“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.
While in general that is true, this is one person and so we can assume a lot of the variables that make it a poor metric are constant in this case and so we can draw a few conclusions.
Dawg, you clearly haven't used any consumer-grade software in the past 5 years. Everything across the board is a worse experience and there in some cases are limitations that make no sense. Use any app such as Spotify or Uber Eats, its a worse experience than it was 5 years ago, hands down. Everyone outside of our bubble knows it.
I have long suspected that one of the driving issues is the continued need for people in the org to keep justifying their existence.
From the consumer POV you can make a great app that does the thing great, and then that's it. Pay once upfront. Just security updates and maybe light compatibility updates after.
Instead we get constant toying and adjusting, and even worse, get pigeon holed into a monthly subscription to bankroll the $200k salaries needed to pay the team that hides the menu button every 6 month to boost screen time.
No one designs for users any more. It's all gas no breaks on the path to enshitification. A lot of this is the motivation of the people building software.
Raise your hand if you ever saw a PM get promoted for removing a bunch of bad and/or unused features?
IME, nobody reads the tests in code review either. They just see "looks like it has tests" *check*. Many times, I've caught LLMs writing completely vacuous tests for configurations of components that were impossible. But coverage number go up, so those tests get written.
I was reviewing some coordinate conversion code one time and a developer’s method of creating unit tests was to run their code, generate a result, then make that output the correct result for the test. Except the result was wrong based on other utilities doing the same conversion, and also failed edge cases.
Test cases are an indicator. They say that this situation I thought of works as I think it should. It doesn't cover everything, but it does cover a large number of things.
A test is mostly useful only in the case that by failing it alerts you to a bug.
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.
i think crafting software has turned into something like making music. consider the movie Trolls World Tour, where there used to be one way of making it, then it splintered off into a ton of different styles.
everybody only likes their own style, and has trouble dealing with other people’s style.
maybe that’s what you mean by the total net feel/experience decreasing. in my world, it’s still harmonious, but it’s possible queen barb hasn’t showed up here yet
I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but a lot of software platforms just can't be customized and mastered like they used to. Things like reorganizing columns, setting shortcuts, menus being consistently organized and accessible using the same command, clickable text and elements looking visually different from unclickable, a wide variety of colors being streamlined to color/pale-color/off-white trios, etc. I use a lot of operational software and every platform just can't be mastered like the old stuff. (And animation lags, too!) And I can watch my younger coworkers on the new software packages, they're certainly not faster on the new stuff than I was on the old stuff.
A few months ago my dad and I roused out the old Windows 2000 computer we used from 2002-2010 and while it took about 6 minutes to boot up, once it booted up, the software was all astonishingly fast (no telemetry) and way, way more "commandable" than their modern equivalents. It was like a tool shop.
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.
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?
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 ;)
Counterpoint - lots of old systems have atrocious architectures.
Those downsides existed, but then that’s just how lots of stuff is or was.
Larger systems are not imo any worse to manage now, but the scale of what is possible and expected dramatically changes what we consider a large system these days.
I think this is like looking back at a few hits and being nostalgic for some decade of music forgetting all the terrible songs of the time. Or perhaps if the volume has increased seeing on YouTube all the school bands that you’d never have seen before because recording was expensive and distribution reserved for the very few.
Not disagreeing, but I feel there is something to be said about how the tools we use nudge us to do things a certain way.
Similar to how using lambda functions and some document DB is easy and fast, but it often times leads to shit architecture as you don't have to think about it anymore, bolt on whatever cloud service X and Y for features and you have a mess.
AI is similar to cloud in that way, it's so forgiving that it pushes you towards a shit architecture as it "doesn't matter anymore".
Funnily enough AI makes the cloud mess easier to manage. These opinions are based on my own experience and most importantly, vibes.
> 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.
* Turbo was default ON and was the regular marketed speed the cpu was designed to run on, for my (dad's:) PCs it was 12 and 16mhz I think
* Turning turbo off reduced speed significantly for software written with original cpu timing in mind (I think 8088 but that was just outside of my direct experience).
So perspective on turbo button is a little bit philosophic, is it half full or half empty:). But it did not give you any EXTRA boost, like over clocking OVER manufacturer design cpu speed.
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.
It’s hard to determine what was aesthetically good from a different time because tastes change.
But there’s nothing wrong with small buttons when your only input tool is a pixel accurate mouse. Arguably what’s worse is too large a button.
But what’s inarguably worse are things like window corners where the click zone extends far beyond the actual window, and parts of the window are not click zones.
Inconsistent? I feel the opposite. Right now, every app seems to have its own UI design. Back then, most apps were native Win32: maybe ugly, maybe too serious, somewhat limiting, but mostly consistent. And relatively fast, despite running out of a spinning HDD and a single-core CPU.
I agree, people are too nostalgic about old UIs. But I think modern UIs also invent square wheels, such as invisible scrollbars, too large margins, etc. For example, Windows 7 had the best UI (maybe needed a handful of small additions for year 2026, such as ability to scroll without focus). Later versions of Windows significantly degraded user experience. Windows 11 has somewhat improved look, but it's too bloated and inefficient (that famous desktop context menu opening in 2-3 seconds, jeez).
One thing that old UIs had were visible and usable scrollbars, while for some reason on that website you need a magnifying glass to see it on Firefox Android
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)
It was simply a magical thing in the early days, and one wonders how things would have turned out if for instance we had had MacBasic instead of HyperCard:
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 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.
My understanding of the headline is that software used to be horrible long ago, got better for a while and now is getting worse again (but is still better than horrible?).
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.
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.
Commonly that isn't a software issue though, that's a hardware problem being [correctly] indicated by software. With three notable exceptions:
- Windows 1.0 through ME era: Legitimately an unstable OS due to dangerous memory model/lack of memory isolation.
- Windows NT through XP: Before KPP was added, software was monkey-patching the kernel, and it was causing instability (particularly multiple trying to over-patch each other). For example during that era it wasn't UNCOMMON for antivirus to do so as a matter of course.
- Windows Vista Specific: They made significant changes to the driver model of several popular device types, and manufacturers weren't ready. So a lot of driver-related failures.
But since then, it has mostly be smooth sailing. If you see a BSOD, you can trace it down, and more often than not the source will be underlying hardware failure which is why BSOD exists and isn't a software bug or problem.
Eh, take a pic of the BSOD and see what the error is based on. Having worked support for a long time you'll commonly find those things are bad ram or overheating hardware.
Quite often you'll see non-windows displays like that crashed too.
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.
Autosave worked just fine if you remembered to tick the box.
BSOD I already mentioned was the only issue.
Client side hacks? Crypto is the bottleneck for all of security. Doing TLS on a 66MHz chip:
Loading WWW.INSTAGRAM.COM
Wait a few seconds per each domain handshake to process.
instagram.com.......................................................................................................................done.
adsmanager.facebook.com...........................................................................................................done.
> 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.
Not worse than humans have been doing on their own since forever.
I've been using AI to make private apps for my own personal use, and it's pretty amazing how quickly I can iterate to fix minor niggles and UI annoyances.. within minutes, while the app is running.
Meanwhile operating systems, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, etc have such shit UX here and there for YEARS. You're telling me they can't fix it with all their employees that get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars?
> Not worse than humans have been doing on their own since forever
If it's not reviewed well (some people stopped even looking at the code) it can be immensely worse.
And most people end up producing much more code with LLMs, quickly reducing how much of it they review; a lot have become fine with turning the interface upside down often just because it's easy, even if the new interface is worse and a lot buggier.
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
If you read the article, you'd know that he is mainly talking about the Win-XP and earlier era. There is a gap there of the 'golden years' of e.g. Win 7 and 10, before the LLMs but after Windows (Loboto)ME.
And computer software is not a linear track, so regression is not going to result in the same 'bads' that existed back then, it's resulting in new ones, some of which are better,and some which are worse. It's not an all-or-nothing state.
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.
“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.
> 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.
Lines of code is a poor metric for measuring, both for application code and testing code
While in general that is true, this is one person and so we can assume a lot of the variables that make it a poor metric are constant in this case and so we can draw a few conclusions.
> 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.
Goodhart's law etc.
lazy low context response to a comment about lazy arguments.
Dawg, you clearly haven't used any consumer-grade software in the past 5 years. Everything across the board is a worse experience and there in some cases are limitations that make no sense. Use any app such as Spotify or Uber Eats, its a worse experience than it was 5 years ago, hands down. Everyone outside of our bubble knows it.
Isn't it just the consequence of enshittification? https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
It does not affect Debian, Fedora, or Qubes OS.
I have long suspected that one of the driving issues is the continued need for people in the org to keep justifying their existence.
From the consumer POV you can make a great app that does the thing great, and then that's it. Pay once upfront. Just security updates and maybe light compatibility updates after.
Instead we get constant toying and adjusting, and even worse, get pigeon holed into a monthly subscription to bankroll the $200k salaries needed to pay the team that hides the menu button every 6 month to boost screen time.
Those aren’t consumer software though.
> worse experience
This too is subjective.
No one designs for users any more. It's all gas no breaks on the path to enshitification. A lot of this is the motivation of the people building software.
Raise your hand if you ever saw a PM get promoted for removing a bunch of bad and/or unused features?
Test cases doesn't mean shit works. It means test cases pass.
About 50% of the test cases I've ever seen are pointless.
IME, nobody reads the tests in code review either. They just see "looks like it has tests" *check*. Many times, I've caught LLMs writing completely vacuous tests for configurations of components that were impossible. But coverage number go up, so those tests get written.
I was reviewing some coordinate conversion code one time and a developer’s method of creating unit tests was to run their code, generate a result, then make that output the correct result for the test. Except the result was wrong based on other utilities doing the same conversion, and also failed edge cases.
Test cases are an indicator. They say that this situation I thought of works as I think it should. It doesn't cover everything, but it does cover a large number of things.
A test is mostly useful only in the case that by failing it alerts you to a bug.
> But I am seeing a lot of very high quality software that simply wouldn’t have been possible before
cite 1
Probably his own vibe coded stuff.
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.
I think you and I align closer to Robert Pirsig's ideas on quality. It feels worse, so it is and you can't really measure it.
You can measure UX. Just ask 100 people "does it feel worse? did you like it better 5 years ago?"
I would not trust the answers to those questions.
People remember things to be more positive than they were. This is an established bias in human psychology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
Direction is right, but more rigorous is A/B testing to learn what people actually prefer.
Stated preference is very often different from demonstrated preference.
i think crafting software has turned into something like making music. consider the movie Trolls World Tour, where there used to be one way of making it, then it splintered off into a ton of different styles.
everybody only likes their own style, and has trouble dealing with other people’s style.
maybe that’s what you mean by the total net feel/experience decreasing. in my world, it’s still harmonious, but it’s possible queen barb hasn’t showed up here yet
I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but a lot of software platforms just can't be customized and mastered like they used to. Things like reorganizing columns, setting shortcuts, menus being consistently organized and accessible using the same command, clickable text and elements looking visually different from unclickable, a wide variety of colors being streamlined to color/pale-color/off-white trios, etc. I use a lot of operational software and every platform just can't be mastered like the old stuff. (And animation lags, too!) And I can watch my younger coworkers on the new software packages, they're certainly not faster on the new stuff than I was on the old stuff.
A few months ago my dad and I roused out the old Windows 2000 computer we used from 2002-2010 and while it took about 6 minutes to boot up, once it booted up, the software was all astonishingly fast (no telemetry) and way, way more "commandable" than their modern equivalents. It was like a tool shop.
> consider the movie Trolls World Tour
can you elaborate?
i was running into random crashes with fusion360
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.
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?
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 ;)
Architecture is still important for large systems. And there are tons of legacy systems with spaghetti code.
Counterpoint - lots of old systems have atrocious architectures.
Those downsides existed, but then that’s just how lots of stuff is or was.
Larger systems are not imo any worse to manage now, but the scale of what is possible and expected dramatically changes what we consider a large system these days.
I think this is like looking back at a few hits and being nostalgic for some decade of music forgetting all the terrible songs of the time. Or perhaps if the volume has increased seeing on YouTube all the school bands that you’d never have seen before because recording was expensive and distribution reserved for the very few.
Not disagreeing, but I feel there is something to be said about how the tools we use nudge us to do things a certain way.
Similar to how using lambda functions and some document DB is easy and fast, but it often times leads to shit architecture as you don't have to think about it anymore, bolt on whatever cloud service X and Y for features and you have a mess.
AI is similar to cloud in that way, it's so forgiving that it pushes you towards a shit architecture as it "doesn't matter anymore".
Funnily enough AI makes the cloud mess easier to manage. These opinions are based on my own experience and most importantly, vibes.
> 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.
I was a kid then but my memory of 80286 was:
* Turbo was default ON and was the regular marketed speed the cpu was designed to run on, for my (dad's:) PCs it was 12 and 16mhz I think
* Turning turbo off reduced speed significantly for software written with original cpu timing in mind (I think 8088 but that was just outside of my direct experience).
So perspective on turbo button is a little bit philosophic, is it half full or half empty:). But it did not give you any EXTRA boost, like over clocking OVER manufacturer design cpu speed.
Commander Keen would be on steroids when I pressed the TURBO button on my friend's computer !!
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.
Being “gray” is an aesthetic preference.
It’s hard to determine what was aesthetically good from a different time because tastes change.
But there’s nothing wrong with small buttons when your only input tool is a pixel accurate mouse. Arguably what’s worse is too large a button.
But what’s inarguably worse are things like window corners where the click zone extends far beyond the actual window, and parts of the window are not click zones.
Inconsistent? I feel the opposite. Right now, every app seems to have its own UI design. Back then, most apps were native Win32: maybe ugly, maybe too serious, somewhat limiting, but mostly consistent. And relatively fast, despite running out of a spinning HDD and a single-core CPU.
Well, it was a mix. Win32, then the Lotus family just refused to conform.
And some others. IP? No, we are a NetWare IPX network!!
I agree, people are too nostalgic about old UIs. But I think modern UIs also invent square wheels, such as invisible scrollbars, too large margins, etc. For example, Windows 7 had the best UI (maybe needed a handful of small additions for year 2026, such as ability to scroll without focus). Later versions of Windows significantly degraded user experience. Windows 11 has somewhat improved look, but it's too bloated and inefficient (that famous desktop context menu opening in 2-3 seconds, jeez).
You can scroll without focus in Windows 95 with the Tweak toolkit from Microsoft.
One thing that old UIs had were visible and usable scrollbars, while for some reason on that website you need a magnifying glass to see it on Firefox Android
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....
Thank you for that link :-) I miss the old MacOS, often..
It was simply a magical thing in the early days, and one wonders how things would have turned out if for instance we had had MacBasic instead of HyperCard:
https://folklore.org/MacBasic.html
https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html https://www.folklore.org/Evolution_of_a_classic.html
(and it kind of kills me that there isn't a book on the history of HyperCard --- a quick search did turn up:
https://www.taskade.com/blog/hypercard-history
which seems promising (if a bit self-serving and possibly AI-generated.... will have to find time to read)
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 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.
My understanding of the headline is that software used to be horrible long ago, got better for a while and now is getting worse again (but is still better than horrible?).
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.
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.
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 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.
Try out MVS-TK5, genius differently and opposite of horrible ;)
I still get Windows 11 BSOD. That definitely hasn't gone away!
Commonly that isn't a software issue though, that's a hardware problem being [correctly] indicated by software. With three notable exceptions:
- Windows 1.0 through ME era: Legitimately an unstable OS due to dangerous memory model/lack of memory isolation.
- Windows NT through XP: Before KPP was added, software was monkey-patching the kernel, and it was causing instability (particularly multiple trying to over-patch each other). For example during that era it wasn't UNCOMMON for antivirus to do so as a matter of course.
- Windows Vista Specific: They made significant changes to the driver model of several popular device types, and manufacturers weren't ready. So a lot of driver-related failures.
But since then, it has mostly be smooth sailing. If you see a BSOD, you can trace it down, and more often than not the source will be underlying hardware failure which is why BSOD exists and isn't a software bug or problem.
And even that got worse - now there's no driver name, exception address or stop codes, so you can't even web search for anything.
All of this is logged just the same in event logs. It's just not displayed right on the blue screen message.
Personal anecode of course but last time I've seen one was around ~2010.
Since Windows 7, which was I think almost 20 years ago, I've seen a single BSOD.
I've seen more on MacOs/OSX in the same time frame.
I’ve seen them from AMD and Nvidia drivers.
Antivirus on my work Windows laptop has caused countless BSODs. VPN clients are often junk.
I had a KVM that could occasionally trigger one.
Windows itself seems to be pretty BSOD free. It is almost always something installed after or hardware.
I still see BSODs on random public displays all over the world while traveling.
There's got to be a subreddit for that I'm sure
Sure they might be using older unpatched Windows but it only reinforces its reputation of being crap and perpetuates the meme.
Eh, take a pic of the BSOD and see what the error is based on. Having worked support for a long time you'll commonly find those things are bad ram or overheating hardware.
Quite often you'll see non-windows displays like that crashed too.
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.
huh? autosave, bsod, security the client side hacks of gaming how is any of this a hardware improvement. Software got a lot better.
Of course hardware also got better but software also got a let better at working around the hardwares quirks.
Autosave worked just fine if you remembered to tick the box. BSOD I already mentioned was the only issue.
Client side hacks? Crypto is the bottleneck for all of security. Doing TLS on a 66MHz chip:
> 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.
> And goobers act as if AI could possibly make it worse
Which it does
heh apt username
> Which it does
Not worse than humans have been doing on their own since forever.
I've been using AI to make private apps for my own personal use, and it's pretty amazing how quickly I can iterate to fix minor niggles and UI annoyances.. within minutes, while the app is running.
Meanwhile operating systems, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, etc have such shit UX here and there for YEARS. You're telling me they can't fix it with all their employees that get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars?
> heh apt username
?
> Not worse than humans have been doing on their own since forever
If it's not reviewed well (some people stopped even looking at the code) it can be immensely worse.
And most people end up producing much more code with LLMs, quickly reducing how much of it they review; a lot have become fine with turning the interface upside down often just because it's easy, even if the new interface is worse and a lot buggier.
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
If you read the article, you'd know that he is mainly talking about the Win-XP and earlier era. There is a gap there of the 'golden years' of e.g. Win 7 and 10, before the LLMs but after Windows (Loboto)ME.
And computer software is not a linear track, so regression is not going to result in the same 'bads' that existed back then, it's resulting in new ones, some of which are better,and some which are worse. It's not an all-or-nothing state.
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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.