Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric
4 points by whymarrh
4 points by whymarrh
The primary purpose of modern software provided by businesses is to generate profit, not serve human needs. Viewed through that lens, all of this software rot seems inevitable.
This is true for capitalism in general. Companies exist to make profits for their owners and shareholders, any social value they produce is strictly incidental, and the harm these entities produce is typically externalized to the society at large.
am I missing something about Omarchy or is it an odd choice to hold up as an "act of rebellion?"
I also think @napkindrawing has it right, but to add to the point: nothing in the piece seems to connect the two sides: there's points about LLMs that seem disconnected from quality, save for there is some nebulous claim of quality as an outcome of LLM usage (which, thinking about it, I've never seen). I think the analysis is missing that we never really cared about software quality, or have not for a very long time, and most of the desire is simply to get software out to some business purpose; viewed this way, it seems to make more sense why we're seeing these things.
am I missing something about Omarchy or is it an odd choice to hold up as an "act of rebellion?"
If I squint my eyes really hard, I guess I can imagine the author meant that it's a whole package deal (since it's so opinionated), so it could arguably better compete with Windows/Mac than a plain distro... but then I don't really want to write apologia for Omarchy. It seems like a bloated mess, championed by a questionable person, and a sink for funding that could be far better spent on the aforementioned "plain" distros and their maintenance/development.
I agreed with everything until Omarchy triggered the record scratch haha. Pop OS and their recent COSMIC update is a far better champion. Or Steam Machine.
yes, this was my intuition as well; I had never read much about Omarchy for the reasons you state, but also nothing I ever did read lead me to believe that it was some scion of quality and performance.
nebulous claim of quality as an outcome of LLM usage
I think, what the OP implies is: individual developers who care about quality will be empowered by LLMs to start greenfield products, acting as managers to the coding agents.
The obvious issue here is that the volume of code required for a full product is nigh impossible to review for a single human, and that the models tend to produce code that's as good as their training material. And, as one might recall, this blog post started off by stating that most of the code out there is not good quality.
I know these type of posts can be a dime a dozen nowadays, but I think they're important reminders every time.
This isn’t a rant against AI. Those humming GPU farms have given us superpowers, but we still can’t use them to build better software.
I feel like we've long had all the tools we need to write, test, debug, and ship high-quality software but we… don't. It feels like software quality, good interface design, performance optimization, etc. have all fallen out of the mainstream.
I honestly have a very hard time thinking of any truly interesting or innovative commercial software that's come out in at least a decade. As the author points out, things just tend to get worse. A big part of it stems from the whole advertisement and data collection based business models where the customer also becomes a product themselves.
Yep it was always possible but no-one, least of all product or business people cared about fast, bugfree software. One good reason is that it’s hard to even know what people want until you ship it; the bad reason is that product would have to figure out what people like about the software to specify it properly and instead managers and investors seem to reward just shipping more features.
A great write up focusing on what the actual structural problems are in the software industry. I also expect that we'll see actually interesting software produced with LLMs outside the commercial sector. People don't just magically get dumber when they use these tools, and if you're not under the gun to pump crap out, and you can take your time with the tool, and build things to your own standard, then it's a completely different experience.
This is exactly the same thing that happens without LLMs as well I might add. When somebody makes an open source project, they tend to care a lot more about what goes into it because they have a feeling of ownership and pride building it. When you're working on some commercial software where you're alienated from your work, decisions are handed down from above, and timelines are set by clueless project managers, then you're naturally going to be producing junk no matter what tools you're using.