Ask HN: What's the most overengineered tool everyone uses but won't admit sucks?

28 points by fazlerocks 347 days ago | 42 comments

Looking to build something open source and trying to figure out what tools everyone pretends to love but actually hate.

I'll start. Jira. We all use it, we all hate it, nobody admits how much time we waste updating tickets.

Did you move it to the right column? Story points aren't filled out. Link it to the epic.

Meanwhile the actual work takes 2 hours, documenting it takes another hour.

Half the team ignores it, the other half are obsessed with workflows that have 47 different statuses. But try suggesting GitHub issues and suddenly "how will we track velocity??"

What tool is supposed to make you productive but just creates busywork?

esperent 347 days ago |

Next.js:

- so many rendering modes - SSG, SSR, ISR, streaming SSR, PPR, client and server components.

- de facto Vercel lock in: edge runtime, middleware, image optimization, ISR, and lots more are massively complex to set up or less performant off Vercel.

- fragmented ecosystem between app and page router.

- so much boilerplate with the app router: layout.js, loading.js, error.js, page.js

Not everything here is bad - in fact some parts are excellent. There's just so much of it, so many ways of doing any single thing and already so much legacy code in a system that's only a few years old, and it's growing in complexity with every release.

petargyurov 347 days ago | |

Next.js feels like a tech demo that exists to demonstrate a bunch of highly optimised paths to frontend development. Yes, my page probably will load faster if I did so and so, but all the work required for it is not worth the 2ms saved.

I'm sure someone will chime in with "skill issue", and that's true to some extent, but you gotta admit it's an over-engineered "solution".

solardev 347 days ago | | |

Next was so good at first with just the page router and ISR. That solved like 90% of common front-end headaches, especially compared to the hodgepodge of other React Frankensteins at the time.

Then they pivoted to the overengineered insanity that is RSC and the app router.

I have yet to see a project or developer use that to its potential. I don't know who they're targeting anymore, feels like some sort of mythical 100x developer who loves hyper optimizing every paragraph differently.

I work in support (for another company) now and several times a week I see Next users confused by all the different options. Their documentation isn't great at explaining all the differences either. They're moving way too fast and leaving all the developers behind and adding more and more black box magic optimized for Vercel hosting.

Enshittification as always, I suppose.

Maybe it's time to fork it into something simpler and stabler? I would be perfectly happy with Next from four or five years ago. Prev.js?

abraxas 347 days ago |

Git. Most people have no need for 95 percent of its features and don't have a good mental model of how it works. Just copy and paste commands to get it to work, more or less.

a_tartaruga 347 days ago | |

I have to disagree with this strongly. Git is probably the perfect software. It is designed around a mental model that is exactly matched to its use case. Far from copy pasting experienced developers are often fluent in the git model and use it intentionally. I took a look at the man page out of curiosity given your 95 percent comment and I would agree that the majority of ancillary and log level commands are unused. But looking only at the main porcelain commands I would say I regularly use 80 percent of them.

rienbdj 347 days ago | | |

The git model is great but the interface is not carefully designed.

I think if the interface were better, fewer people would be copy pasting git commands.

eternityforest 347 days ago | |

Nobody knows how it works, but we have a good mental model of the high level behavior, and we understand the features we actually use.

solardev 347 days ago | | |

I didn't use to be a religious man. Then I started using git and now I understand the power of prayer.

solardev 347 days ago | |

Git is the one software that I know less about the more I use it. 10+ years now, and every month I learn some new quirk. It very much has that "designed by engineers, for one particular super smart engineer, gl everyone else" vibe. I'm like a 0.5x dev at best and my brain doesn't have enough folds to fit its mental model.

swah 347 days ago | |

On the other hand, I don't feel punished for not using the complex stuff. Still miss (some parts of) Darcs, though... it was so "user first" compared to this.

mountainriver 347 days ago | |

A lot of people have taken on git too, but at this point it’s so entrenched I’m not sure it’s going away anytime soon.

Maybe we’ll have more agentic SCM that auto solves merges and all that fun stuff in the future. But for now we are stuck with a pretty challenging piece of software

nunez 346 days ago | |

I think the Git CLI is very learnable.

mattbrewsbytes 347 days ago |

JIRA gets a lot of deserved hate but I think nearly all software work tracking systems suffer from the same issue: marketing over promises about velocity and predictions about project delivery timelines.

Have we as an industry gotten any better at delivering projects on time? If you have a lot of dysfunction in your organization no software is going to fix that. Or to put it another way, you can’t solve people problems with software.

BobbyTables2 347 days ago | |

The whole story point thing seems like a scam where some invented currency is used to trick people into not seeing reality.

I’ve never worked on a team where any nontrivial task could be done by any two people in roughly the same amount of time.

Experience, skill, subject area familiarity — everyone is different.

It is utter madness to estimate sprints before assigning the work!

muzani 346 days ago | | |

We just stopped using story points when nobody could agree on them. I used emojis as story points once. A colleague asked wtf the :D meant vs :/ or :( or :').

I said I had no idea. I just put how I felt. Some things looked simple but gave me a bad feeling; the bad feeling was always mostly justified.

Every day I'd add up all the emojis for the day, which adds up to ~8 hours. After a week, we add them up again for ~40 hours. Eventually we got a pretty decent estimate that :) meant half an hour and the vomiting one would be at least 3 days.

Some emojis like the grimacing were an indicator that we needed to run a spike on this - it just wasn't groomed enough. Some are an indicator that we didn't trust the other person expected to handle this.

Everyone has different emojis just as they have different emotions about the same task. One person may like refactoring, another may be better at UI.

None are entirely accurate but such is the nature of software. Story points are misleading because they are precise but inaccurate.

fazlerocks 347 days ago | |

Right. We're optimizing for the wrong metrics. Hours spent arguing if something is a 3 or 5 story points could've been spent just building it.

The obsession with predictability in an unpredictable process is the real problem, especially in copilot and cursor era. :D

wsc981 347 days ago |

Maybe I am the odd one out, but I don’t hate JIRA. From my POV it works pretty well. I would agree Github Issues would be nicer though.

By the way in last few companies I worked at I’ve been using Azure DevOps and that feels over engineered to me. I think much stuff could be done with Github Actions instead.

At times I looked at AWS services, but also seems quite complex and I find the website navigation horrible - at least last time I tried.

AnimalMuppet 347 days ago |

JIRA might be like C++. It's OK if you just use a subset, and everyone uses the same one. If you use all of it, though, you get a mess.

The fundamental problem with JIRA is that it's trying to be usable for all the workflows in all companies in all the world. It's hard to do that simply.

And the problem with using it is that companies don't fix their workflow; they just try to port their existing workflow to JIRA. The result is that all the frustrations with the workflow turn into "frustrations with JIRA" (on top of the frustrations that are actually due to JIRA itself).

coldtrait 347 days ago |

The entire javascript ecosystems since the advent of node.

mattl 347 days ago |

Everyone I know who uses Jira hates it. I don’t think there’s a lack of people ready to point out the things they hate about it.

I have one:

I hate that browsers (except Firefox) won’t let me copy a column of data from a table on a webpage. It’s 2025, most tables are going to be data these days, not layout.

bigyabai 347 days ago |

MacOS

muzani 346 days ago |

Jira's a great tool with a terrible UI. You have to heavily customize it, build it into your command line, automate stuff and so on.

pirates 346 days ago |

helm, except everyone I’ve ever worked with who has spent enough time with it freely admits that it kind of sucks.