This might sound like a rant, but it's more an attempt to outline the breadth of the problem by way of many examples. Software quality sucks right now, enough so that I plan my life around it. Payment processing is regularly broken? I'll maintain a couple cards from different providers. Login systems are always broken? If you require a login then I'm going to weigh the quality of your service against not just its physical dollar cost but also the amount of my time you're about to waste if I sign up. Etc.

Enterprise broke something and has been unable to text or email me receipts and reservation information for months. No trouble; I'll look up my information manually on their site when I want to modify a reservation. Great, I've found that information, surely I can modify it? Nope; that's broken too, and it asks me to call and doesn't provide the number I should call. So...I'll look up their customer support number, surely that isn't broken? Nope, somebody deployed a version of the site where I physically see the handlebars and variable name which should have referenced the phone number rather than its actual value, and they seemingly didn't notice or weren't able to roll back the change for at least a day.

And that's not to pick on them (especially because they're otherwise a good company IME), but to highlight a series of technical fuckups which never would have flown in past years, and they're not alone. My HSA just made it impossible to log in without buying a new phone, every single time I've tried to set up automatic payments for Visa they've had a different bug on their website preventing that, WalMart supposedly allows buying things for people in other states (I was buying my sister tires), but some broken AI will reverse the transaction hours later. eBay and Visa are even better on that front; their customer support seemingly aren't able to override the broken fraud-detection AI, so there are some Visa purchases I can't make, and every time I log in to eBay my account credentials are forcibly reset a day later.

Beyond the straight, obvious incompetence manifest in 3+ major bugs in nearly every website or service I interact with, there are also stranger bugs (no "strangest" bugs in recent memory). One of my coworkers has a reliable network blip every 20s (my memory is fuzzy, it might have been 10s or 15s when I timed it, but it's incredibly consistent), only hitting their outbound traffic, and it's at or upstream of the modem. One site I visit has some sort of broken filtering from my mobile carrier, but only for their login page, so I need to use a VPN to log in, but then the rest of the site has VPN detection, so I need to leave the VPN to access the rest. A little while ago, I stopped being able to accept calls while my wireless hotspot is active. Slack automatically moved precisely one of my DMs from the section I had assigned to it to a different section. Discord and Target both had an automatic retry on a failed telemetry implementation without backoff which caused you to immediately violate their rate limit by just visiting the site.

And so on. Major companies are writing broken software, missing the bugs in review, missing them in testing, don't have monitoring or alerting on core metrics to be able to roll back when their deploys suck (or just can't roll back), usually have no way to contact them to inform them of the mistake, and sometimes choose not to fix bugs as big as "many of our customers can't pay us" in days, sometimes ever.

Yeah man, I think this exactly captures what I've been feeling - every time I need to get something done, I consistently hit some experience breaking bug. And you're totally right, I've actually just come to expect it and work around it...

Do you think in the future apps that are stable and "just work" will be a moat? Feels like the direction we're trending in.