Nothing works and everyone is euphoric

Software quality is declining across consumer products despite the AI boom, according to a developer's firsthand account. The author cites bugs in a banking app, Slack, an LG fridge, and a car infotainment system, arguing that teams with access to advanced AI models are failing to prioritize stability over new features. The piece concludes that until companies shift focus from KPIs to bug fixing, the decay will continue.

Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital https://x.com/robj3d3/status/2076356929878966555 beds https://x.com/thekitze/status/2076360316670054760 , scrambling to capture some of that market value before everything is automated away. I can’t blame them. Models keep getting better, programmers are being laid off left and right. We’ve been repeatedly told that AI will write 100% of the code by the end of the year. Whether that’s true or not, this may not be the best time to sit back. The widespread excitement around the Agentic Era comes with the promise of greater productivity and higher quality. 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 upgraded the average skill set of software teams in a way we have not seen before. So why does software keep getting worse across the board? A few examples from last week alone: - My banking app requires, on average, three FaceID logins before the 3D Secure confirmation view appears. - 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. - My LG fridge started making weird sounds, so I tried to file a warranty claim, through a multi-step form with countless fields. It failed with a submission error at the very end. And I only found out because I looked at the JavaScript console. - My car’s infotainment system got a software update recently. It was never great to begin with, but at least it didn’t reboot itself during every drive. Now, it’s riddled with bugs: the turn-signal sound randomly goes silent until I reboot the OS; I tap the screen to open Google Maps – the radio app shows up; there’s a 1-2-second lag before anything happens after I tap the screen. This is no longer just a UX problem at this point – those bugs affect your ability to focus on driving. A few months ago, I saw a LinkedIn thread by a PM on the team that redesigned the car’s OS. 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. While I can’t know the full story, I’m willing to bet that most of the teams behind those bugs have access to the latest models, with generous token budgets. LLMs can be really good at squashing bugs if given the chance. Software has always had bugs, and the nostalgia for the good old macOS Snow Leopard era when everything was stable is mostly the product of selective memory. Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler. Since then, we have kept coming up with new abstractions, new frontend frameworks, and more infrastructure complexity https://world.hey.com/dhh/merchants-of-complexity-4851301b . The bar for “user experience” has kept rising, but everything has become increasingly fragile. We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS – or to any app I rely on, really – is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse. This isn’t a rant against AI. Those humming GPU farms have given us superpowers, but we still can’t use them to build better software. Software vendors have long been KPI-oriented, and making things more stable doesn’t always have a direct effect on the numbers. It doesn’t look exciting in presentations: 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. — Imaginary PM at a BigCo Until this attitude changes, the great software quality decay will continue. That doesn’t sound optimistic, but I’m actually excited about what comes next. As companies collectively spiral into AI debt, individual developers have a unique opportunity to build software that would previously have been beyond their reach. I have no hope for my car’s Android Auto or LG’s stupid website – but I choose to believe that everyday software will get better as a result of this frustration. We’re already seeing acts of rebellion https://omarchy.org/ against the current state of macOS and Windows, and I hope the trend will spread across the stack.