News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by latentsea on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:52AM (#50068643)
Well we're starting to see game mashups and photoshop clones. So, the effects are becoming more outwardly visible.
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by 0points on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:56AM (#50068679)
The question was about good software. Those photoshop clones won't even let you get basic work done.
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by nicce on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:58AM (#50068694)
E.g even the comments are not working properly in the PDF reader from some unnamed related suite
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by rob on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:11AM (#50068818)
What? Normal people are going to edit a photo and "spin up a photoshop clone" every time. /s

https://x.com/levelsio/status/2109288526726549822

Re:Where is all the new, good software? by TeMPOraL on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:10AM (#50068809)
That's just the goalpost moving exponentially fast.
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by lloydatkinson on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:09AM (#50068798)
> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance.

I would like to see some of this software improvement in the form of fewer bugs. If anything it's adding more bugs.

I'll give an example from a game I like called ARC Raiders. For the first ~9 months they did not fix any of the bugs in the main menu. The damn main menu! The first thing you see when you load the game! They also failed to fix, in that time, the bug where simply pressing the Xbox button on the controller would break in-game voice chat.

They only just solved that, as of a few days ago. The main menu bugs still exist.

Re:Where is all the new, good software? by Kiro on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:52AM (#50069179)
Dealing with third-party overlays (I presume that's the main menu bug you're talking about) is one of the most annoying things in game development due to how it hooks into the rendering pipeline and not an easy fix.
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by ulfw on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:53AM (#50068653)
None of it good by any definition of the word
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by YuechenLi on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:59AM (#50068704)
Yeah, the Photocraft (or whatever that photoshop clone name is, naming everything *craft just blends the names together in my head) program, for example, is way too slow in WASM to be usable, I think it ran on a single thread without using Worker and basic optimization features like that.

Just because you can throw tens of thousands of dollars at frontier LLMs doesn't mean what they write would be good, you still need to have some oversight for their work.

Re:Where is all the new, good software? by chii on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:07AM (#50068781)
expecting it to work well in wasm seems a bit too high of a bar.

It works relatively well in native mode as a standalone app (tho not being an actual photoshop expert, i dont know if the features compete properly, i simply hear that those trying it are impressed).

The excel clone works well enough for me to do taxes on, even tho the look and feel is a bit janky. I would stick with google sheets, but it's a usable replacement if i didnt already have sheets.

Re:Where is all the new, good software? by latentsea on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:12AM (#50068829)
Sure, but we weren't really seeing that at all. At least, not to that scale or degree at that speed right?

I'm seeing people vibe-code inference engines for custom hardware/models too. Are they good? That remains to be seen, but I didn't used to see this at all.

It does feel like something has changed to me lately. I expect it's only going to accelerate, and the quality only going to increase.

Re:Where is all the new, good software? by HotHotLava on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:14AM (#50068848)
If the photocraft suite had been manually written in 2022, with the exact same source code as it has right now, they would be the poster open-source project that people would point to for the power of an open-source community over proprietary software and be praised for the high standards of the source code.
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by nekooooo on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @07:21PM (#50080343)
photopea existed in 2022 and is better than this current slop suite
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by rusticpenn on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:57AM (#50068688)
Usually it starts like this.
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by contravariant on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:05AM (#50068759)
The problem with that is that it implicitly assumes things will progress in the way we're used to.

AI written software doing the exact thing it was supposed to but breaking apart on any further improvements or changes matches what I've seen from AI generated output. The code is often bloated and fragile.

Re:Where is all the new, good software? by latentsea on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:17AM (#50068875)
Maybe in 2 years the only jobs devs can get anymore is working for Frontier Labs to build training data / RL environments to improve performance on this task. Who knows? In the limit it seems like a solvable problem...
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by rusticpenn on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:47AM (#50100127)
Most actual software written using "Agile" methods is also supposed to be fragile (unless an actual good engineer is steering it)
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by h4x0rr on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:57AM (#50068689)
Some people are just hard to please. This is awesome
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by xyzsparetimexyz on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:32PM (#50078286)
Not new software.
Re:Where is all the new, good software? by latentsea on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @10:27PM (#50081624)
If it wasn't there before it's new. In some sense.