Something smells specious in the world of software. Have you noticed it? A rapidly declining quality, reliability, up-time? Security? Thought? Care?
GitHub, a once crowning jewel of the software industry, holding 99.999999999% uptime (fact check: maybe fewer 9’s in reality, but close enough) with no issues, now seems to be struggling every day. Big projects are leaving GitHub as a result. By their own CTO’s admission (Former VP of Privacy at Meta btw, which we all know by now is a completely honest and trustworthy department /s), this is due to an exponential increase in “agentic development workflows”. Just ask the creator of cURL, another well-beloved product of our industry, how well that is going. Ask any open-source maintainer. Ask proprietary software engineers how well it’s going. Ask, dare it say it, the users of our software.
By all accounts you can find (unless perhaps you’re a CEO or Founder who doesn’t really care), software is getting worse. And it sucks. For everyone.
Look. I have come a long way from my AI Doomer mindset. I do see that it can be a useful tool during development. Many people on my team, myself included, use it every day. We have built some useful AI workflows that are incredibly helpful to us. But not in the full-flow, agentic, write-everything, think-everything mindset that seems to be taking over our industry. What would you rather have on your team? 1,000 junior level developers who need the utmost guidance and care to make sure they’re producing something decent, or like 4 senior+ engineers who actually know what they’re doing and the implications of the code they write?
“But it will get better!” – No it won’t. These models are trained on the intuition, creativity, and knowledge of real-world software engineers (mostly through GitHub Open Source projects, I would add). We will fast approach the scenario of model collapse, as more and more software becomes AI-generated, and more and more Open Source software closes it’s doors. While everybody is high on the notion that this new and shiny product is “intelligent”, offering unlimited productivity, the Law of Averages is a mathematical certainty, currently racing towards the bottom. We can already feel it in the decline of the software we use today.
I don’t yet know how this situation will evolve. I can only hope that at some point, our software starts to get better again rather than decline. I do know, that whatever the solution is here, it will fall on the backs of competent, experienced, and reliable software engineers to navigate. And we’re at least used to that burden by now.