Software is in Decline - Jonathan Blow

What people said

OnionBlender · 2023-01 · Recommendation

Reminds me of Jonathan Blow's talk: [Software is in Decline]( [VIDEO] ). I think one reason why software is slow because managers don't allocate time to improve performance unless it gets worse than "good enough". For me that meant taking time to improve performance without being told or telling anyone how much time I spent trying to improve performance. When I used to work on Android in a large company my favorite low hanging fruit was looking where people used `Cursor.getColumnIndex(String columnName)`. People would call it inside a loop for every row in the query result. This was a surprisingly large time sink according to the profiler. Some developers just don't know or care about performance. I depended on a system that had very large list of banned/blocked IP addresses. This list was stored as a giant array of hundreds of `BigInteger`s. Each time the function was called to determine if an IP address was banned it would convert hundreds of strings into an array of `BigInteger` and then loop through the array checking against each one.

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CoffeeSky · 2026-06 · Reference

I actually felt the opposite. HN is full of AI crowd. > Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace. This precisely why I still have mixed reaction towards AI, even AI can produce functional code but might be filled with foot guns. I personally don't use AI (the full automated ones, e.g., Claude code, Codex, Cursor) but also I don't complain about people using AI. This also reminds me of Jonathan Blow's Software is in Decline[1] talk. Even when the humans coded everything, we gave up on quality a long ago for speed. So people complaining about low quality AI code is ignored. Simply put software engineering is not as rigorous as other engineering and most of the time when software ultimately fail there isn't major consequences. [1] [VIDEO]

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fzeroracer · 2023-11 · Criticism

'Admitting his flaws' certainly isn't the way I would describe Jonathan Blow. Even ignoring his political turns, he's had a long history of saying some outright wrong stuff on game dev, web dev etc and being insufferably rude to anyone that tells him he's wrong. I could go off on how many ways he was wrong in his talk on Software Decline [1] or his many wrong takes on Linux. All of which he's doubled down on. [1] [VIDEO]

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