I'm definitely noticing, I imagine the populace at large will soon too. I'm not even talking about random software either, the company I work for has more and more fired that need to be put out because people are spamming out ai-generated code that was at best rubber stamped.
Not even just the customer-facing stuff either, the internal tooling is on fire more and more often. It's not sustainable in the slightest
I suspect the massive shitshow of Windows 11 and all of its failings is a result of large quantities of vibe code being merged into the OS. People are noticing.
Windows 11 was released before vibe coding was viable. And the shit show seems to be that they push ads and bloatware on people, not that it doesn't work reliably. Windows 11 IoT LTSC has been absolutely rock solid for me on both machines I have it on. Waaay more stable and reliable than Linux, and even a bit better than Mac (which is also way better than Linux).
If they are vibe coding anything, it hasn't had any bad consequences yet. The ads and bloat are human decisions!
In the last two years Windows 11 has shipped with increasingly serious bugs. Many of my co-workers report needing to reboot a few times a day because issues just compound.
I regularly have major issues with Teams and Outlook. Crashes, not showing messages until hours later, calls dropping every few minutes, and the app just never opening. Just Friday afternoon I could not close Teams from the Task Manager
Just because some of Windows 11 was released before Claude Code doesn’t mean that the really shitty stuff from the last year wasn’t vibe-coded garbage.
They do. Most economically viable software already exists today, most people's job is to make .1% improvements, and features on top. For this work it's obviously pivotal that any change should not worsen the existing software, as that instantly nullifies the value of improvements.
Another kind of highly valuable software is a new design which digitizes some process, like the ticket management of a rail company. If you don't follow the internal processes and workings of the firm exactly, or you do not interface with existing systems 100% accurately, your software very soon becomes worthless.
Figuring out how to create a piece of code that solves the exact problem the customer has, while not breaking anything, and fitting into existing operations seems to be a big head scratcher still, and something humans still need to do, at least that was my experience so far with LLMs.
The sad reality is that the vast majority of customers (whoever you are writing software for: clients, management, or end users) simply don't care as much about quality. If you give them the "time, cost, and quality" pick-two choice, 99.9% of customers are going to ask for fast+cheap. It's not the world I wish we were living in.
This isn't true. I don't think you or me would want a car/TV/smartphone that's cheap and flashy but breaks every two weeks. Sometimes people are strapped for cash that's why they cheap out on stuff, or really are enthusiastic about it, so they tolerate it breaking all the time, but for everything else, reliability is king.
Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two weeks, what choice do people have?
In tech, the era of competing based on quality is long gone. The winning strategy is to get a monopoly/oligopoly and then you can let the quality decay to zero and people will have no choice but to keep paying you money (or to your handful of equally-mediocre competitors).
> Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two week.
Certainly not true for me. One example is Linux. I've been sticking with Ubuntu LTS, and delaying upgrades for as long as I can get away with for any system that's connected with earning or at least not losing money.
For the packages whose versions I care about, I compile them from source/use a PPA, and accept the consequences, but I really don't care for shiny features, if the price is random stuff breaking and having to be troubleshooted in the latest version.
There is a minimum but beyond that people don't care. Asian brands like Toyotas are the most reliable yet the Ford F150 is the best selling vehicle in the world.
This is why I believe true engineering art comes in actually marrying all three: build great quality quickly at reasonable (small) cost!
If you need it to work for at least a month or two (instead of one and done, which some demoware is like). Following a few rules early on will ensure you can keep evolving it — even if it's MVP/demoware/whatever — as long as you know you need to evolve it soon after you build it!
The most important result of quality in software is that it's faster to produce and cheaper. How are people defining quality? We're not building tables with the finest wood.
Low quality ends up taking longer to build over the long run. It gets harder and harder to add or change features.
