Our current software crisis—we've had a few—has been ramping up IMO since the post-2007 bailouts. Instead of regulating finance, the US let the finance industry take over, which hasn't been great overall, but for software it's meant that "quality" stopped mattering

Well-funded startups capture market share with subsidised products.

Big tech is a cluster of oligopolies and monopolies.

Internal software projects are driven by their potential effects on stock prices

There is little to no downside to poor software quality and the upside of doing the job well is limited compared to tactics like lock-in, dishonest subscription models, and monopolies

Some corners of the software industry are less affected. Others, such as web dev, are more affected

For example, the stock price for Crowdstrike, even in a stock market affected by the Iran war, is up 12% today over its peak before it

Massive worldwide economic harm, no real consequences

This has led to a field whose standard practices are a cluster of bad habits and superstition. Most of the ideas of user-centred design are alien to modern devs. Misconceptions about test-driven dev abound.

When devs says 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

@baldur re "superstition-drive coding", my favorite term for that for a long while has been:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

Rereading the Wikipedia definition in the new context of LLMs is enlightening:

> The term cargo cult programmer may apply when anyone inexperienced with the problem at hand copies some program code from one place to another with little understanding of how it works or whether it is required.