I think software has always been terribly buggy. Back in the day, things would crash (including your entire OS in many cases) all the time. These days, it's more often smaller, stupid UX issues, but that's been the situation for a few years. I've seen no difference over the past six months.
We've always had bugs. Good chance that it's largely confirmation bias - you're familiar with how software development has changed in the past 6 months, and especially if you don't like it, any time you see a bug or a problem, you'll attribute it to that.
nah, things are worse. Basic userfacing components in windows frequently shit the bed. File explorer in W11 is near unsuable for example. grim state of affairs. Problem extends to many other platforms at scales where its not a quirk here or there, but rather, I can not longer use system instability and unexpected behaviour as a signal that maybe something is wrong that needs fixing.
Bugs and errors were rare and spaced out enough in the past, that when they happened I'd wonder if hardware was on it's way out, or if I broke something. Now, I simply assume software is fucked and I am almost always right.
I had one encounter with an obviously vibe coded website last year. Everything looked great, but nothing worked. Had to deal with the company over email.
Things might be better now, but that was a clear warning of what future may hold.
Not only buggier, but less usable overall. We can not blame everything on AI. For example events discovery platforms and ticket platforms were way better decade ago, you could search by popularity, friends going to the same event and there wasn’t as much fragmentation. That part you could blame on Cambridge Analytica scandal and late capitalism love of algorithmic feeds
iOS is definitely buggier. It used to be a silky smooth experience but it's degraded significantly in the last year or so. Safari on iOS, in particular, is very bad. Lots of problems in Adobe Creative Cloud on Win 11 (primarily Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator) in recent months too.
It's similar to the ElectronJS desktop app problem. Sure the desktop apps use a lot more system resources, but it's doubtful those apps would have been created in the first place if it wasn't for the speedup of development allowed by ElectronJS.
In this case, sure software is buggier, but there's also a ton more software+features that wouldn't have existed before AI coding tools.
I mostly feel this on Microsoft stuff. O365 browser stuff was always buggy, but last month I had to fight to zoom in on something in PowerPoint. Pagination in Azure ML randomly broke, it took them a month to fix it.
Atlassian is also a bug factory, but I did not expect anything better of them. Each UI update they did to Confluence and Jira just made everything more confusing in the last 10 years.
Websites and mobile apps, definitely. Every time a typical proprietary mobile app updates I wonder what they will break. They always do break something or remove a feature I want.
Desktop apps, not in general. Some work better, like KDE's DE has fixed some irritants.
It's definitely been buggier for a while now. It's already been an issue for a decade or so due to the "release minimum viable product, fix problems with patches/updates model" (especially in the world of video games), but the rise of AI has only made the issue more apparent. Microsoft is the biggest example here (with Windows 11 seemingly screwing up something massive in every update), but other companies like Google and Meta haven't been as reliable either.
I thought about writing a comedy, set in the far future, where everything looks beautiful but nothing works right and it's just accepted (almost unnoticed) as a running gag throughout the film. Now I wonder how prescient that would be.
This was a theme in early Futurama (before it just became another Simpsons). A great example from the pilot is the Star Trek doors that keep closing on Fry.
There has been a steady decline for decades. Release early, release often. One example: Apple used to have a thing called Gold Master release when updating software was not as immediate. The GM programs met a high bar for quality. Not so much anymore… the attitude is we can just release a new version later this week. There also used to be a thing called backwards compatibility… now no one thinks twice about breaking code on older platforms.
QA is more likely needed for humans, but in the LLM era, when agents write consistent code, there is no need for it anymore in my opinion.
A bad example, but still: I recently developed a TG bot without a single test, and yet, it works.
It's pretty hard to separate this from confirmation bias. But I've had to disable the YouTube app and switch to mobile web because it would just buffer nonstop on everything; never had issues like with it like this before.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 85.9 ms ] threadBugs and errors were rare and spaced out enough in the past, that when they happened I'd wonder if hardware was on it's way out, or if I broke something. Now, I simply assume software is fucked and I am almost always right.
Things might be better now, but that was a clear warning of what future may hold.
Opencode: pegs a core
Paypal: pegs a core
Chatgpt: pegs a core
In this case, sure software is buggier, but there's also a ton more software+features that wouldn't have existed before AI coding tools.
Atlassian is also a bug factory, but I did not expect anything better of them. Each UI update they did to Confluence and Jira just made everything more confusing in the last 10 years.
Desktop apps, not in general. Some work better, like KDE's DE has fixed some irritants.
Core libs/software have never been better, eg I have had much better luck with stuff like ffmpeg and virsh than ever before.
If it has a UI and targeted at consumers though? Bug city.
QA teams were fired/never hired in the first place (put onto the Devs/support/customer to report and test)
Management want features and selling not Lovability and polish. We are just hitting an all time of make make make.
Partly it was about continuous delivery - you can’t push out to production instantly if you have people doing QA.
Partly it was - developers should be responsible for the quality of what they produce.
And it was also trendy to say - I’ve just got rid of our QA team - we don’t need them.