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...
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.
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?.
I don't understand the plasma desktop though. Why can't I just drag a shortcut to the desktop.
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.
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. :)
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.
I just switch devices depending on context and needs. If it were me, I'd just use the gaming PC as a console.
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.
That was annoying, but it let you finish doing what you were doing until you were ready to switch focus.
Is this workflow part of the Kwin settings? It's not interrupting typing part of the settings?
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
"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.
> Would I?
You would
> How do you know?
By being the omniscient being that came up with the conditions in the first place
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.
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
> Provide settings
So we agree again?
For that it suffices if the window comes to the foreground, but it does not need to steal the focus.
Maybe you do. I don't. With this setting we can both be hapopy.
Also, the presumption that I'm going to wait around for 5+ seconds whilst an opens is unrealistic.
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?
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.
I do, this is also pretty bad. User focus is more valuable than that
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.)
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."
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.
- 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.
I’m sure it works.
But for me, it drove me to stop using Reddit on my phone.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
If developers are producing garbage to begin with, chances are they still produce garbage just at an accelerated rate.
Bizarre experience.
The Role Collapse attack is that LLMs turn out to ignore role tags (input, output, thinking) and identify role using writing style alone.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
A lot of this is about bureaucracy
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.
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.
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.
I do not disagree with what your said, but I think it just boils down to that.
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.
__
How that could be done is how I've demonstrated before you've regrettably dismissed it and tried returning to the shorthand
> 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".
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is really hard to keep your cool.
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.
Can we please stop and start doing _effective_ stuff before we actually all get right-wing ruling parties?
__
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;
So thanks, I guess. Thanks for the proof of humanity. At what cost though.
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.
So good marketing? Hell no.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
This is hilarious.
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.
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.
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.
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?
This extends to any device which has software or firmware: banking websites, banking apps on mobile phones, car firmware, etc.
I find it very depressing, especially when I think of the people who design, develop and deploy these apps. We are talking about large companies and teams of people. Entire chains of well-paid people designed, looked at, developed, tested, and then accepted these apps. And yet they break in the most obvious ways, or fail to be usable, instead pestering us with pop-ups and useless drivel and forgetting their state at every point.
These problems are not subtle. To take a glaring example from my everyday life, in my car there are buttons for moving windows up and down. Sometimes when you press the button to move the window down, it will actually start moving up. We are talking about a simple button that moves a window. And seemingly everybody thinks this is fine?
I don't know what to do about this.
I 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.
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.
Now AI tests? Except not really. It claims to perform testing. It’s still up to us to review and remediate.
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 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 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.
Name and shame! I'm in the market for a car. Which one should I avoid?
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.
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.
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.
Back when I was using IRC from Emacs (with erc) I had written a safeguard in elisp against that. Haven't been on IRC in a while but this helped me prevent sending to the "group chat" (the IRC channel) a great many private infos.
Same for my real name for example: I had a filter where anything containing my actual name would be blocked.
I think a great many software where you "chat" with "groups of people" would benefit from having both default and configurable filters that catch obvious mistakes. Say you probably want a confirmation before attaching a private SSH key, or before sending a password in the clear (which could be filtered by blocking words matching the hash of the password), etc.
Not that it solves the fundamental problem TFA is talking about: nothing works.
But that is a given: that's why we need safeguards.
Let's have a look at a few rarely quoted examples from the last decade, shall we?
Just six years ago, a big company rolls out a line of new chips so good that geeks and technology experts all get ecstatic and can't stop churning endless raving reviews. Those chips are fast, small and consume little energy. On top of that, the big company reworks their entire OS (OS!), the whole suite of software it has for it, the developer suite with compilers and SDKs and god knows what else and also ensures that everything ever written for that OS for the old chips continues to work and it indeed does.
Then there's another big company that launched a file storage service around 20 years ago. Back then it was reliable and only gotten better over the years. They started offering their storage for a nanocent per gajibyte and twenty years of hard work allowed them to lower that cost to a picocent per gajibyte. They don't lose data, they are highly available, half of the internet stores their data at their servers.
And then there's a -- gasp! -- consortium of big companies (fools would reply to this with an XKCD standards strip) that works on improvements to a shared set of standards for 4G, one of the most widely used technology stacks in the world, agrees on it, calls it 5G and rolls it out across the world and the whole spectrum of hardware and software vendors in a manner that resembles replacing a wing of an aircraft mid-flight so that not a single pasta strand falls from the forks of the business class customers.
And here we have someone who thinks that a customer support page for his fridge (fridge!) thrown together by a low-paid second-grade developer in a third-world country is indicative of the whole industry decline.
"Nothing works", my hairy bum. Get real.
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?
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.
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.