Software Context

Software is not in good shape. The current state of software is not great. Technical debt is bigger than ever. Companies completely ignore technical debt and focus only on new features.

Denis Stetskov has this amazing article about our current software quality crisis: The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe. I like Denis’s post quite a lot and agree 100%. The only thing is that he talks about memory leaks too much, to the point that someone could say, “but we have more memory today, so that’s fine.” Beyond memory and optimization, the fact is that lead time is not getting better, bugs are not getting fixed faster, and overall quality is declining. That goes beyond memory leaks.

Such acknowledgment of the problem is the first step to solving it. It’s very important to understand that the state of affairs is not good. AGI is not here yet, and only God knows when it will arrive (if it arrives). AI can create a lot of trash code, introduce nasty bugs, and generally make things worse if we don’t have good software practices in place. I will cover this extensively in the later chapters.

Now is not the time to pay less attention to software; on the contrary, we must be more vigilant and pay more attention.