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Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been. AI isn’t going to make someone care about writing robust software and that is why we don’t see better software all of a sudden. The market doesn’t rewards apps that don’t break on every update, it doesn’t reward cobbling together multiple independent solutions, as opposed to using Microsoft as a one stop shop. If people could have gotten away with this in the early days of computing they would have, but computers were too low powered, and the knowledge too scarce.

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We found the limits of what it takes to make software stand, and what software paper cuts people are willing to deal with

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"Software quality is tied to the market incentives and always has been."

Yes -- but. The market is irrational especially in a time of mania or panic. The AI phase we are in has mania, bubble aspects. There is no rational calculation about what is happening to software quality and is that good for customers or the industry (or individual businesses). We are too far into FOMO. It won't stop until it STOPS. Uh oh.

A friend of mine works in a niche software field at a small company. It was recently acquired and the whole technical team was laid off because the new director of engineering determined that they could replace the whole team with AI. All of the people who wrote the product were dumped as well as the whole cohort they had trained. Everyone.

But maybe that’s bad? Maybe keeping everyone just on the verge of leaving or getting hurt isn’t a good place for society to settle?

Given doing better costs money, and people don't want to pay for better, leaving that place is hard. We've seen the same play out with physical goods - the cheapness of just-good-enough-but-right-now-cheaply outcompetes quality, which costs and takes time.

We as society are choosing to be in that place.

I mean every industry has done this before getting highly regulated. The meat industry was horrific before being forced with fines and shutdowns if they released a bad product.

Software is a market for lemons. There are huge costs for switching, and it's typically very hard to tell what is good. That and with the rate software is updated you have no clue if it will remain good. There are high motivations for short term gains with enshittification all over the market.

Is HR aware you hold these dissident opinions?

Most software doesn’t matter and nothing happens if it’s slightly broken temporarily. The stuff that actually is critical is generally very stable.

You don't have to extrapolate much to conclude that's a general critique of capitalism.

Corporations aim to make the cheapest possible product that still sells because that creates the biggest profit margin.

If we're collectively unhappy with the outcome, that's the core value we need to change.

The problem is that the cost curve for completeness/correctness goes asymptotic at 90-99% so the cost up building complete/correct software is never worth it from a revenue perspective, and only happens if there is significant liability risk from defects.

So what's our (literal or metaphorical) breaking point here? How much more does things need to break before people just say "enough" and stop consuming into the declining quality?

I feel like the only real answer is "we just don't know". But in an attempt to actually answer this, I think the breaking point are different for different groups of people.

If you are struggling to pay the bills, you probably could care less about software's 'decline', you're just trying to survive. Maybe if something catastrophic happened it would be enough to put you at that limit, but software could stand to get much worse before then.

If you are forced to interact with technology a lot everyday, then what might be a paper cut for someone every once in a while, could be literally hundreds a day for you. In that case you are probably very near or at that threshold already.

As a society, I don't think we would see cracks until we start to see multiple community scale disasters related to poor software, or small disasters in highly visible areas like healthcare, planes, etc.

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