The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe
AnonTechie writes:
An interesting article about software quality over the years - by Denis Stetskov
The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM.
Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is haemorrhaging more memory than most computers had a decade ago.
Twenty years ago, this would have triggered emergency patches and post-mortems. Today, it's just another bug report in the queue.
We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.
The Numbers Nobody Wants to Discuss:
I've been tracking software quality metrics for three years. The degradation isn't gradual-it's exponential.
Memory consumption has lost all meaning:
VS Code: 96GB memory leaks through SSH connections
Microsoft Teams: 100% CPU usage on 32GB machines
Chrome: 16GB consumption for 50 tabs is now "normal"
Discord: 32GB RAM usage within 60 seconds of screen sharing
Spotify: 79GB memory consumption on macOS
These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix.
This isn't sustainable. Physics doesn't negotiate. Energy is finite. Hardware has limits.
The companies that survive won't be those who can outspend the crisis.
There'll be those who remember how to engineer. We're living through the greatest software quality crisis in computing history. A Calculator leaks 32GB of RAM. AI assistants delete production databases. Companies spend $364 billion to avoid fixing fundamental problems.
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