"They" don't care about "fixing" the DMV. It's nice to think that "they would if they could" but in fact, the anti-government party actively cripples and dismantles government services so that people lose faith in government's ability to improve lives. And what would "fixing" it look like, anyway? Lower cost to operate or lower time-in-queue? Those are in conflict and as much as I would appreciate a better experience there when I have to go (once every 5 years), I think few people would be willing to pay $X/year for that.

On the other hand, my personal computer setup is better than it's been in a long time. Other peoples' software that I run has not improved much, but I've managed to fix several long-standing issues by just giving Fable access to my configuration and telling it my intent.

I've also vibe-coded several applications which are lighter-weight versions of things like Pinboard, Descript, and Weechat. I'm not releasing them because I've been doing OSS for 10 years and I've felt first-hand how the economics of open-source is skewed. And in this day and age where anyone can vibe up their own custom app, it doesn't feel worth it anymore.

What this tells me is that there's not proper incentive for the software you use to get "better" according to your values. You have implicit metrics of "cleanliness", "minimalism", "anticipatory design", and I share those values, but having worked as a SWE for 30 years, I have never worked for a corporation which encouraged those values. If I managed to inflict them on the corporate software I created, it was a "yes and" situation and I only did it because I (or other engineers) cared, never because management wanted it.

So the problem is not "AI is failing us" but rather "the system is failing to use these awesome tools to improve our lives". We can use AI to try to improve the system itself, but our system is not a github repo you can deploy to prod. It's a bit trickier to vibe up the improvements to our incentive structure (though I am trying to do it a bit myself).