I think a lot of folks in the industry are feeling this way. It’s an existential crisis for many of us right now. Why bother progressing when slop is “good enough”? Some of us still care but I have a feeling there are a lot of people that don’t.
Software engineers feeling down should think about software designed to track medication administration, or validate their tax calculations, or to decide whether to flag you for a CIFAS marker, or whatever, and then imagine the generic "fuck it, that'll do" type vibecoder-level-engineer handling the code.
That makes me feel even more down, because I know this will happen.
I know this may be some kind of reverse survivorship bias and that I simply do not notice all of the slop around me that somehow is truly "good enough", but I think I need to see some concrete examples to convince me.
Maybe you use your 2-10 apps and that’s it? Do you even let’s say — for the excercise sake — use those apps fully, each and every screen?
I use dozens of apps, most of functionality from the ones I need is a single flow or function.
I don’t care about setting my avatars or filling „user details” unless it is a delivery app or a shop. Most frameworks have boilerplate for that but there are dozens of such screens that don’t have boilerplate yet those are nice to have even if not used by 90% of users.
That kind of proves the opposite point: you’re using those apps so they were good enough for the people who made it to get to you who would probably never even be able go write an app. Also are you comparing the apps to your average, bug ridden app written before LLMs existed? Maybe they’re not that much worse.