Like many software people, I often play the role of tech support at home. My experience means that I can generally imagine what went on at the company that made it, and why it sucks. And by the way, most of it sucks. I'm not sure why we tolerate it, other than there's little incentive to make it better if you're competing against more suck. It's infuriating.
Most recently, my wife got a new phone, and the credentials for the Ring app didn't transfer over. She's been trying for weeks, and the requirements to unlock her account were ridiculous. Even better, when you try to recover your account, it spawns a help page that tells you to enable recovery options. In the account that you can't enter. I can't make this stuff up. And don't even get me started on the trash in the academic world. Our school district does their best at integration, but much of it is garbage. That makes my kid rage. Speaking of rage, try making anything with Google's FamilyLink work right or in a predictable way across Google products. Total trash.
So I call upon my fellow software people... we must put an end to crappy software. Enough already. I keep seeing all of these hot takes about productivity and how everything is easier and faster to make (and somehow more expensive, too). The outcome least spoken about is making software better. No one cares if you can sling 20 agents at a time churning out code based on incorrect assumptions. Agent slinging is not an outcome or a functional requirement. It's not in your product requirements at all. It's not in your mission statement or business plan. No one ever said, or will ever say, "I love this software, they must have made it faster with AI!"
If your software does not delight, turn on the red light. Get it in front of people early and often. Feel the customer pain. Listen to what they have to say. If we're going to leverage this new found power of agentic coding, let's use it to make software better. That should be the goal.
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