Great essay, made a few things click into place for me. I've been hearing people complain about the tech industry's abandonment of quality for decades, but never quite mentally connected that to the funding model.

Another thought: a lot of the other phenomena discussed here seem to be happening in virtually every industry, as far as I can tell.

Thanks for sharing!

I unfortunately agree with all of it. The world is now run by con artists. Things that last, that are reliable, that have value are all threats to capitalism and so are anathema. The cult and its cultists cannot be reasoned with or deprogrammed, because they did not arrive at those beliefs by reason. Our species and planet are fucked. My heart breaks for todays youth.

The stock price of the company that caused worldwide outages and economic havoc, Crowdstrike, even in a stock market affected by the Iran war, is higher today than its peak before the outage. Massive worldwide economic harm, no real consequences.

I actually went and checked, Crowdstrike, CRWD, had an insignificant fall after the bug in October 2024 (around 300 USD). By mid November it was already up 10%. Today, it's around 768 USD - it had a huge bump up from April/26 onwards.

When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent. (...) Those who are most vocal today about the dysfunctions of LLM-coding were already warning about the dysfunctions of the software industry well before the “AI” bubble began.

I feel somewhat vindicated and seen, I have been complaining about shitty software for a number of years now (increasingly bloated and slow because fuck you, get newer hardware), though mostly blaming javascript, electron and react. I should look at the bigger picture, the money, that incentivizes the dysfunctional application of those things

So, I feel I saw a but of what the author was talking about in the discussions I've been having about Sony deciding to kill physical discs.

Most of the people making the argument that this is bad are really centering their argument on what should happen. The software should be sold as a good and work without requiring an Internet connection or update. The public should punish these poor business practices from occurring.

But there aren't meaningful consequences to not doing what should be done. The rules don't have consequences.

And it is hard to have conversations with people who are pointing out that there are rules and they should be followed when those rules have only been suggestions for decades.

The article writer is right; there aren't any rules to software development any more outside of needing to develop a monopoly or dependence immediately.

It was a good read; thanks for sharing.

My honest opinion is, that this not even innovation anymore it's just same old patty burger selling around in different flavor on favor of majority of power people's and Ai as in real concept is disgrace to its fascinating origin and study 😕