The Decaying State of Modern Software

Published on: 2026-04-22 00:00:00 +0000 by kz6wk9

7 min read

Modern software is a ruin waiting to crumble.

I might not be an 'old timer' on software development like a lot of other folks in the FOSS community are, but I do still remember a time when the quality and design of our code was the most important thing, because I'm relatively young I went into the software development world on the last years were this was generally true, but before that I remember, as an avid user of technology in general, how much we could do with hardware that was, compared to today's standards, incredibly weak.

I remember games that used to feel and look amazing while running on less than 256MB of RAM and around the same amount of video memory, nowadays this would be an unimaginable thing, as the recent minimum requirements for a simple LEGO game released just last week exemplify [1]: 16 GB of RAM, an i5-10600K 6/12 @ 4.10GHz or a Ryzen 5 1600 6/12 @ 3.20GHz paired with a GTX 960 4GB, Radeon 6400 4GB or an Intel ARC A580 8GB... All of this hardware just to run the game at 1080p LOW settings at a whopping 30 FPS with FSR or XESS AND frame generation enabled... But the worst thing about this are not even the requirements themsevels but the fact that it's not even suprising anymore; every time a new piece of software is released nowadays we are conditioned to expect high (sometimes insanely so) hardware requirements by default, this is what shocks me, as consumers we are simply accepting any awfully designed garbage code that is thrown at us, mostly because, as consumers, we don't have much of a choice, yes, but as developers, we do not seem to care anymore; we went from quality and good designd being the most important things so we can extract the most performance from the hardware therefore giving our users the best experience possible to 'you will be lucky if your 5 year old hardware is even able to run this'.

This is not exclusive to closed source, our beloved GNU/Linux, the OS that has been known for many years as the bastion of compatibility, literally reviving the oldest of hardwares now have distributions requiring more RAM than Windows 11 [2]. Talking about Windows, it is actually funny how it has become so terrible in the past few years that Microsoft themselves took issue with people rightfully calling them Microslop [3], because of the latest trend of integrating Copilot into everything, afterwards they even promised to make Windows better. If it's going to hold or not we are yet to see.

But the actual reason I'm writing this today is not just to hightlight the problems we currently have with the code quality and design of our software nowadays, it is to externalize a thought I had a few weeks ago that made me understand a lot better what is happening in the software development world, I was thinking about arising issues like enshittification [4] and other forms of decaying quality of services both online and offline and of software in general which IMO is being driven today mostly by the rise in the trend of vibecoding [5] and other models of LLM assisted coding, with big companies like Google boldly stating that 75% of their new code is AI generated [6], a Microsoft top engineer posting about very large rewrites planned for "Microsoft largest codebases" [7] powered entirely by AI, and other news that follow the same pattern: ultimate trust in the code LLMs regurtitate; so what I didn't understand was how/why so many seemingly knowledgeable people were pushing so hard for a clearly inferior and frankly vile technology to write and maintainin code, apart from the obvious multiple shills scattered over social media and news outlets, Software Engineers, Programmers and others I used to know the work of, even some members of the FOSS community, are also allowing this terrible technology to infect their codebases. This is when it dawned on me: they do not care about real quality nor ethics at all! They probably never did, I just never realized that because there was never such a clear way of telling that they do not care as there is now.

If LLM assisted activities, like coding, brought anything good to the world it was making it easy to distinguish who truly cares about their work and who doesn't. Anyone allowing this terrible technology to be of any part in the development of their codebases is, at the very least, negligent, and I could go as far as to say irresponsible even, as Bjarn Stroustrup, the creator of C++, rightfully stated in a recent interview: "[AI tools] generate more bugs, more security holes, they have bloated code which pessimizes [...] because you use more memory, and it's hard to validate. [...] The senior developers that would be needed to validate it — I've seen some of them starting to retire, because they don't want to deal with [it]" [8], and this is just looking at the surface, because if we go any deeper it gets way worse; looking beyond just quality this technology was: built around mass theft in which their companies are getting sued almost every month for copyright infringement [9], it is also the reason why multiple thousands of useless extremely wasteful data centers are being built all over the place, data centers that consume up to 5 million gallons of water every day and enough energy to supply 100.000 homes or more [10], alongside labor laws violations, deskilling, the introduction of security issues, ties to war (yes, war), alongside many other problems that I won't mention here because this is getting a little bit too long for a simple blog post. For more information about these and other issues related to LLMs/AIs there are websites that aggregate many informative links such as open-slopware [11], which is a repository maintained by smart, dedicated and lovely people that contains a list of software (mainly open source) tainted by LLMs and useful links on why this technology is detrimental to everything and everyone.

I truly believe that LLMs, pieces of software clearly developed with the sole purpose of stealing value to the benefit of whoever controls them, are the final boss of enshittification and all other forms of decaying quality in software, if there's any point in time in which there will be a peak of code becoming truly horrible on every single aspect it will be in the near future because of LLM assisted coding, reviewing and everything else related to what is (erroneously) currently called AI assistancies (it's just LLMs, there's absolutely nothing even remotely intelligent about them, they're actually pretty dumb), if we don't push back that is, both as consumers and developers, and IMHO there's no better way to make it clear that we do not agree with something than to just simply not use it and advocate against it, especially in the open source world, for this reason I will be starting a new series of blog posts here in which I will write about my experiences getting away from every single piece of LLM tainted software, some will be hard, others not so much, but I will do my best to highlight good alternatives and try to make it as easy as possible to understand how I swapped from one piece of software to another with equivalent or similar functionalities, I will be focusing first on the biggest offenders, the ones in which the maintainers truly do not care about vibecoded commits entirely or in part, I will be using the already mentioned open-slopware [12] list as a guide. This will also be a good exercise for me to remember to post more frequently and I also hope this will help bring more attention to alternative software, which will in turn make them even better by (hopefully) bringing more contributors.

In conclusion, I think we have an opportunity now that we never really had before, with the sharp increase in bad quality that I foresee we can use this momentum to stop enshittification and all other types of worsening quality our software is suffering from nowadays completely and go back to trying to extract the most out of the current hardware, because any open source project or company that focuses on this in the near future will be infinetely superior to it's competitors/alternatives, and, most importantly, we can also keep our consciences clean by not using nor allowing an extremely unethical technology to be of any part in our lives.

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