Kevin Marks
“We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.
[…]
We've created a perfect storm: tools that amplify incompetence, used by developers who can't evaluate the output, reviewed by managers who trust the machine more than their people.”
https://techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-software-quality-collapse
The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM.

From the Trenches
Oct 20 at 4:43pmWeb
Show threadSophie SchmiegOct 20
@KevinMarks I love this, except for the framing of buggy software as incompetence. Bugginess is software's natural state, reducing bugs is work that an engineer needs to be given room to prioritize accordingly. It's not that we need better software engineers, it's that we need to prioritize quality correctly. And by "we" I mostly mean company leadership.
Show threadKevin MarksOct 20
@sophieschmieg That's broadly fair, but writing very leaky code used to be something frowned on - I wrote about this back in the last century with my colleague Maf: https://kevinmarks.com/personality.html - see the section on extravagant programming. Nowadays we tend to leave this kind of cleanup to the programming environment and hope that things don't leak. I found running Honeycomb on my apps was good at spotting leakiness.
Code and Personality

Show threadcrispy branzino ☭ (sold out forever)Oct 20
@KevinMarks writing shit in electron is the equivalent of going to the grocery store for milk and eggs and driving a four story tall terex 6300 mining truck to get there. You won't find parking but as an electron developer with no ram, its not your problem.