Software brokenness
Date published: Sep 12, 2025
Open any Github project, look at the commit list (or pull request list), and count the instances of the word "fix". Alternatively, count the red "X" marks (indicating CI failures).
The "fix" keyword in recent commits from repositories on Github's trending page
So many projects remain in a state of brokenness; even if temporarily fixed, they regress shortly after. This has been the case for a while. Jonathan Blow gave a whole talk in 2019 in part about the increasing degradation of software.
The main observation I wanted to write about is how so many people seem to accept this as the new normal. My impression is that many developers expect and accept this brokenness. Non-programmers (who are probably confused about why things are often broken) frequently report bugs, and the programmers are like "good catch!", not taking much responsibility. Maybe some notice the increasing regressions on their website and respond by trying to increase test coverage, but then of course the end-to-end web tests are all flaky for whatever reasons. I somewhat touched on this in another post about how unfinished, bug-ridden software collectively drains thousands of development hours. Others maybe justify the brokenness with ideas like "move fast and break things", where the assumption is that the long-term productivity exceeds the time/effort required to fix these issues.
...AND THEN! To further emphasize my point, I wanted to publish this very post, so I go to open WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux, which I use for web development on Windows), and I see an error!
After sifting through Stack Overflow posts recommending me to replace my WSL installation, I came across a buried Github comment on a Github issue from 2024 instructing to download the WSL installer from Github and shift-click it to select "Repair"... and that fixed the crash and allowed me to publish this post to my website...
Check out this talk for deeper points about software degradation:
Edit 2025-09-25T17:31:22.563Z: "'Why can't we ship new versions? Why is this feature taking so long?' Well we were busy fixing all the things that broke this week!..." from C is All You Need | Eskil Steenberg