All of these are examples of the physical performance of software or hardware limitations at the time. I find that software's reliability has increased a thousandfold in my lifetime, but its actual controllability/feel/UI-UX has been rapidly declining for about a decade.

“Software is degrading for obvious reasons” is just painfully lazy. Where are the metrics of degradation? Where are the claims of specific reasons, and the evidence of causality?

If the complaint is vibe coding makes bad software, I largely believe it, but I absolutely believe that vibe arguing makes tissue paper arguments. “Everyone knows” and “it’s obvious” are flimsy things to rest arguments on.

I’m writing dramatically better software for all the reasons this post says obviously make worse software.

Testing has gotten much easier, and bug fixing has gotten much easier. I looked at a pre-AI project I did a couple of years ago: test to code LOC was 0.15:1. The projects I work on now are around 1.3:1. The old project had no accessibility considered at all, the new ones are nicely done aria and beyond. Old project is stuck on old libraries because upgrading is a major pain. New projects take new libraries (after cooldown) no matter the effort.

So I’m left thinking that perhaps some people, too lazy to use the new powers of new tools, churn out the same or worse quality code/essays.

But I am seeing a lot of very high quality software that simply wouldn’t have been possible before, and I believe the same could be done with essays by leveraging these tools to research and find real data beyond “it’s obvious”. But that does take a lot more work.

It's interesting that he brings up Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 (and Quake for that matter), though, because I think it really foregrounds why these discussions are so fraught.

I worked in early AAA in the late 90s, and it's true that games were often quite rough around the edges. But they were also often biting off WAY more than they could chew, inventing genres and innovating like crazy, often in messy ways that didn't always work. But that meant players were often also routinely and genuinely surprised by the experiences they encountered in even big budget games.

He lists a bunch of quality of life and balance issues that were fixed in Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2... but, well, Diablo 2 was obviously _important_ in ways that Diablo 3 wasn't. It's a much greater game.

And lurking in the background is the hard fact that often the progress with software (certainly game software) entailed turning to much better software engineering standards, using much better external libraries or game engines with much larger teams, and relying on much more process to capture and filter all those rough edges... and along the way, you've built a much, much larger team with a much larger burn rate, and so all those experiments and innovations become much more dangerous and need to be corralled and controlled and mostly stifled, and as the cost of all this to build skyrockets your entire game design _has_ to focus on your business model and your microtransaction story and your live services first and foremost, because you've boxed yourself into a corner where that cash flow issue is the central fact of your game / software design.

(I experienced this evolution first hand in the FPS space)

All of which is to say, I think there are multiple different axes at play here for evaluation, and it's probably fair to say that software _undefinably_ was much worse in the past along some of them... but not all of them. And there are probably deep tensions and tradeoffs between some of those axes.

I think this entirely discussion really is muddied, though, too, by the fact that hardware got radically better over this entire arc as well, and so many programming techniques in the past that made software more brittle or crash prone hinged on memory and computation optimizations techniques that really had nothing to do with the software culture of then or now. It was just a response to the realities of the hardware.

IMO it's a bit more nuanced than what the author portrays it as. Broadly, software used to be much worse on the micro-level but better on the macro-level i.e. architecture.

Since it was much harder to make stuff, you really had to architect it well or otherwise it would simply fall apart. For example in assembler you need discipline in your calling conventions, layout and so on, otherwise it just corrupted, you needed to follow sensible naming conventions otherwise it degenerated into unreadable label spaghetti and so on.

Nowadays it's the other way around, the micro level is so much better due to libraries, code reuse, LLMs and better languages/tools, you can use highly sophisticated data structures and functions at your fingertips. In exchange, you can afford to skimp on architecture because computers are fast anyway, and the programming languages don't let you make a huge mess. (Most don't have unstructured goto/jumps, can't corrupt memory accidentally, etc.)

However, this has the cost of making larger programs a nightmare to maintain and systems suffering from a "death of thousand cuts" i.e. on the micro level all is well but when you look at the entire system it's a sprawling unreliable mess. This is where rewrites often happen ;)

Software bottleneck has moved from hardware performance to management efficiency.

As a part-time software developer, one of the problems I think is the following: AI/LLM coding may actually be improving some software, true. But I think it's often in domains where we've already made a lot of progress, and AI helps put the finishing organizing touches on things.... but when it comes to new ideas or new software, I think AI is making things worse.

For instance: an AI-assisted developer can probably make a pretty decent basic text editor, but let's say they need to make an entirely new type of app, then I think the new app will lack polish or finesse because no one has made that before. Or AI can help find bugs in mature, well-written code but what if someone needs to write a new kind of app? Then there's a lack of polish again...

> Computer manufacturers devised a simple solution: add a TURBO button that would just slow your CPU down on demand.

I remember these! I could not figure out why it never seemed to make the computer faster and actually made it slower. TURBO was even written in italics to imply speed.

I suppose for some short time it may have actually overclocked the CPU, until the default clock speed caught up. After that, the turbo button was a lie.

Edit: Maybe I have it backwards, it sounds like on some machines it might have been in the underclocked condition when it was off. I just remember disappointing results with the machine that I used.

Restricting attention to the Windows ecosystem in the 90s almost proves the point. The BSOD was legendary. It was notoriously buggy compared to Solaris, NeXT, and Apple. Those platforms had their problems, but they proved you could do a lot better than Windows for reliability.

Ah, the venerable disk defragmenter! I ran it once, and it was slowly progressing. 97%, 98%, 99%, almost done now I thought! 100%, 101%, 102%, uh oh, that can't be good... but maybe it was just a rounding error in the calculation of the percentage? I stopped it at 110%, but the damage was already done, all the sectors shuffled so much the filesystem was effectively unreadable.

Software is the same as it ever was, if there was more competition, i.e, all those vertical computer companies (that did hardware and operating system software) that used to exist in the 1980s, maybe things would be better?

Maybe choice might come back when some talented kindergartener or junior high schooler who doesn’t know any better comes along and kickstarts the process all over again?

A user of alternative systems from the 1980s, early 90s…

Probably the most annoying bug I ever encountered was in Quark Xpress 7 when in a two-column layout, placing a discretionary hyphen in a paragraph on the right-hand column caused a preceding paragraph on the left-hand column to reflow to a different number of lines. I tried to get Quark to look into it (it was perfectly repeatable) --- when they wouldn't, I pulled a couple of all-nighters over a weekend and shifted the entire project to InDesign.

That said, as a counter-point, there were also applications such as WriteNow which was ~100,000 lines of hand-coded assembly, which was quick and performant even on an 8MHz 68000 Mac Plus --- it flew on a 25MHz NeXT Cube (it was originally developed as a possible advanced MacWrite/replacement for it if it didn't ship, then was contracted by NeXT to make a bundled word-processor)

https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder....

Definitely rose-tinted glasses when people look back at Windows XP and earlier in particular. So many HN posts waxing poetic about how great the UIs were then. No! They were ugly, unreliable, inconsistent, and slow. It was a bad OS. Being gray and having small buttons doesn’t make it automatically more powerful or functional.

The headline makes not much sense though. If the software used to be horrible, and now is getting worse, then what is the result? Abysmal software? In the light of this decrease of quality, the "but" seems misplaced, as if it indicated, that it is not so bad, while in fact software getting _even_ worse, will make some software unimaginably bad and we should worry even more.

I remember when software asked for a permission to check if there are updates available. Commercial software became complete garbage.

Mandatory EULA must be banned. Any device must be usable and provide all features advertised without accepting an EULA.

What software today matches the incredible look and feel of say Delicious Library?

What popular consumer software today matches the incredible extensibility of Winamp?

Who is developing fun tools like Coverflow, which was popular enough that Apple incorporated it into iTunes.

You actually do see some of this today but it’s almost entirely limited to software tools, because software devs are willing to spend a little more effort on the tools they use because they know their users can just develop an alternative otherwise.

AI might change this, but well crafted software was genuinely disappearing for the past decade and a half.

The real issue is it was secure just by human hacking skill cap and not a wide adaptation of Internet early. now with AI everybody just needs compute and can just run their own hacking operation.

No Internet for us back in the day with its myriad of issues. Just BBSs and screaming at the family when the carrier dropped and you wanted to know who picked up the phone.

Speaking of degradation, every time I type a character in this box the grey bar above the keyboard jumps up and down the entire page. EVERY SINGLE KEYSSTROKE. This is like example 10 in my daily life where software worked fine for decades and then suddenly shit the bed in the past 2 years.

I feel this is an apt description of our times. It's getting worse but people forget how horrible the past was.

I, for my part, as much as I dig a little 70s and 80s retro stuff, would never ever want to go back.

I still get Windows 11 BSOD. That definitely hasn't gone away!

I really do not like Steam and Windows Updates. In Mac, it is the same thing as well. But I remembered the old memories of Blue Screen.

I built this extremely heavy drag and drop editor in one giant typescript file a year ago, then I had to go back to check something and to my surprise, vscode just choked on everything. Syntax highlighting became a rainbow and required restarting vscode, intellisense took 3 seconds to suggest anything useful.

The code I wrote was ugly yes, but vscode back when I wrote it was nowhere near that miserable.

The other day google docs started freezing, It got stuck on the creating sheet state.

Youtube is making my fans spin recently just because I am hovering over the play button.

God forbid you use a lesser known SaaS tool. I started a trial on a platform and it kept asking me to start trails because I suppose the modal system was just trash.

The list is endless.

Things just don't work as intended and I know hn gets very offended when you're critical of AI but I couldn't care less honestly because I have my own data. Vibe code slop is slop no matter how good you are with your "orchestration". Oversight is a side effect of vibes and no ambition.

I had to think about this one for a bit. Programming by hand took ALOT of time and, yes, software invariably had errors and edge cases that weren't noticeable until after release. BSOD, buffer overflows, etc.

If anything, software 'may' be getting worse due to non-programmers (vibe coders) releasing things they have no business making in the first place.

All but one of these complaints are due to hardware limitations, not software. In fact, if there were cheap 200GB SSDs in 2003 this list would be down to the BSOD complaint. I have no idea why Autosave is even on this list, it did well in Word 95 and floppy disks and never was "horrible". Skip this one entirely, it is just wrong.

> And yes, there were Linux distros like Debian where people could get real computing done[0].

The author then kids in [0] that the most popular software in Debian was editors to edit X86Config but...

I fully agree that Windows was an horrible crashing piece of crap back then. Linux was a godsend to me (installed it in the early Slackware days).

Armed with Emacs and LaTeX, on Debian 1.1 then 1.2, I wrote a 440 pages book (published by an editor).

Linux was already rock stable solid, while Windows was a crashing PoS.

Linux was so solid that I'd also run it on my laptop (and back then all laptops were crappy). When I was late I'd let LaTeX convert the files to .dvi (IIRC) and the PostScript while driving to my editor. We'd then the PostScript file to the printer at my editor.

It was something else then Windows.

As for Windows, yes, I was using it too.

And the absolute best software I ever got back then was Ghost, way before Norton bought them (it then became Norton Ghost). That allowed me to take a full dump of the Windows partition and then restore it at will from that partition, when Windows would invariably become unusable.

When I discovered Linux, suddenly I had a stable system that didn't need to be re-installed every other day. There's a reason the world is powered by Linux and companies like Google weren't built on Windows.

And I also had a small consulting gig (for little SMEs) where I basically had a business installing brand new Windows systems for the clients and all their stuff (like Outlook) and then immediately imaging the entire disk.

Because the only guarantee was that Windows would be borken rather sooner than later.

TFA is right and Microsoft has always produce mediocre shit.

It's hard to say if the BSOD'ing Windows of yore was even shittier than the ad-infested, surveillance, behemoth Windows of today. Both are equally bad IMO.

Because the day Microsoft shall product a product that doesn't suck is the day they'll start producing vacuum cleaners.

This largely deals with Windows 9x, and seems to imply that agents improved the software, while all the improvements he mentions (what he considers to be improvements) happened way before LLMs.

The author fails to mention the intentional corporate enshittification of software. Coincidentally, the author currently works for the Hinge dating app and previously worked for Google. [insert Upton Sinclair quote]

I've used online dating services around 20 years ago, and I've used them recently. The difference is painfully obvious: they're vastly worse now by design.

The author talks as if every issue were technical. It's not. At the same time that we've seen innovation in computer hardware, we've also seen "innovation" in social norms, corporate financing, antitrust enforcement, and flat out lawbreaking. Astonishingly, many people watched Oliver Stone's "Wall Street," which was intended as a morality play, but took away the message "greed is good."

(this was mean to be a reply to the comment about rose-tinted nostalgia for Windows XP)

Everything used to be horrible.

There were a few gems of good UI and functionality but they were rare and either got snuffed out by bigger companies like Microsoft or bought out and then forgotten.

Now, everything is more horrible than it should be.

It's like airplanes: Just barely 100 years ago, nobody could even dream that a common person could fly across the world to anywhere within hours.

Now we have planes and spaceships but they cram you in like cattle to squeeze into tiny inhumane chairs for hours..

The biggest companies in the world with hundreds of employees and billions of dollars still can't fix their software.

Google is still anal about dark mode if you're not signed in. Some other major apps don't even have dark mode even though it's been almost a decade since major operating systems supported it.

YouTube still hinders iOS's picture-in-picture feature.

Facebook still doesn't have iPad-native versions of their apps.

There's so much shit in apps with millions of users that hasn't been fixed for years.

And goobers act as if AI could possibly make it worse.

What????

If it's getting worse, one can logically deduce that it used to be better

If it used to be better, why are you saying it used to be much worse? You cannot have it both ways unless AI already fried your brain.

...and if we are actually heading the wrong direction, why does it matter that we haven't regressed fully quite yet. AI is pushing us towards regressing fully. It's only a few miserable humans ranting about wanting a future filled with hope

There is simply too much software out there. Too many websites, apps, ui choices, frameworks. Impossible to keep track of it all and with AI accelerating release quantities, I already feel a fatigue of just keeping up with the news, not too mention using any of it to even a small extent. It will only get worse.