apps could spend the first 30 seconds of every session loading a welcome animation
> As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis.
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.
It was always like this.
I think the flaws have moved. I remember Mac OS 7-8-9 (”Classic”) fondly and the suite of software I regularly used there.
It crashed, and crashed hard, a few times per week. That never happens today, maybe at most once a month.
However, what has changed in terms of quality is that there are 1000% more smaller bugs. I never felt that small annoyances or problems were even noticeable or even existent back then. Every feature seemed to actually work. Yet just so far today I have encountered over a dozen small problems in my operating system and apps I use.
It’s exhausting in a different way. Two decades ago I felt ”safe” from problems by frequently saving my files. Today I dread having to navigate a UI that keeps giving me a thousand paper cuts of small bugs.
I don't think it fair to compare cooperative multitasking OSs to OSs that requires virtual memory chips on a software quality basis.
It makes a difference to my experience as an end user and that is what I am talking about.
I work in development and programming and with all the modern tools and testing frameworks and QA engineers and analytics and modern language we seem to only have achieved less crashes and more non-crashing bugs. It annoys me and I am a bit ashamed at my own profession.
This post and the comments so far reminded me of 1984's two minutes of hate. When is Hate Week?
Hate Week is every week I have to use Jira. Or SharePoint. Or Slack. Or Teams. Or Magento.
Big Brother is trying to turn is against modern coorparate software practices or what is your point?
They got rid of test managers. Then testers. The industry said everyone should be responsible for testing— which means no one is.
Now AI tests? Except not really. It claims to perform testing. It’s still up to us to review and remediate.
> those bugs affect your ability to focus on driving
Name and shame! I'm in the market for a car. Which one should I avoid?
I remember noticing the same thing a decade ago. I don't think it has anything to do with AI.
It probably comes down handing over power from the user to capital which is antagonostic in its nature to the users' needs.
Running non free software is essentially giving up our freedom. Before internet connectivity the problem wasn't too bad but nowadays there is always the temptation to squeeze the lusers.
Sad cause its true
Those two twitter links with people that got hospitalized might just be people trying to get their 5 seconds of internet fame by (pretending to be) doing something dumb.
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.
> If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
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.
Use open source everything. If you have the source to something, you can change it. If you can change it, you can fix it. Run Linux and Firefox. Fork every last damn program and have AI fix every papercut that you don't like.
MacOS contstant trolling with tab switching. I regret each day of life I need to use this shitty OS because of corporate. In linux these things will never happen
> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat.
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.
I've also noticed so many pieces of software becoming worse and worse, either with useless features (basically any new thing on Slack in the past year) or with a huge amount of large bugs, over the past year.
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.
God, those "software is getting worse everywhere" takes are tedious.
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.
So three things work.
Or two and a half. Can you tell me why having a weak 4G signal sometimes doesn't imply being able to send and receive data packets?
Disagree, but upvote for "my hairy bum"
> So why does software keep getting worse across the board?
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.
Customers speak with their wallets, and OP doesn't like what they're saying.
Do we really still believe this? There are plenty of ways to get the money of someone who doesn't especially want to give it to you.