Software is in Decline - Jonathan Blow
Why Hacker News recommends it
Pulled out in threads about declining software quality, though some commenters distrust Blow's claims about game and web development.
What it is
A ten-minute clip from Jonathan Blow's talk on preventing the collapse of civilization, arguing that software quality and the knowledge to build it are in decline.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2023 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends OnionBlender · 2023-01 · on “Is Software Getting Worse?”
Reminds me of Jonathan Blow's talk: [Software is in Decline]( [this video] ). I think one reason why software is slow because managers don't allocate time to improve performance unless it gets worse than "good enough". For me that meant taking time to improve performance without being told or telling anyone how much time I spent trying to improve performance. When I used to work on Android in a large company my favorite low hanging fruit was looking where people used `Cursor.getColumnIndex(String columnName)`. People would call it inside a loop for every row in the query result. This was a surprisingly large time sink according to the profiler. Some developers just don't know or care about perfor
Cites CoffeeSky · 2026-06 · on “Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?”
I actually felt the opposite. HN is full of AI crowd. > Let’s face it: by the time I manually ship version 1.0 of a product, the AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster. By then, enough real-world feedback would have surfaced to identify the major issues, and tools like Claude Code would make it possible to fix and ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace. This precisely why I still have mixed reaction towards AI, even AI can produce functional code but might be filled with foot guns. I personally don't use AI (the full automated ones, e.g., Claude code, Codex, Cursor) but also I don't complain about people using AI. This also reminds me of Jonathan Blow's Software is in Declin
Critical chaxor · 2023-07 · on “Twitter Is DDOSing Itself”
[this video] The webdev or JavaScript mentality of if it breaks, don't worry, we can fix it live strikes again.
Critical fzeroracer · 2023-11 · on “Braid, Anniversary Edition trailer [video]”
'Admitting his flaws' certainly isn't the way I would describe Jonathan Blow. Even ignoring his political turns, he's had a long history of saying some outright wrong stuff on game dev, web dev etc and being insufferably rude to anyone that tells him he's wrong. I could go off on how many ways he was wrong in his talk on Software Decline [1] or his many wrong takes on Linux. All of which he's doubled down on. [1] [this video]