Ask HN: Why is software quality collapsing?

Resource Bloat and Externalized Costs

• Many comments focus on RAM/CPU bloat: IDEs, browsers, Electron apps, and music clients using tens of GBs and draining batteries.
• One camp says this became “normal” because hardware is cheaper than engineer time; optimization is no longer mandatory.
• Others counter that costs are just pushed onto users and the environment, and at global scale this is not actually cheaper.
• Some argue IDEs are a special case (constant analysis needs resources), but even there people report big differences between tools.

Incentives, Deadlines, and Org Culture

• Common theme: management optimizes for shipping features fast, not for robustness or polish. Performance reviews reward “new stuff,” not cleanup.
• Startup “ship anything now” culture is said to have infected large companies; raising quality concerns can be career‑limiting.
• Testing is often treated as an afterthought; Agile/DevOps rhetoric (“everyone owns quality”) is seen as having devalued dedicated testers.

Complexity, Abstractions, and AI

• Software stacks are far deeper: layers of frameworks, containers, and cloud services increase “trouble nodes” and hide failure sources.
• Dependencies move bugs into places teams can’t see or fix easily.
• LLMs are blamed for subtle bugs and low‑value tests: they boost apparent productivity while making correctness harder to trust.

Is Quality Actually Worse?

• Some insist quality is better: modern systems crash less, have more testing tools, and past software had deadly and frequent bugs.
• Others argue user experience is slower and more frustrating despite vastly better hardware, with egregious resource leaks normalized.
• Several note survivorship bias: we mostly remember the old software that aged well. Others say three years of metrics aren’t enough to show a real decline.

Market Structure, Lock‑In, and Users

• Cloud and ecosystem lock‑in (e.g., devices, purchases, messaging) make switching costly, so competition on quality weakens.
• Large tech firms are seen as “too big to fail,” trending toward permanent mediocrity rather than being displaced.
• Users keep buying and often can’t evaluate quality beforehand, creating a “lemon market” where price and hype dominate.

Human Factors and Craftsmanship

• Commenters cite a shortage of strong engineers, weak mentoring, distraction, and preference for building new things over polishing old ones.
• Some still prioritize craft and long‑term maintainability, but feel they’re swimming against organizational and economic currents.