If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

In one line

As I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of an AI-induced mass psychosis. People are literally token-maxxing themselves into hospital beds, 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.

Opening excerpt

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.

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 . The bar for “user experience” has kept rising, but everything has become increasingly fragile.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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