I'm accustomed to working with buggy tools, nothing I do is mission-critical, so things aren't as thoroughly tested as a car might be before hitting the road. But it seems things are getting released with more and more bugs. Am I nuts?
Seems like there are three possibilities to me:
1. This is just what happens with products that are new to market. 2. People creating these products are relying too much on tools like Cursor that don't work right. 3. The pressure to keep up is getting faster and faster, so companies are releasing products that are less and less thoroughly tested.
My gut tells me it's a combination of 2 and 3, and this is a sign we're reaching a new stage in the AI bubble. But maybe I'm wrong and being overly cynical.
Tools like replit are idea to product and feel like it is prompt to a fixed typescript kind of stack based product.
The argument for the vibe coding side could be that best developers are able to write better prompts. But based on my experience, that stuff works only till mvp or medium complexity code and not for complete framework level code.
Also, regarding microsoft, I use Windows 11 home Edition of Microsoft and it crashed two times via updates. Although, i was able to restore it via restore point. A paid software product that doesn't cover user data protection in its warranty is not really a great product.
> "when I hit save, my data disappears."
out of the box, because it has evolved to make these things automatic and easy to implement as part of its convention. Whatever full stack JS framework is hot for startups these days doesn't do this out of the box because it hasn't been around long enough and focuses on other things.
But get that software out in the field, grow its userbase, run it for years, and you have thousands if not millions of different uses of it. Take all the bugs that come out of that, fix them, and you have software that is less buggy.
So sure, inexperienced teams put out bugs. I do, too... more than I should. Hopefully the egregious one's where it simply does not work never get to production. But the more nuanced bugs and their eventual fixes come from the software running in the wild.
So if you are the pilot user for new products, you will see all those early bugs.
Fast forward to today, and it's way cheaper to ship code with bugs to prove out an idea works than it is to spend even a few minutes writing test cases and doing even a modicum of QA.
Ultimately, it's a not just a combination of all 3 things you've mentioned, which are all contributing factors; the real problem is any level of QA before proving an idea is seen as a waste of time and money. As someone who started in tech support & QA 30 years ago, it's really tough to see.
And I'm just thinking about the amount of time people spend paying me to work through these bugs with the team at the startup building it.
Putting aside the whole "it's easier to keep a customer than it is to acquire one" and "easier to keep your good reputation that overcome a bad one" side of things (and there is one tool a client asked me to use that I told them either the tool goes or I do),
Ship out the product, even if it isn't ready. Meet your performance goals for shipping on time. Collect your bonus and exercise your stock options. Bail to another gig before the consequences for the buggy product hits the fan.
A recent one was that Azure Backup and Azure Update don’t work in combination! If you restore a VM, it can never again be patched by the update system. (It won’t recognise the OS as supported and just refuses to do anything.)
It has been reported, but nobody cares. I was told by support that this is a “will not fix” because it’s not a requirement.
There is no way anything this catastrophically bad would have made it past QA back when Microsoft used to have an actual QA team.
I swear there is a significant portion of development teams out there that are secretly pleased as punch that they can just push whatever garbage they want straight to production without the pesky people in QA “just complaining” and being “obstructionist”.
Backup: check!
Update: check!
Backup + Update both working at the same time - not on the list.