One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it when I have to use my work mac or windows computers.

See here for docs, under "Focus stealing prevention" - https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehavi...

I still don't understand how a full focus stealability debounce is not the norm. If I am in the middle of writing, or interacting with one UI bit in any way, no other app should be able to steal focus, full stop. Add an annoying popup if you want, make angry computer noises, flash icons, I don't care. 99.9, if not 100% of the time, it's completely unrelated to what I'm doing and can absolutely wait. While some OSs have something along these lines, they also give the tools to bypass it (I'm looking at you, Cisco AnyConnect! Being connected after clicking on connect is not an emergency!)

Imagine you're working in a terminal and an app decides to steal STDIN. Why do we accept that for a GUI?

Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now. Where do we invest, absolutely stunning human support? Or is support not that key and we should invest into being the most reliable? The most enjoyable to use?

One can hope.

My experiences as a user haven't really changed. Streamers fail to cast to TVs. Browsers are devices which reliably and efficiently propagate red console text and 500s from companies to you. I still see bluescreens on public touchscreens.

Uncle Bob nailed one reason why the industry isn't getting better: the growth of programmers is exponential, such that half of all programmers have less than n years experience (5?).

I offer two additional reasons:

Firstly, you hone your skills doing individual algorithms on a single thread, where it's OK to get it wrong and change it as many times as you like.

When you get a job, you don't even realise you're in a distributed system and the getter/setter model you practiced on is woefully inadequate for interacting with partner systems, cqrs, event-sourcing, auditability, idempotency or whatever else is required.

In short, 10 years of practicing writing for-loops and data-structures will not translate into building a system that customers can access via their phone and multiple tabs of a browser, at the same time as a database schema is being updated.

Secondly, while I don't think there is any realistic alternative to agile development, it seems that nontechnical POs have captured the software lifecycle. 'Focus on happy path only, for the MVP' is how you build buggy software. Good developers can learn that this will guarantee the need for a rewrite in the future, but POs never will.

It seems like the languages have been increasingly targeting the beginner segment (C++ -> Java -> JS -> Python), while the tasks have been getting more complicated (b2b distributed systems, 24/7 uptime, millions of users, resistance to hackers, machine learning, etc.)

There was a brief stint of UX, ergonomics and HMI getting traction in enterprise, and, imo, the biggest technological achievements in consumer software has been in the realm of UX in twenty first century. But it lost its importance, I suppose, as you don’t need to make good software to make money off consumers.

Whatever capabilities AI gives to programmers in terms of speed of development, etc, doesn’t change the fundamental behavior —- commercial software is not developed for humans. It is developed for investors, markets, around operational needs, based on CEOs whims, developers’ personal itches, relying on approximation of human experience that gets regurgitated through layers of commercial processes of product managers, UX researchers (who, if present at all, often don’t get invited to the conversation until there are buttons to move in a GUI of an already existing product). Where human experience is considered, it’s from the perspective of our natural weaknesses with the goal to exploit them to maximize profits. Hence why 21st century tech gave us all the dark patterns, feeds, social media, LLM chatbots, etc.

Even when I talk to individual engineers who are committed to creating something good, wholesome, something that they can be proud of -— many think and reason about the problem in a way that sounds like they are trying to engineer human experience the same way one would engineer instructions for machines.

It will never get better, IMO. AI only exemplifies what already exists.

If you're making a Linux distro, please don't do this. I will not watch your video. I was interested, and now I'm not.

The smaller the org, the better the chances of having only reasonable levels of misalignment... but without taking on high risk, it's just better pat to work on a large, worse org. Frustrating.

Imo we know the tools (social, + technical) to make good software that works. But in the face of massive complexity, people just want the next feature, the next thing sales can use as a win

And yeah I agree with the other commenter here - I don't think this is AI. We had terrible software before, even declining quality.

Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is.

The incentives are large companies are fundamentally not in align with making high quality software people actually enjoy interacting with.

Expectations is neither about creation not use. "May" isn't a revolution outside of the historic calendar, so on both counts it's trivial to deny an ungrounded statement.

> So why does software keep getting worse across the board?

Because the premise on which the expectation is built is wrong?

Also plenty of the issues are prehistoric with all the past meat bag generations to blame, case in point: > Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty

So who stopped that huge fruit corpo from doing the very basics of managing user experience in the past few decades minus a few AI years?

This is hilarious.

I don't necessarily believe in 10x devs, but there is a very clear output difference between various developers. During my career I've been both in a position where I was delivering much higher quality code at a similar pace to other coworkers and also mediocre code at a slower pace. Sometimes at the same time.

Now, AI itself is a force multiplier. Depending on the task, your setup, your skill level (both as a developer and with LLMs), the weather, the model and so on, it can range anywhere from actively hindering you, to solving the entire thing for you. Let's say that on average you get a 20% productivity boost.

If you take a 0.8x developer and give them a 1.2 force multiplier LLM, you get a 0.96x developer. Worse, the axis that has moved is speed, not quality.

All this to say that if you let a below average developer vibecode, you get a much higher volume of slop. You can make an agent create good code, but this developer didn't care before so why should they now?

*Note that this is from experience. I've started getting feature PRs from our devops team. It's been a very enlightening experience.

I think that points do the solution. We should not make stuff more complex than we can the level of complexity at which we can make it reliable.

I work in mediation and have recently seen a few cases where I’ve wondered if the participants were suffering from AI psychosis as related to their claims: where they’d constructed their legal cases hand-in-hand with an LLM and had become absolutely convinced despite a contestable set of facts.

People have always been subject to delusion, but in these cases, all documentation submitted was obviously created by chatbots.

This extends to any device which has software or firmware: banking websites, banking apps on mobile phones, car firmware, etc.

I find it very depressing, especially when I think of the people who design, develop and deploy these apps. We are talking about large companies and teams of people. Entire chains of well-paid people designed, looked at, developed, tested, and then accepted these apps. And yet they break in the most obvious ways, or fail to be usable, instead pestering us with pop-ups and useless drivel and forgetting their state at every point.

These problems are not subtle. To take a glaring example from my everyday life, in my car there are buttons for moving windows up and down. Sometimes when you press the button to move the window down, it will actually start moving up. We are talking about a simple button that moves a window. And seemingly everybody thinks this is fine?

I don't know what to do about this.

I mean, he has given the answer in the article: Because "coding has been solved" is from the perspective of upper management, not devs or users - and that cares about software quality and usability (as standalone metrics) about as much as the McDonald's board cares about nutrition value.

So taking it at face value is kinda part of the problem here.

The only way this can get better is by completely suffocating it off attention. It doesn't exist. It's not real.

If developers are producing garbage to begin with, chances are they still produce garbage just at an accelerated rate.

Bizarre experience.

And bring back change & configuration management processes and documentation reviews. All the boring slow stuff.

Except now make it part of your CI/CD pipeline.

That's a complete non-starter unless you're serving some extreme luxury premium market with absurd margins, and/or your customer interactions already require a lot of human involvement. So 99.9% of digital products are right out.

Good human support is absurdly expensive and will easily make your product 10 times more expensive than your competitor's. But almost no customer is willing to pay 10 times more for good support.