Posted on May 18

Why modern software feels broken and why we keep shipping it anyway

#webdev #programming #showdev #discuss

Exploring the bugs, bloat, and burnout behind today’s software and why it’s not entirely your fault.

Introduction: welcome to the software multiverse of madness

Let’s be real: software in 2025 feels like it’s stuck in a boss fight it can’t win.

Every time you open your favorite app, something’s changed and not always for the better. Your battery drains faster, the “new improved” UI hides buttons you used daily, and the performance? Feels like it’s running on a toaster powered by anxiety.

You’re not alone.

Developers are tired. Users are mad. Product managers are aggressively optimistic. And somewhere in the middle of this chaos, software ships whether it’s ready or not.

So the question lingers:
Is software actually getting worse… or are we just becoming more aware of its flaws?

This article isn’t a rage-post (okay, maybe a little). It’s a deep dive into:

Why modern apps feel bloated,
How the pressure to ship fast sacrifices stability,
And what developers can do to fix the mess (without losing their sanity or coffee).

We’ll talk nostalgia goggles, MVP culture, bloated stacks, and developer burnout with memes and examples along the way.
So buckle up, because if you’ve ever screamed internally at a loading spinner, this ride’s for you.

Spoiler: It’s not entirely your fault. But you might be shipping the problem too.

Nostalgia.exe was old software really better?

Ask any dev over 30 about software, and you’ll get some version of:

“Back in my day, apps just worked and we liked it that way.”

Cue the Windows XP startup sound.

It’s tempting to believe software was better “back then.” Winamp was clean, fast, and skinnable. Microsoft Office 2003 was snappy without a billion collaboration pop-ups. Photoshop opened in seconds. Even Clippy, cursed as he was, never crashed the entire app.

But before we declare a retro golden age, let’s remember a few things:

Dial-up crashes were a real thing.
Saving a file in the wrong format meant starting over.
There were no updates. If it was broken, it stayed broken forever.

What we’re really feeling is survivorship bias. We remember the stuff that worked and forgot how many apps silently disappeared into the void. Software that was so bad, it never made it to version 2.0.

Also, let’s not forget hardware expectations were lower. Nobody expected real-time collaboration or fancy animations. We weren’t trying to run machine learning in the browser while watching a 4K Twitch stream. It was simpler times because we asked less.

Still, the old-school tools felt lighter, faster, more stable and there’s truth in that. They were often written in low-level languages with fewer dependencies and ran locally without a sea of JavaScript frameworks bolted together like IKEA furniture.

So was old software better?

Let’s say it was dumber, faster, and built with fewer moving parts.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The update treadmill too many features, not enough fixes

You open your favorite app.

There’s a new update.

The patch notes say “bug fixes and performance improvements.”

But now the Settings button is gone, and the app takes longer to load than Elden Ring on a hard drive from 2010.

Welcome to the update treadmill where features keep shipping, bugs become roommates, and stability is a distant dream.

In today’s world, software development has become a never-ending sprint. Agile cycles, CI/CD pipelines, and feature flags mean that teams can push updates weekly, daily, even hourly.

And they do.

But here’s the catch:
Fixing things doesn’t get clicks. New features do.

Product teams want metrics to move. Marketing wants shiny things to promote. Users just want the thing to work but they often get caught in the crossfire of KPIs and quarterly roadmaps.

This leads to:

Redesigns no one asked for
Features half the user base hates
Critical bugs staying in the backlog because they “only affect 3% of users on Android 11”

The result? A Frankenstein app that keeps growing but never heals.

And the irony?
Every time users adapt to the “new flow,” another update lands, breaking their muscle memory all over again.
It’s like being in a boss battle where the enemy changes forms every 3 seconds.

Modern dev workflows make it easy to ship but not necessarily to ship well.

Until we shift focus from “what else can we build?” to “how can we make this actually good?”, the treadmill keeps running and we keep stumbling.

The bugocalypse why software is full of bugs we ‘accept’

Once upon a time, a bug meant something was broken and needed to be fixed.
Today? A bug is more like a suggestion.

Modern software ships with so many issues that users have learned to tolerate them.
The submit button doesn’t work unless you click it twice? Cool, I’ll just… click it twice.
The audio randomly stops during video calls? Classic Zoom moment.
Notifications arrive 12 hours late? At least they arrive.

So what happened?

Speed > perfection

We live in the age of “move fast and break things” and things are definitely breaking.
Shipping early has become gospel. MVP (minimum viable product) means get it out the door now, polish later (or never).

This leads to:

Unfinished features wrapped in shiny UI
Complex codebases riddled with temporary hacks
A QA process that looks like:

if (itWorksOnMyMachine) {
  ship();
}

Feature flags to the rescue… or not

To deal with chaos, teams wrap bugs in flags.
“Don’t worry, it’s behind a feature toggle.”
Which leads to ten versions of the same app running in production. Debugging becomes a Choose Your Own Adventure book — with traps on every page.

Real-world bug gallery:

Twitter once broke its own logout button
Slack forgot how to scroll properly for weeks
macOS shipped an update that bricked Bluetooth
One major bank’s “download statement” button silently downloaded someone else’s statement

These aren’t indie projects. These are billion-dollar products trusted by millions.

And let’s not forget mobile apps, where bugs are immortal because updating requires going through app store approvals which sometimes means living with a broken release for days.

So why do we tolerate it?

Simple: we have no choice.
We’ve normalized bad software behavior the same way we normalize potholes in our city roads.

Until there’s real pressure to prioritize quality over speed, the bugocalypse continues and you’re either squashing them, shipping them, or stepping on them daily.

Blame the stack abstraction overkill is killing performance

Remember when apps were small, fast, and didn’t consume 2GB of RAM just to open a settings menu?

Well, those days are gone buried under 12 layers of frameworks, libraries, meta-frameworks, and 17 MB of unused CSS variables.

Modern software stacks are like ogres:

They’ve got layers. Too many of them.

Let’s take a simple example:
You open a to-do list app.
It’s built with React, which uses Webpack, which bundles a dozen NPM packages, which include Lodash, Moment.js, three unused date pickers, and a crypto mining dependency no one noticed.

Oh, and it runs in Electron so it’s really just a glorified Chromium browser.

The stack is bloated, and we know it.

Why? Because abstraction is convenient.

Developers don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we pull in a library. Then a plugin. Then a CLI tool to manage the plugin. And before you know it, the project has more dependencies than lines of code.

Sure, it’s “easier to develop” but the cost is:

Performance death on low-end devices
Long build times
Debugging stack traces that look like spaghetti and cryptic emoji

And it’s not just web apps. Even native apps suffer. Swift apps with SwiftUI that lag. Android apps pulling in entire ML models to decide which tab to show first.

Abstraction isn’t evil but it’s abused

Abstractions should simplify, not hide everything until it breaks.

But these days, we don’t even know what’s running under the hood. Our apps are built on shaky towers of dependencies that:

Go stale overnight
Break after a minor patch
Get deprecated mid-sprint

And when the abstraction breaks?
Good luck. The person who wrote that code now works at a llama farm in Peru.

“Why is the app slow?”
Because it’s trying to run a microservice architecture inside a single-page application.

Dev feels burnout, deadlines, and doing the best we can

Let’s get one thing straight:
Developers aren’t lazy. We’re overwhelmed.

Behind every janky release and laggy UI is a team of devs with 3 Zoom calls, 5 Jira tickets, and a Slack DM from a PM asking,

“Can we just ship this now and fix the rest later?”

We want to build good software. Really.
But we’re up against deadlines, unrealistic roadmaps, and tech debt older than some interns.

Burnout is not a bug it’s a feature now

Working in modern software dev often means:

Being on call for every production blip
Context switching between 5 microservices and 10 tabs
Debugging someone else’s framework inside your own code
And still smiling through standup like it’s totally fine 🙂

Add to that:

Tight sprints
Scope creep
A culture of “just push it to prod
And the dreaded:

“Let’s rewrite it in TypeScript… next quarter.”

You end up with teams stuck shipping features instead of solving root problems.

Reality check: devs aren’t the enemy

It’s easy to blame developers when things break. But let’s be honest — most of us are just trying to keep the app running without crashing Slack in the background.

We build what we’re told.
We rush because the product timeline says so.
We compromise because perfect is the enemy of shipped.

And yeah, we cut corners sometimes… but mostly because there’s no time to pave the whole road.

So next time an app breaks mid-demo, remember:
There’s probably a dev behind it, chugging cold coffee, quietly screaming into the void, and praying the fix gets merged before Friday.

The good news not all software is doomed

Okay, we’ve dunked on bloated stacks, buggy apps, and burnout culture.
But let’s not forget: there’s still a lot of great software out there — tools that are fast, thoughtful, and dare we say… pleasant to use.

Despite the chaos, many developers are pushing back against the madness and choosing better over faster.

Small teams, big wins

Some of the best software in 2025 isn’t coming from BigTech behemoths it’s coming from small, focused teams that obsess over:

Performance
Minimalism
Actual user needs

Examples worth applauding:

Figma collaborative, fast, and shockingly stable (even in a browser tab).
Obsidian a markdown-based knowledge tool that runs like butter, with no unnecessary cloud lock-in.
Raycast a blazing-fast Mac productivity launcher that doesn’t try to be a browser.
VS Code yes, it’s Electron, but they actually optimized it. Somehow. Miraculously.

These apps get the vibe right:

They ship smart defaults
Respect system resources
And evolve slowly, not chaotically

Devs are getting smarter about dumb decisions

There’s also a shift in dev culture an awakening.
More engineers are questioning:

Do we really need this framework?
Can we trim these dependencies?
What if we wrote less code and did more with it?

And it’s working.

Blogs, podcasts, and conference talks are increasingly focused on:

Resilience over velocity
Simplicity over novelty
Debuggability over abstraction

We’re not fully healed, but the immune system is kicking in.

So no, not all software is doomed.
Some teams are saying no to the chaos.
And it’s working.

Section 8: conclusion fix your code, fix the world

So, is software getting worse?

Not really.
It’s getting bigger, faster, shinier and sometimes dumber.

We’ve traded the old-school principles of simplicity and stability for rapid iteration and infinite growth. Somewhere along the CI/CD pipeline, we forgot that users don’t care about your framework they care if the app actually works.

And as devs, PMs, designers, and QA warriors, we’re all complicit in this spaghetti-tower of bloat. But here’s the good news:

We also hold the power to change it.

We can slow down.
We can prioritize maintainability.
We can push back on unnecessary features.
We can test before Friday night deploys.
We can write fewer lines of code and make each one actually count.

Because every time we choose performance over pretty animations, clarity over cleverness, and function over flex we make the web (and software in general) just a bit better.

Even if the codebase is messy.
Even if the tech debt is mountainous.
Even if your app is one merge away from collapse.

There’s still time to fix it.