Thread on why software quality keeps falling

Sources: HN 49033004, original post
Summary: A blog post arguing software keeps getting worse despite coding assistance drew 630 points and 489 comments on 2026-07-24.
Comments: The dominant technical reading rejected AI as the cause: several commenters said quality was already declining a decade ago and attributed it to unowned surface area in large product organizations, incentive misalignment between what engineers are rewarded for and what they judge important, and complexity growth with no budget for correctness. One commenter working in mediation reported legal filings assembled with an LLM as an example of the confidence effect the post describes.
Why it matters: The thread separates a delivery-incentive problem from a tooling problem, which matters when teams reach for agent adoption as the fix for defect rates.