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:
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 don’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.
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.
I’m Piotr, a software developer living in Warsaw, Poland. This is a place where I explore different topics related to software development — or whatever happens to be interesting to me at the moment.
I’m available for consulting and freelance：/consulting/ projects.
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