The current state of software is depressing
I blame AI, obviously. Not because I’m a hater, but because ever since [vibe|prompt|agentic|spec-based|loop] coding became the norm, big tech and big corps are neglecting quality. Productivity is all that matters. Ship things, and ship fast.
Gmail & outlook are taking forever to load. WhatsApp is constantly crashing. I see small inconsistencies in UI everywhere. To keep my sanity in check I won’t even to talk about jira. Every single app I use got significantly worse. Apps are slower, bloated and full annoying bugs, which exposes the lack of care about the product.
At this point I will not even mention ads and attention economy. Just thinking about that makes me sick.
I already accepted that crafted software is a dead art. Who got time to be typing code? George Hotz once told that one of his biggest frustrations is typing. He thinks faster than his fingers can press keys, but he is a genius so I accept his rant. We, mortals, are not, so why are we rushing so much?
As for me, I like slow, diligent, well thought stuff. I like handcrafted. That being a necklace, a ceramic mug, a watercolour painting and, why not, delightful software? Who remembers Apollo for Reddit? Or Crash Bandicoot 2 for PSX?
We got way too much computer power in our hands, so optimisation is not a concern anymore. “I get that”. What I do not understand is how we, as an industry, accepted (or worse, normalised) that software should take 30s to load. We got silicon chips, ultra-fast internet. How is that possible? I blame the suits!
(Actually, Software Engineering has the wrong incentives and that’s the real reason, but I will talk about that in another post. Rant over.)
The new normal.
I tried to read an article without an ad-blocker. What the actual fuck. Screenshot taken on July, 2026.