[HN Gopher] Good software knows when to stop
___________________________________________________________________
Good software knows when to stop
Author : ssaboum
Score : 298 points
Date : 2026-03-05 13:52 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ogirardot.writizzy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ogirardot.writizzy.com)
| theorchid wrote:
| Oracle Database has now been renamed Oracle AI Database. But I
| think that in time, they will rename it back to Oracle Database.
| The hype will pass, but the AI will remain, and the name will no
| longer need to include the AI prefix. AI will just become the
| norm.
| ssaboum wrote:
| not exactly what we're asking of database, don't you think ?
| righthand wrote:
| Needs for actual survival and functionality do not out weigh
| needs for product manager promotions anymore.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| The destructive forces (fire clearing deadwood) of the
| economy have been artificially suppressed for a long time.
| Most companies are zombie companies now. The US is an
| entire zombie economic zone.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| That's what happens when you have nearly a decade of ZIRP
| & QE.
|
| Money printer go brrrr.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Ironically, yeah kinda. In so far as fuzzy text search goes,
| vectorization works great.
|
| The generative part of the AI hype is getting in the way.
| theorchid wrote:
| We want to maintain the status quo in technology. We want
| databases to remain as they were five years ago. But for some
| reason, Oracle implemented AI into its database. Perhaps they
| surveyed their customers, and most of them supported this
| initiative. Perhaps they surveyed the wrong audience, and
| real database users do not want to see AI in them. Or maybe
| they made this decision to get more investment or because of
| the hype around AI.
|
| But the decision has been made. And if AI remains in
| databases after the AI hype, the next generation of
| developers will no longer know databases without AI. That's
| why I said it will become the norm. But that's just my guess.
| Unfortunately, I can't see the future. I don't know what it
| will actually be like in a few years.
| easton wrote:
| Not only that, but due to their pattern of putting letters
| after the version number the current version is Oracle AI
| Database "26ai".
|
| I skimmed the video and the presenters said "Oracle AI Database
| 26ai" multiple times without even a glint of self awareness on
| their face. They must've picked the only people on the team
| that could say that without laughing.
| kube-system wrote:
| That never happened to JavaScript. It still has Java in the
| name long after the Java hype ended. We never went back to
| calling it LiveScript.
| layer8 wrote:
| Well, there was an attempt of sorts with EcmaScript.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Well no, ECMA Script exists, but it's not a language it's a
| standard that JavaScript runtimes implement. JavaScript
| today means ECMA Script version + runtime flavor.
| benttoothpaste wrote:
| als: both fitting and terrifying name for that new utility...
| PTOB wrote:
| ... slowly losing all functionality until, suddenly, death.
| Jackevansevo wrote:
| if I ran an OS upgrade and was greeted by something like this I'd
| immediately be swapping OS.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's optimistic to assume that there'll be any better options
| left.
| NoSalt wrote:
| We need something similar to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, to
| protect un-AI'd Linux distributions so that, in the event of an
| AI apocalypse, we will have access to clean operating systems.
| allemagne wrote:
| https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
|
| Of course, any AI smart enough to apocalypse us would also know
| about these.
| dirkc wrote:
| I like the fictional way the article starts!
|
| When chatGPT first gained traction I imagined a future where I'm
| writing code using an agent, but spending most of my time trying
| to convince it that the code I want to write is indeed moral and
| not doing anything that's forbidden by it's creators.
| ssenssei wrote:
| I built a spotify music extractor called harmoni that helps you
| download your playlists and I feel I'm done. It does its job and
| it caters to both non-technicals and technical people alike.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Spotify is a moving target, however. It may change its API,
| remove it completely, etc. I think you can only be truly done
| if you don't rely on a third party.
| latexr wrote:
| > I think you can only be truly done if you don't rely on a
| third party.
|
| On a third-party _that changes_. Making software for a
| specific hardware like a game console or a specific e-reader
| may still technically rely on a third-party but doesn't carry
| the same risk and you can definitely say you're done.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _Ignore feature requests -- don 't build what users ask for;
| understand the underlying problem instead_
|
| not quite in the same area, but this advice reminds me of
| blizzard and world of warcraft. for years and years, people
| requested a "classic" WoW (for non-players, the classic version
| is an almost bug-for-bug copy of the original 2004-2005 version
| of the game).
|
| for years and years, the reply from blizzard was "you think you
| want that, but you dont. trust us, you dont want that."
|
| they eventually caved and launched classic WoW to _overwhelming_
| success. some time later, in an interview, ion hazzikostas (the
| game director) and holly longdale (vice president & executive
| producer), admitted that they got WoW classic very wrong and that
| the people "really _did_ know what they want ".
|
| anyways, point being that sometimes the person putting in the
| feature request knows exactly what they want and they have a good
| idea. while your default mode might be (and perhaps should be) to
| ignore feature requests, it is worth recognizing that you may be
| doing so at your own loss. after all, you might not not be able
| to fully understand every underlying problem of every user of
| your product -- but you might understand how to code the feature
| that they asked for.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Same with Old School RuneScape.
|
| Jagex thought they knew better than the players what the game
| should look like, and overhauled the whole game to the point it
| was unrecognizable. It took a massive loss of paying members to
| get them to finally release 2007 version of RuneScape back.
|
| Even now, OSRS has double the amount of players that RS3 has.
| Lol
| j_w wrote:
| This isn't even true. OSRS was on life support with very few
| players for years until they started giving it updates.
|
| Turns out the 2007 version of the game was ROUGH for a lot of
| reasons - they picked the time because, IIRC, it was the most
| complete backup they had.
|
| OSRS has now had nearly a decade of consistent updates, a
| large team, and typically 10x the online player count of the
| "modern" game. The catch is that OSRS is not the 2007 version
| of the game, it's an alternative update timeline which broke
| off at the 2007 version of the game.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| That's not quite how I remember it.
|
| But I can't think of a way to verify those numbers, so
| agree to disagree.
| matthewkayin wrote:
| This is a good point, though maybe means that "understanding
| the underlying problem" requires a degree of humanity.
|
| I think it's fair to say that Blizzard at a certain point went
| corporate and "lost the plot", so they thought they knew what
| people wanted, even though they really didn't (don't you guys
| have phones?).
| AberrantJ wrote:
| That's also a good case of the difference between a "Yeah, it'd
| be cool if you added this feature for free" type of feature
| request vs "I'm actively paying a company making a hack version
| of what I'd like from you - would you please let me pay you
| instead - for the love of god, please please please take my
| money?"
| treetalker wrote:
| I'm not a WoW player, so perhaps speaking out of turn -- but
| doesn't that example show that users know what extra features
| they don't want, not extra features they do?
| john_strinlai wrote:
| that distinction sort of misses the point i was trying to
| make.
|
| sometimes users want _something_. that _something_ might be a
| feature request, or it might be a feature removal. it doesnt
| really matter for the sake of my point(s):
|
| a) ignoring your users requests can sometimes be a bad
| choice.
|
| b) you might not necessarily understand every underlying
| problem that every user has. worse, you might _think_ you
| understand the problem when you dont.
|
| expanding on b: blizzard _thought_ they understood their
| player base and the underlying problems of retail WoW. on
| multiple occasions, ion explicitly said stuff like "you
| think you want this, but you dont". they kept making changes
| to retail WoW to try and stop the hemorrhaging of players.
|
| eventually they said "fuck it, we dont know why you want
| this, but here" (not a verbatim quote). it ended up being
| very profitable.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Sid Meier has talked about something similar: he likes to
| tell designers at Firaxis that "feedback is fact". That is,
| no matter how strongly you (the designer) believe that
| something is a good design, if the player says "this isn't
| fun" then that needs to be taken as the gospel truth. The
| players might not be able to explain _why_ it isn 't fun,
| and you might be able to tweak the design to make it fun,
| but what you can't do is insist that the design is for the
| best while players are telling you "no, really, this isn't
| fun".
|
| Unfortunately Blizzard has had a problem for a long time
| where they are too stubborn to listen to player feedback
| about WoW. They will put systems into the game that people
| hate, and for years they will insist that the system is
| fine and meets the team's design goals, despite all the
| people telling them that it sucks and isn't fun. Then,
| finally, in some future expansion they will go "yeah guys
| that really did kind of suck" and remove or overhaul the
| system. They really don't have a culture of listening to
| player feedback, and it drags their games down.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Blizzard did the same exact thing with Diablo 4 too, and
| D3 also famously sucked at release.
|
| You'd think they would have learned by now, as they
| repeat the same exact mistakes over and over again. It's
| like they hate their playerbase.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The biggest problem I remember from D3 release was that
| they listened too much to the "this is way too easy, not
| hard like D2 was" from the beta feedback. Inferno
| difficulty was absolutely ridiculous. I know people also
| were unhappy about the AH, alleging that the item drop
| rates were lowered to drive people to use the AH, but I
| don't know whether or not that was true.
| hinkley wrote:
| What I've found is key to UI design is to take this a
| step farther. Users will often try to explain why it
| isn't what they want and they will be wrong about the
| explanation.
| Shank wrote:
| I would actually argue that Classic WoW and OSRS are not good
| examples. These games already existed. For OSRS, the mass
| cancellation of subscriptions immediately following game
| updates was a clear wallet vote. Most feature requests aren't
| asking for the return of something people already liked.
|
| Classic WoW is also not as successful as OSRS, which is why
| they're exploring Classic+. Even OSRS, which was born on
| nostalgia, also gets significant new content updates (albeit
| polled).
| thewebguyd wrote:
| To be fair on the Blizzard example, I think Blizzard could have
| also made the player base just as happy by, doing as your quote
| said, understanding the underlying problem.
|
| It wasn't only a "we want WoW classic bug for bug," it was "the
| modern game has become so unrecognizable that it's basically
| WoW 2.0, you ruined it with the modern systems"
|
| Blizzard could have rolled back LFR/LFG, class homogenization,
| brought back complicated and unique talent trees, remove
| heirlooms, re-add group guests and world mini-bosses, remove
| flying, etc. and players likely would have been happy.
|
| Classic will only save them for so long without them making new
| content, but using classic's systems. So in a way, I think the
| point still stands, you have to understand what the underlying
| problem is. Users do generally know what they want, but they
| don't always know how to ask for it.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > Blizzard could have rolled back LFR/LFG, class
| homogenization, brought back complicated and unique talent
| trees, remove heirlooms, re-add group guests and world mini-
| bosses, remove flying, etc. and players likely would have
| been happy.
|
| 100% nope. Classic is what we wanted. All of what you just
| said is you saying: "you think you want that, but you dont.
| trust us, you dont want that."
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Agreed. Current WoW has done some _similar_ things to what
| the prior poster suggested, and while I personally find the
| current game better that it was for a while, it remains a
| very different experience from Classic.
| bombcar wrote:
| Classic is what we wanted, not that we wouldn't want "other
| things added in Classic-style" perhaps, but the problem
| with that is it becomes a whole new ballgame.
|
| Classic WoW wasn't perfect, but it was amazing, and it's
| NOT all just nostalgia-glasses.
| adampunk wrote:
| They knew exactly what they wanted and they knew exactly how
| to ask for it. That's the point.
|
| engineers love announcing that nobody but engineers knows
| what's important in software; that's complete and total
| bollocks. wow classic is a perfect example because it is
| exactly the sort of thing that the business unit and the
| engineers and the designers would not want to do. We don't
| need to assume that because we have hundreds of Internet
| posts indicating exactly that. Not only did they not want to
| do it, but they argued that users didn't know what they
| wanted for the sheer fact that making it was not something
| that was desired by either the business unit or the
| engineers.
|
| Also, the point is not that classic saves them from making
| new content. It's probably the case that the more content
| they make the more of a value proposition classic appears to
| be. Is there some new race in the new expansion that's
| stupid? OK hop on over to classic.
|
| Kill the part of your brain that makes you assume users are
| stupid.
| lemagedurage wrote:
| We shouldn't discount nostalgia. Sometimes an otherwise
| objectively worse product is better because it reminds people
| of the past.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| But there are people who didn't play WoW back in the day
| who still love classic, so it can't just be nostalgia.
| Vanilla WoW really did have a different design ethos than
| the later expansions did, and some people prefer that
| experience.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Vanilla WoW really did have a different design ethos
| than the later expansions did, and some people prefer
| that experience.
|
| Right, and that's my point. When you take away the
| nostalgia for the content, you reveal what players are
| asking for, which is a reversion to what is effectively a
| previous game as modern WoW lost all of what made it a
| good game, to those players, in the first place.
|
| So yeah, there was definitely a group of players that
| literally did want Classic WoW, original content and all,
| but I also feel like Blizzard would have saw success
| continuing that Classic formula with new content.
| Blizzard sucked the soul and charm out of WoW. For all
| intents and purposes, modern WoW is a completely
| different game.
| InitialBP wrote:
| Another example is Old School Runescape, who reverted back
| to an earlier save and has now diverged as an entirely
| separate game running with older systems as they lost a ton
| of players with their "Evolution of Combat" update. While
| nostalgia is definitely a powerful tool, I agree with the
| previous commenter that the original WoW was a very
| different game than the modern version and it seems like
| that is one of the core aspects of what people desired.
| hinkley wrote:
| I spent some formative years helping people run MUDs and
| applying my pattern matching brain to the problem of how to
| make a multiplayer game succeed.
|
| I played WoW precisely because they dodged the first bullet,
| which is inflationary or deflationary economies caused by
| each content creator trying to leave their mark by making
| better gear for their quests than are already available. The
| whole thing with used equipment only being for to be scrapped
| guaranteed that low level characters weren't all carrying the
| third best helmet in the game.
|
| But they still had the same problem with expansions - the
| need to change things in order to declare, "I made that".
| They wouldn't have needed classic if they followed your
| conclusions.
|
| However, without those changes would they have stayed on
| everyone's radar as long? Hard to say. Balancing in LoL and
| friends seems somewhat easier because the mechanics change
| less frequently. So maybe they would have been fine or maybe
| they'd be on WoW 2.0 now.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Other than a brief huge burst of interest at the launch of
| WoW classic, retail WoW has consistently been significantly
| larger than Classic. Classic WoW has been a success, but
| killing the modern game in favor of something more like
| Classic would have been an astoundingly bad idea.
| manoDev wrote:
| That's reinforcing the author's point: the classic game already
| existed, users just wanted the same game with some maintenance
| updates - not a new game with new features.
|
| In this case it was the producers (not the users) that were
| wrong in wanting to throw away something that already worked.
|
| I believe his point isn't exactly about users not knowing what
| they want, but instead the tension between evolutionary design
| vs. "keep piling features".
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _users just wanted the same game with some maintenance
| updates - not a new game with new features._
|
| this is similar to the comment by treetalker, so i dont want
| to just copy/paste my reply to them, but focus on "add" vs.
| "remove" is sort of beside the point(s) i was trying to make.
| devin wrote:
| This reminds me of Origin Systems and Ultima Online. The number
| of player-run shards over the years promising Classic UO
| gameplay and the number of player hours spent on them is
| enormous.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I think a large part of that is that Classic Wow is possibly
| not in the business interests of the bean counters. If it's
| classic, you can't sell new expansions, new MTX etc. I don't
| know how honest Ion was about the actual reasons Classic didn't
| happen sooner.
|
| Still, by volume, there are thousands of examples of bad ideas
| and feature requests on the wow forum too.
| sfink wrote:
| Users usually don't know what they really want. But neither do
| developers or product managers. The "understand the underlying
| problem" part is _hard_ , and easy to convince yourself of
| incorrectly.
|
| There are also shallow wants and deeper wants. I don't have the
| experience to know, but my guess is that classic WoW was more
| of a shallow want, where people were very happy to get it, but
| the deeper want was more about a style and feel of gameplay.
| The players would be happier with new stuff that kept the magic
| of the classic game, but they justifiably knew they couldn't
| trust Blizzard not to add anything without messing it up. So
| the only practical way to satisfy the desire was to just roll
| back all the way to the classic version.
|
| In a perfect world, some designer would come along and
| incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new
| version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out,
| and end up with something superior to both classic and new WoW.
| But that would be really hard to get right, and distrusting
| players would fight it (with very good reasons for their
| suspicion), and you would have a giant mess of different people
| claiming that _they_ know what to keep and what to discard,
| except nobody would agree on the same things, etc.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _I don 't have the experience to know, but my guess is that
| classic WoW was more of a shallow want, where people were
| very happy to get it, but the deeper want was more about a
| style and feel of gameplay. The players would be happier with
| new stuff that kept the magic of the classic game, [...]_
|
| > _In a perfect world, some designer would come along and
| incorporate carefully selected bits and pieces of the new
| version, probably with some novel changes to balance it out,
| and end up with something superior to both classic and new
| WoW._
|
| this is exactly what they put a _lot_ of effort into for 5-10
| years or so. years! blizzard convinced themselves that the
| players asking for classic didn 't _really_ want classic,
| they just wanted some of the _feeling_ of classic bolted on
| to the current game.
|
| but players actually, really, 100% truthfully, no
| exaggeration, wanted classic WoW. not retail WoW with some
| classic-feeling bits. they wanted (basically) bug-for-bug
| classic.
|
| and it worked out great in the end! classic is thriving.
| retail is thriving. no balancing act between the two player
| bases needed.
| latexr wrote:
| I have been in situations where a user makes a feature request
| and I don't think it makes sense, but because they've been
| polite and understanding I decide to take the time to explain
| exactly why it wouldn't work, but while doing so I basically
| rubber duck and come up with solutions to the problems I'm
| describing (which the user hasn't foreseen yet). Sometimes that
| ends with me discovering yet even stronger reasons to not
| implement the feature, but other times it makes me delete the
| whole reply and work on it instead because I have worked it
| out. Sometimes doing so ends up taking less time than writing
| the full reply. Often the feature ends up being even better
| than what they originally requested.
|
| In contrast, if a user has been rude, entitled, and high
| maintenance, I may end up not even trying to reply in the first
| place because I know they'll just be combative every step of
| the way, and giving them what they want just makes them demand
| more, seldom being appreciative. These tend to be users who
| want something a very specific way and refuse to understand why
| the thing they are asking for is profoundly selfish and would
| shit the interaction for everyone else to satisfy their own
| desire. So I don't do it.
|
| This has been a bigger sidetrack than I originally intended. I
| guess the moral of the story is don't be a prick to the people
| you're asking something from.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| A variant of the first is the highly imaginative user who
| keeps coming up with new variations or expansions of their
| idea. It's not malicious but it can be exhausting.
|
| Especially if you try to address their core need but their
| imagination doesn't extend quite far enough to see how your
| effort would help, because they love their ideas.
| Thews wrote:
| I can imagine the kind of person you're describing, and I
| find the idea of the burn they get from reading this
| hilarious. They sound innocent and quirky.
| latexr wrote:
| I would describe those as a variant of the second, not the
| first. Those imaginative users may be polite, but they're
| not understanding. While not rude, they are their own brand
| of entitled and high maintenance (I like your description
| of "exhausting"). One major reason I put them in the second
| category instead of the first is that the result is the
| same from my side, i.e. I interact with them as little as a
| I can.
|
| To the first kind, in contrast, I'm happy to answer any
| question, no matter how silly it may seem, because I can be
| confident they'll trust my judgement, that they'll learn
| from the interaction, and that the next one will be even
| better. Just about the only thing I'm sad about regarding
| those users is that as they grow they start interacting
| less because they don't need it as much, as they are able
| to help themselves.
|
| Now that I think about it, that seems like a good way to
| differentiate: The good users delight you and demand of you
| less and less; the bad users drain you and demand of you
| more and more.
| hinkley wrote:
| Due to the XY problem what they ask for often isn't what they
| need. And what they yell about won't make them happy.
|
| By and large I've gotten better feature requests out of
| looking at patterns of frequently asked questions and turning
| them into tasks instead of reacting to negative feedback.
| dcuthbertson wrote:
| There are few things so valuable as a good user who is
| willing to work with you. Many years ago I worked at a
| company that was going to shutdown a very buggy product.
| There was one user who relied on it heavily and convinced the
| CEO to make one more release, and I was tasked with working
| with that customer to make it happen. Over the next month, we
| fixed the bugs (I coded, he tested). We wound up making a
| stable and more user-friendly product. It was a real pleasure
| to work with that guy. The company still mothballs the thing,
| but I know we had at least one happy customer in the end.
| IncandescentGas wrote:
| The counter-example, in classic MMO terms, is Ultima Online
| adding non-PVP game instances in response to player feedback.
| Without the dramatic threat of PVP conflict at most times, UO
| was less emotionally engaging. The non-PVP players were bored
| without the emotional excitement (stress, danger, whatever) of
| ad hoc PVP. The PVP-focused players were bored when all the
| reputational mechanics became more or less meaningless in a
| world only occupied by PKers.
|
| The release of Arc Raiders captured that original UO social
| dynamic perfectly. Players flooded forums with requests to make
| PVP optional. In that case, the devs knew better than to
| listen.
| grim_io wrote:
| Arc Raiders and other involuntary pvp games will miss out on
| players like me who will not try it until pvp is optional and
| voluntary.
|
| Involuntary pvp is the long term death sentence for a game.
| It punishes new players by making them easy prey for veteran
| players. Player numbers will fall hard and fast, like every
| other involuntary pvp game does.
| keerthiko wrote:
| "I _may_ play your game if you trim away a core appeal
| factor for the people who _already_ play your game by
| splitting the active player base " is not that convincing a
| feature request to a gamedev.
|
| Many live service games that are punishing for new players
| are still thriving like LoL and DOTA2. Much that punish-
| factor can be resolved by good matchmaking, putting new
| players mostly with each other.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Plus, not every game needs to appeal to every player,
| which I think is where games like that eventually have
| their downfall. WoW was talked about earlier in the
| thread, and Blizzard continuously trying to make it
| appeal to other types of players is what kept killing it.
|
| It's OK for a game to exclude entire demographics of
| players. A PvP first game shouldn't try to force itself
| to appeal to PvE only players.
| grim_io wrote:
| I thought the core appeal was the loot that you get from
| the PvE.
|
| But I'm just an interested outsider, waiting for the
| crashing player numbers for the devs to come to their
| senses.
| bikelang wrote:
| The loot itself is - quite literally - mostly trash.
| Sometimes you may find a high end weapon (although
| usually that comes from PvP...) - but typically you're
| just bringing stuff back to put in your scrap hoard. The
| PvP is really the highlight - which is not to say it's
| all about fighting to the death (certainly you can do
| that) but instead making friends with morally ambiguous
| strangers to fight the biggest robots. They may be a
| friend, they may be a jerk, they may be YOUR jerk.
| Sometimes the entire map will come together to take down
| a gigantic robot - but after that robot dies? It may be
| every man for himself in a huge firefight - or it might
| be a big party.
|
| That's the core draw - and it's not necessarily for
| everyone.
| bigyabai wrote:
| There are much better games for PvE looting, honestly. My
| recommendation is the _STALKER: Anomaly_ modpacks like
| EFP and GAMMA, both of which are free downloads.
|
| Trying to make _ARC Raiders_ into a PvE shooter would
| require every map and enemy to get reworked for low-
| population gameplay. The game just isn 't built for it,
| and their effort is better invested in catering to the
| preexisting playerbase.
| bena wrote:
| That's ok. They are also missing out on all the players who
| won't try it until it's a dating sim. Or a turn-based-rpg.
| Or a third thing.
|
| Everything doesn't have to be for everyone.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Same. I don't play any PVP. I play co-op. I play co-op vs
| npcs. If PVP is the only option I'm not playing.
| pphysch wrote:
| The "underlying problem" here, for Blizzard, is shareholder
| value, and they understand it well. The decision to dedicate
| developer resources to re-releasing old content is driven by
| careful assessment.
|
| In most cases it's probably driven by falling new player
| acquisition numbers, and so the equation switches to favoring
| player retention or luring back veteran players.
|
| Every profile of player has their own preferences (some just
| want to see big boob textures, etc.) but that doesn't mean they
| are driving product decisions, except in the case that this
| demographic becomes core to the business model. But it has
| nothing to do with the particular preference.
| lithobraking wrote:
| On this note, I'm seeing this pattern crop up in retail WoW
| addons. (It's maybe an even more literal interpenetration of
| the title.) Many of the newer addons are heavy vibe-coded due
| to last-minute WoW API changes, like ArcUI.
|
| The addons have _so_ many ways to customize displays that their
| configuration menus look like lovecraftian B2B products with
| endless lists of fields, sliders, and dropdowns. I hear a lot
| of complaints from raiders in my guild about how hard it is to
| put together a decently functional UI. I wonder if these tools
| are allowing and/or causing devs to more easily feature creep
| the software that we build.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| the sudden influx of low quality UI addons has certainly been
| interesting to watch!
|
| but, i dont think it is really an ai problem in this specific
| case. the biggest addons in wow have been like that since way
| before ai was a thing (elvui, weakauras, plater, etc.). they
| all have a thousand settings.
|
| and, to be honest, in the specific case of WoW, i am totally
| fine with it. i dont want 10 different addons to change how
| my UI looks. i want 1 addon to do it. and there is just _so
| much_ stuff to edit that of course you are going to end up
| with a thousand settings.
| hinkley wrote:
| WoW at least figured out sometime around Pandaria or the
| previous expansion that they needed to launch the game engine
| changes a month or so before the full release and do beta
| servers so add on designers had time to adapt to api changes
| before everyone was trying to make World First achievements
| happen. It also probably saved their download servers from
| being slammed.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| But they didn't actually build WoW classic. They just built
| another version of the game. Gameplay wise it is drastically
| different.
|
| Economics & business wise it is very simple while it is
| popular: monetization.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _But they didn 't actually build WoW classic. They just
| built another version of the game. Gameplay wise it is
| drastically different._
|
| what?
|
| i played vanilla in 2004, and i played classic when it
| released. your description is extremely inaccurate.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| Explain. Classic is nigh identical to the old version in all
| the ways that matter, primarily gameplay, with fairly minor
| improvements.
|
| Drastically? What are you talking about?
| JackSlateur wrote:
| And the underlying problem is that newer world of warcraft
| sucks, no ? So when people ask "give us wow classic", what they
| really want is "give us a nice version of the game"
|
| And the team failed to do that multiple times
|
| Is this wrong ? Probably
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _And the underlying problem is that newer world of warcraft
| sucks, no ?_
|
| no. retail has more players than classic. they just had a
| massively successful expansion release.
|
| > _So when people ask "give us wow classic", what they really
| want is "give us a nice version of the game"_
|
| no, they want classic. you are re-learning what blizzard
| finally learned. people literally just wanted classic wow.
| JackSlateur wrote:
| So what, they want nostalgy ?
| HauntingPin wrote:
| Classic represents a different design philosophy. One
| that still appeals today. It has nothing to do with
| nostalgia. Or games like Project Gorgon wouldn't be so
| appealing to people.
| JackSlateur wrote:
| So we are back to what I said earlier :p
|
| People do not want "classic": people want a "good" game
| that has some specific characteristics
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _People do not want "classic": people want a "good"
| game that has some specific characteristics_
|
| as long as those "specific characteristics" are literally
| and exactly what classic wow is, sure.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Kinda. I think people want "classic WoW" because they
| aren't able to articulate what, exactly, would need to
| change with WoW to make them happy again. But they can
| pretty easily paint to the old version and say "I liked
| that, bring _that_ back ". I think it's plausible that
| you could (with time and effort) design something that
| isn't the same as classic WoW while keeping the players
| happy.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think there's possibly more to it. Many, many years passed
| and the people asking for it changed over time. There's a big
| difference between, "I wish I could go back 4 years and re-
| experience it all" and "I wish I could go back 20 years and re-
| experience it all."
|
| I also wonder if maybe they were generally correct. What
| percentage of people asking for WoW Classic back in the day
| actually ended up there?
|
| It's kind of like if my dad encouraged me at 17 to get a
| minivan because I'm going to want a minivan. And then I'm 35
| with kids and I get a minivan and he says, "see? I was always
| right!"
|
| Another way of reasoning about it is to reframe it as a shared
| problem: "What should we do with the resources we're committing
| to WoW?" "Do WoW Classic!" probably was a wrong answer for a
| long time if the goal is to make the most people happy (and
| make the most money) rather than make the loudest people happy.
| This quickly gets into how users ( _especially tech savvy ones_
| ) generally have no clue how things work and have zero sense of
| the associated cost. WoW was _constantly_ full of people with
| quick opinions on how hard it should be for a multi-dollar
| company to do certain things. No appreciation for the mythical
| man-style difficulties associated with distractions and pivots
| and whatnot.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a decent video of someone playing WoW Classic for the
| first time - https://youtu.be/NjQgoaagS-E
|
| And it basically came down to "classic WoW was simpler and
| for _new players_ provided something that modern WoW doesn
| 't/can't really - especially the spontaneous community.
|
| WoW started out as an MMORP, but it's really a massively
| _single_ player game until you 're top level anymore.
|
| The demand for classic wow got much, much stronger after
| cataclysm, because then you couldn't even "pretend" anymore.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| This is such an odd line of argument. They continue to put a
| lot of resources into classic. Clearly it's paying off for
| them and there is a large enough demographic that it's
| financially sensible to do so. They don't run a charity.
| hnfong wrote:
| The irony of your WoW example is that "retail" WoW basically
| evolved by Blizzard adding features in response to player
| feedback where each step when viewed individually seemed
| reasonable.
|
| And eventually the situation got so "bad" that players realized
| they actually didn't want any of this (a lot of people have
| lengthy commentaries on how more in-game friction somehow makes
| the game better), and _then_ the demand for Classic actually
| became overwhelming. And even so, I 'm not sure Classic
| consistently has more players than Retail. Probably just two
| different player bases.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| Does it matter if classic doesn't have as many or more
| players than retail? Nobody said it would. Just that some
| players would prefer to play classic and that has certainly
| held up.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _WoW basically evolved by Blizzard adding features in
| response to player feedback_
|
| blizzard is notorious for not responding to player feedback,
| as my original comment serves as just one example of, so i am
| not sure where you are getting this idea from. there is
| probably a super compilation somewhere of ion telling the
| player base that they are wrong about wanting X.
|
| (to be fair to blizzard, they have been better at listening
| to feedback in the last ~2 years, but that is a very recent
| change.)
|
| > _and then the demand for Classic actually became
| overwhelming_
|
| this is the point in time where my comment starts. demand for
| classic became overwhelming, and yet they ignored it for
| _years_ , while telling everyone "no, you are wrong, you do
| not want classic".
|
| this is the key part: blizzard eventually released classic,
| and publicly admitted "we should have listened to you guys.
| you really did want classic.". turns out the player base did
| actually know what they want.
|
| > _And even so, I 'm not sure Classic consistently has more
| players than Retail._
|
| i am not sure what the relevance of this is.
| allthetime wrote:
| As always the answer is... both. We make things that people
| didn't know they wanted, and then they have good ideas about
| them that we didn't think of. A truly great product finds the
| balance between developer creativity and user satisfaction
| asukachikaru wrote:
| Similar thing happened to Diablo II recently as well. Blizzard
| added a new class and couple of quality of life updates, after
| not touching it for over two decades other than the pretty
| authentic resurrected remake. Some of the QoL updates such as
| loot filter are very long overdue (integrated by competitors
| and have been asked by the community for years). Blizzard even
| sent surveys looking for player opinions about further updates
| for this 25 years old game. All these while D4, the one that
| should be their flagship product has its expansion announced. I
| believe there is something other than nostalgia that makes D2
| superior than all successors. I don't believe current Blizzard
| is capable of adding contents without breaking that
| authenticity though.
| antidamage wrote:
| Runescape has a similar thing going on. What everyone's not
| understanding is not that improvements are bad, lots of the
| player base also want to see games evolve. It's just that a
| significant proportion of the audience also like The Old Thing
| and they're often more engaged as an audience in the first
| place.
|
| You hear this story over and over about every kind of software.
|
| There are two audiences every successful developer needs to
| cater to: the "I wish this did X, I want new features" side and
| the "I liked it the way it was" crowd and they're distinctly
| different groups.
|
| For a long time I produced a popular technical art asset for
| video games and even I realised I needed to include every
| single version of the tool with every single installation. If a
| developer has to go and find out how to get "the right version"
| at all then I'm 90% likely about to lose a user.
|
| Focusing on the "we did this right just keep going like that"
| and really understanding WHAT you did right and WHAT people
| like is really important. It's really hard to be impartial when
| you made the world rather than consumed it, but always take the
| win.
| DataDynamo wrote:
| So uhm where can I get the 'als' command then? :P
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| It's mostly hereditary.
| Tossrock wrote:
| "To order, to govern,
|
| is to begin naming;
|
| when names proliferate
|
| it's time to stop.
|
| If you know when to stop
|
| you're in no danger."
| muppetman wrote:
| This is why I love Sublime Text. It's so fast, it works so well.
| It isn't trying to be AI, it isn't trying to evolve until it can
| read email or issue SSL certs via ACME. It's focused on one thing
| and it does it extremely, extremely well.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| this is why i am still on vim
| dgxyz wrote:
| Yeah that. Same here.
| muppetman wrote:
| Ha yes, learning vim was one of the best things I ever did. I
| can SSH onto a Juniper router and fix up config using vi. I
| still try to instill in juniors these days "Learn vim!" but
| everyone just wants to use nano (which I understand but nano
| isn't preinstalled on many network devices)
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| I am still on "vi"
| deafpolygon wrote:
| it's okay, you're still one of us
| stronglikedan wrote:
| hey don't be so hard on yourself, everyone makes mistakes!
| rglover wrote:
| It's not about software, it's about money. They're chasing what
| they see making money and being mimetic. Simple as. It's a shame
| and sad to see so many get caught up in this, but it makes sense
| relative to where the world is at. People are desperate and this
| is what desperation manifest looks like.
| xg15 wrote:
| Good software doesn't get you VC funding.
| grishka wrote:
| As if VC funding is a good thing.
|
| Good software is made by individual people, nonprofits, or
| privately-owned entities.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| VC funding gets you paid, which is a good thing.
|
| Not getting paid is less good.
| grishka wrote:
| VC funding gets you enslaved. There's no such thing as free
| money.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| But more and more, as a user, VC funding is a pretty good
| sign that either the product is shit or later will become
| shit.
|
| Which is great because it means whenever I can I should go
| with the underdogs and SMBs.
| latexr wrote:
| > VC funding gets you paid
|
| So does robbing a bank. But it's far from the only option.
| Plenty of indie developers thrive without any VC funding,
| and I thank every one of them for it. VC funding is
| essentially a guarantee that if the software isn't shit
| now, it'll be in the future, and that the creators care
| more about the money than doing something good. Case in
| point, the deterioration of 1Password.
| smm11 wrote:
| And AI.
| grishka wrote:
| No. The optimum amount of AI in this world is zero.
| grougnax wrote:
| Sometimes you need to pay the people who made the software.
| You can't steal during all your life. At some point you have
| to pay the others for the work they did.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Nobody is saying don't pay your developers. Just that VC
| funding creates perverse incentives within your business
| where you are pressured to do what is best for your
| investors, rather than your customers. But there are other
| business models where one can earn money and still pay the
| people working on the product.
| grishka wrote:
| Definitely that, a finite scope is good and finished software is
| beautiful.
|
| But also, most of the modern software is in what I call "eternal
| beta". The assumption that your users always have an internet
| connection creates a perverse incentive structure where "you can
| always ship an update", _and_ in most cases there 's one singular
| stream of updates so new features (that no one asked for btw) and
| bug fixes can't be decoupled. In case of web services like
| YouTube you don't get to choose the version you use at all.
| criddell wrote:
| I moved to Obsidian after Evernote increased their subscription
| prices beyond the point I could justify and I think Obsidian is
| heading down the same path Evernote did. They keep adding more
| and more features to it when I wish they would call it complete
| and move it into maintenance mode.
|
| For me, the turning point for Obsidian was their Canvas
| feature. That was a big move beyond the initial design of it
| being an excellent editor for a directory or markdown files
| that supported links and all the other cool things you can do
| with a basic directory of files and a few conventions. Nothing
| proprietary, nothing much beyond the directory of files aside
| from a preferences store. IMHO, Canvas and beyond should have
| been a new product.
|
| If Obsidian was open source I would have been tempted to fork
| it at that point.
| sowbug wrote:
| The more stars my personal GitHub repos have, the more likely the
| project was something I cranked out over a weekend to scratch an
| itch, and then more or less abandoned because it was good enough
| -- maybe even perfect for that specific itch?
| sammy2255 wrote:
| Link this to the Spotify product developers
| esafak wrote:
| Good example. Spotify today is noticeably worse.
| Bullhorn9268 wrote:
| I dislike spotify but weirdly enough I can never point out
| exactly what's so frustrating about it...
| emilbratt wrote:
| App is slow. It plays music video content as default. Gui has
| many non interesting parts. I just want a list of albums and
| songs. I guess I just want it to be "boring but functional.
| :)
| wenbin wrote:
| We should normalize "finished" software products that stop
| feature creep and focus strictly on bug fixes and security
| updates.
|
| It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It's good enough.
| It's complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want
| more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new
| brand.
|
| Evernote and Dropbox were perfect in 2012. Adding more features
| just to chase new user growth often comes at the expense of
| confusing the existing user base. Not good
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is one of the biggest issues in software development: So
| few projects are willing to admit that they are finished. I can
| probably count on one hand how many software products I use
| every day that actually get better (or stay the same) on
| update. The vast majority of them peaked somewhere around v1.0,
| and are just getting worse every time the developer touches
| them.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I can understand the incentives for professional software. If
| you admit the software is done then management will question
| why they need you anymore.
|
| For OSS it's more psychological: admitting you're feature
| complete is cutting off the dopamine hit of building new
| things.
| paxys wrote:
| You are basically describing all software ever shipped before
| webapps and online updates became a thing.
|
| Companies wrote software and sold them in boxes. You paid once
| and it was yours forever. You got exactly what was in the box,
| no more and no less.
|
| The company then shipped a new verson in a different box 1-3
| years later. If you liked it enough, and wanted the new
| features, you bought the new box.
| wenbin wrote:
| Yea, good old days :)
|
| The catch was that old boxed software eventually breaks on
| new OS versions or devices.
|
| However, SaaS has the potential to "freeze" features while
| remaining functional 20+ years down the road. Behind the
| scenes, developers can update server dependencies and push
| minor fixes to ensure compatibility with new browsers and
| screen sizes.
|
| From the end-user's perspective, the product remains
| unchanged and reliable. To me, that's very good!
| paxys wrote:
| My experience is actually the opposite.
|
| In the old days there was no expection when and if users
| would upgrade _anything_ , so vendors had to take extra
| care to ensure compatibility or they would lose business.
| People in a single office could be running 6 different
| versions of Microsoft Office, and the same file had to be
| viewable and editable on all of them. A company could
| decide to upgrade to Office 2010 but stay on Windows XP, so
| the Office division had the finanical incentive to ensure
| that newer versions would work on an older OS.
|
| Nowadays the standard is "you must be on the newest version
| of everything all the time, or the app won't work". Don't
| want to upgrade to Win 11? Want to use Firefox instead of
| Chrome? Don't want all the bells and whistles that come
| with the newest version of the software? Too bad.
| guhidalg wrote:
| More like "you must be on the newest version of
| everything all the time, or you will get hacked".
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Because security fixes don't get backported, when they
| could, and few are still doing separate security vs.
| feature updates.
|
| Even Windows is doing it now with CUs, bundling feature &
| vulnerability patches together, then deprecating the last
| version. You don't have a choice anymore, it's "accept
| the features or else"
| SoftTalker wrote:
| SaaS has that potential but the reality is more often that
| the vendor gets acquired, or they just decide to stop
| supporting it, and shut it down. You have no options to
| keep running what you had, only to migrate to a
| replacement, which is likely another SaaS which will do the
| same thing.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Or, as in the case of Microsoft Publisher, announce that it
| will be going away on a certain date with no recourse.
|
| Before 10/26 I have to re-work my desk position manual and
| a deposit sheet which use Publisher and which MS Word is
| _not_ suited for. Probably will do them in LyX or LaTeX.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| And people liked that model, see the huge backlash when Adobe
| went subscription for creative suite.
|
| I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I upgrade my
| camera _maybe_ once every ~7 years. Cameras have largely been
| good enough since 2016 and the 5D Mark IV. I have a pair of
| R6 mk II that I 'll probably hold onto for the next 10 years.
|
| Point being, Lightroom has more or less been feature complete
| for me for a very, very long time. For about the price of
| 1/year subscription, I could have purchased a fixed version
| of Lightroom with support for my camera and not had to buy it
| again for another 10 years.
|
| We are getting milked for every nickle and dime for no reason
| other than shareholder value.
|
| It actually discourages real improvements. Before the
| subscription model, if Adobe wanted to sell me another copy
| of Lightroom they had to work really hard to make useful
| features that people actually wanted, enough to the point
| they'd buy thew version.
|
| Now, they don't have to. You have to keep paying no matter
| what they decide to do.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| > And people liked that model, see the huge backlash when
| Adobe went subscription for creative suite.
|
| That backlash was short lived. Adobe went from $4.4 billion
| in revenue in 2021 to $23.7 billion. It used to cost $2500
| for the "master collection". Now it's $50 a month.
|
| I was one of those people that disliked switching to
| subscription. I stayed on CS6 for years. I'm also only a
| relatively casual user though. I once tried Affinity Photo
| for some work. Their workflow, for my needs, would have
| made me take ~6hrs more time than the similar workflow in
| Photoshop. So I paid the $120 a year for
| photoshop/lightroom because $120 is way less than 6hrs of
| my life. If of course that was my specific case. It might
| not be true for others. The point was though, $120, at
| least for me, is not that much money relative to what I
| charge/get-paid. So I gave in.
|
| Further, Photoshop is a good example (to me) of software
| that can't stop updating. New formats come out HEIC for
| example. New cameras with new raw formats come out. New
| tech comes out. HDR displays are ubiquitous at this point
| (all apple products, some large percent of Android, PC, and
| TVs) (which BTW, Photoshop does not yet truly support so
| expect an upgrade).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| How did Adobe manage to change your previous installation
| of Lightroom? If you bought it, can't you still use the
| version you bought?
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yes, but no support for CR3 files, only this time I
| didn't have the choice to buy a new standalone version, I
| had to subscribe.
| wtallis wrote:
| Dropbox is a great example. It's now a fundamentally different
| product than the original, and has re-created exactly the
| problem the original solved. There's no longer a good cloud-
| synced folder tool; everybody has gone back to implementing
| network filesystems that are much more complex and a badly
| leaky abstraction.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| It's funny, Express.js tried this. 4.x was basically a complete
| piece of software. There weren't any great reasons to change
| the API.
|
| But people hated that. They considered it "unmaintained". They
| moved to Koa and Hono because they appeared to be more
| "actively maintained".
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I think it's common in libraries of small to medium size. I
| often see Haskell and Rust packages that are not updated
| because full functionality achieved, no bugs and 100% test
| coverage.
|
| Absolutely not the case with enterprise software. Zawinski's
| law is truer than ever:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20165602
| rutuhffhbb wrote:
| > ready to upgrade your favorite Linux distribution and packages
| to their latest versions
|
| It is "their" distribution, to do with as they wish. If this
| would happen to your workstation, you are a fool, for not
| following release notes.
|
| I already jumped distros for several reasons, marketing BS was
| one of them. I do not need latest scam or flag of the month!
| amelius wrote:
| Really at this point we should stop making software as we know
| it, but create minimal tools that an LLM can use.
| smm11 wrote:
| No, all software grows until it gets email. Jamie told me that.
| river_otter wrote:
| It's the wonderful part about OSS and 'mission-driven' projects.
| If the mission is not to make money, then a project is free to
| reject addons/etc that might be lucrative but not add value to
| the core of the product
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think notepad.exe is the strongest example of this right now.
|
| The amount of hacking required to even be allowed to re-associate
| text files with that particular exe on Win11 was shocking to me.
| I get that windows is extremely hostile to its users as a general
| policy, but this one felt extra special.
| latexr wrote:
| > I think notepad.exe is the strongest example of this right
| now.
|
| It's a strong _bad_ example, i.e. an example of software with
| doesn't know when to stop.
|
| https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/01/21/notepad...
|
| https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
| dpcx wrote:
| I notice at this time there are no comments about systemd. I
| figured there would be at least one comment about it and "it does
| not try to do everything".
| patcon wrote:
| Maybe good software is like a living thing?
|
| It grows and grows and eventually slows or grows too much and
| dies (cancer), but kinda sheds its top-heavy structure as its
| regrown anew from the best parts that survived the balanced
| cancer of growth?
|
| Just forks and forks and restarts. It's not the individual piece
| of softwares job (or its community's) to manage growing in the
| larger sense, just to eventually leave and pass on its best parts
| to the next thing
| lrakster wrote:
| Just like all organizations are naturally self-expanding and
| self-perpetuating. Same with all organizations building software.
| The natural pressure is to expand. It is hard to resist it.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| > `als` doesn't just show files.
|
| > It predicts which ones you meant.
|
| > It ranks them.
|
| > It understands you.
|
| This is so good I want to know whether someone generated this or
| wrote it by hand.
| lgas wrote:
| If they did they learned writing from an LLM first.
| motoboi wrote:
| In 2020 I became a full time Java developer, coming from a
| infrastructure role where I kind of dealt with Java code, but
| always as artifacts I managed in application servers and whatnot.
|
| So when I first started dealing with the actual code, it scared
| me that the standard json library was basically in maintenance
| mode for some years back then. The standard unit test framework
| and lot of other key pieces too.
|
| I interpreted that as "Java is dying". But 6 years later I
| understand: they were are feature complete. And fast as hell, and
| god knows how many corner cases covered. They were in problem-
| solved, 1-in-a-billion-edge-cases-covered feature complete state.
|
| Not abandoned or neglected, patches are incorpored in days or
| hours. Just... stable.
|
| All is quiet now, they are used by millions, but remain stable.
| Not perfect, but their defects dependable by many. Their known
| bugs now features.
|
| But it seems that no one truly want that. We want the shiny
| things. We wrote the same frameworks in Java, then python the go
| then node the JavaScript the typescript.
|
| There must be something inherently human about changing and
| rewriting things.
|
| There is indeed change in the Java ecosystem, but people just
| choose another name and move on. JUnit, the battle tested unit
| testing framework, had a lot to learn from new ways of doing,
| like pytest. Instead of perturbing the stableness, they just
| choose another name, JUnit5 and moved on.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I remember we made a switch to redis because java's memcached
| library was unmaintained. I made I joke that it's just feature-
| complete and cannot be improved upon, people chuckled, but we
| still did the switch.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > But it seems that no one truly want that. We want the shiny
| things. We wrote the same frameworks in Java, then python the
| go then node the JavaScript the typescript.
|
| I think that people are just afraid that if they use a library
| in maintenance, they will run into a bug and it'll never get
| fixed. So they figure it's safer to adopt something undergoing
| further development, because then if there are issues they will
| get fixed. And of course, some people have to deal with
| compliance requirements which force them to only use software
| which is still updated.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Don't forget the lifetime support subscription you bought for
| "ls" 2 years ago. It turns out the lifetime is for the lifetime
| of the software, not your lifetime.
| hollowonepl wrote:
| This is an article Microsoft Windows, Office, Outlook and MS
| Teams developers and product managers should read, they
| continually break the working software only to come back
| regularly to what they have invented already, in the meantime
| annoying many who had to experience the experiments in between...
| lasgawe wrote:
| > Good software knows the purpose it serves, it does not try to
| do everything, it knows when to stop and what to improve.
|
| agree with this point. new developers should care about this.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| "know the role and place your software fits in" yes! Probably one
| of the most important lessons of my career. As a junior dev
| starting out, I had no idea how my software fit into the
| company's product let alone into the entire ecosystem of what was
| already available and open source. Now as a senior, I see juniors
| making the same mistake that naturally arises out of this:
| needlessly doing things that have already been done or re-
| inventing the wheel. And now that coding ability is a cheap
| commodity, product development, and knowing where you fit into
| the ecosystem becomes the main skillset.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Stardew Valley is a great example of this, and that more is not
| always better.
|
| Specifically he rolled out a "cave" system with procedural
| dungeon generation where players could mine through walls and
| other advanced systems, then undid all of it and ended with ~30
| static layouts and very simplistic interactions. The entire game
| feels like a demonstration that simple, predictable and
| repeatable interactions with software have more longevity than
| cutting edge dynamic systems.
| pkilgore wrote:
| Yeah, but if you vertically integrate you expand your target
| market, increase switching costs, and can charge rents, so
| everyone is trying to do it now.
| twitchard wrote:
| Coreutils gets updates regularly!
| https://gitweb.git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git
|
| Even `ls` gets news flags from time to time.
|
| I think "stopping" is great for software that people want to be
| stable (like `ls`) but lots of software (web frameworks, SaaS)
| people start using specifically because they want a stream of
| updates and they want their software to get better over time.
| twodave wrote:
| Yeah, I've written about this before on this site. Incentives in
| software licensing have gotten really stupid since the Internet
| (and more importantly, since the typical user's bandwidth has
| increased enough to allow all software installation to happen
| totally online). Now, too many pieces of software are a revenue-
| extraction optimization problem instead of attempting to serve a
| space or solve a specific problem.
|
| There are great exceptions to this rule, even in paid software,
| where the authors are significantly poorer in exchange for
| producing better software. I imagine the authors of BeyondCompare
| or Magnet (for example) could have done a lot better financially
| for a while using a recurring license model.
|
| There are also really stupid applications of this rule, such as
| what has happened with AutoMapper and MediatR in the last year or
| so, where the only meaningful commits since going commercial are
| the bits that check your license and try to fool you into paying
| :/
|
| It seems like this shouldn't be a problem. It often only takes
| one developer willing to make a sacrifice to make a particular
| class of software available that actually attempts to solve the
| problem and nothing more. But in reality what we see is over time
| those developers that did make a stand start to look out for
| themselves (which I have no problem with) and try to take what
| they can while they have market share.
|
| How do we find a way to live in a world where developers can
| build useful things and be rewarded for it while also preventing
| every piece of software from turning into shit? I'm not sure what
| the answer is.
| dcchambers wrote:
| I agree with this basically 100%.
|
| > Say no by default -- every feature has a hidden cost:
| complexity, maintenance, edge cases
|
| AI-assisted development is blowing up this long-standing axiom in
| the software development world, and I am afraid it's a terrible
| thing.
|
| Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
| rambambram wrote:
| Also from 37signals, somewhere in their first book they talked
| about the importance of 'evergreen' things people always want,
| things like 'the speed of software'. As a junior dev I didn't
| really get the point or thought it was not that important. I
| browsed further in the book looking for other gems of wisdom, and
| this 'speed'-thing only stuck in my head for the wrong reason,
| thinking it was a little obvious for such clear writers with a
| solid vision.
|
| Only 15 years later - now a couple of years back - I started to
| realize the importance of this. The apps on my smartphones seemed
| to get slower and slower by the year. The fast software
| experiences were a real joy amidst slow apps. I now have an
| appreciation for their opinion on 'evergreen' things like the
| speed of software.
| dguest wrote:
| I think Signal (the messenger) is an interesting example: by
| being free, open source, and privacy centered, there's
| automatically no room for ads and it's difficult to monetize.
| Also they have to be very careful adding new features for
| security reasons.
|
| The result: very few features. Which is exactly what I want.
| krasikra wrote:
| The hardest engineering skill I've developed is knowing when to
| stop optimizing. There's always another microsecond to shave,
| another edge case to handle, another abstraction to introduce.
|
| The best codebases I've worked with share a common trait: they
| have clear boundaries about what they don't do. The worst ones
| try to be everything and end up being nothing well.
|
| This applies doubly to developer tools. The ones that survive
| decades (Make, grep, curl) do one thing and compose well. The
| ones that try to be platforms tend to collapse under their own
| weight.
| sarthakaggarwal wrote:
| This resonates with AI coding tools. Claude Code doesn't know
| when to stop --it'll do 30 agentic loops for something that
| should have taken 3. The cost implications of a tool that doesn't
| know when it's done are brutal.
| jackfranklyn wrote:
| The hardest part of building software isn't adding features, it's
| having the discipline to leave something alone when it works.
| There's a real gravitational pull toward "just one more thing"
| because every feature request feels like a missed opportunity.
|
| But I've noticed the products I actually keep coming back to are
| the ones that feel opinionated. They decided what they were and
| stuck with it. The ones that try to be everything usually end up
| being mediocre at all of it.
|
| The WoW comparison in this thread is apt. The early expansions
| had clear identities. The later ones kept bolting on systems
| until playing felt like managing a spreadsheet.
| groby_b wrote:
| "Good software knows when to stop, look at ls!"
|
| ls: usage: ls [-@ABCFGHILOPRSTUWXabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxy1%,]
| [--color=when] [-D format] [file ...]
|
| I don't think it knew when to stop.
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