constant outages, horrible UIs that won't change, security issues left and right. What's going on?!

Because people don't care about quality

> why does everything feel worse?

Not to be that guy, but you own your own feelings, and no one can answer that question.

> horrible UIs that won't change

UIs have been crap for well over a decade - especially via the browser. I've not noticed any big change since LLMs came around.

> security issues left and right

Take all the CVEs. Subtract out those that were found by an LLM. Subtract out those in projects that are purely about AI (e.g. OpenClaw). And finally scale for the amount of SW being written (i.e. if twice as much SW is written per year, you'd expect twice as many CVEs). Now tell me whether it really has gotten worse.

> If AI has made engineers more efficient

Efficient is a loaded term. It doesn't mean better quality, but simply being able to do more of what they were doing in a given unit of time.

because engineering efficiency has nothing to do with leadership or quality control.

"If X is good and it makes things bad, is X good?"