I like AI and I use it every day. I am glad software is getting easier to make. But we can recognise that when the bar to entry drops, quality drops with it. That is everyone’s problem, because we all have to use the result.
Critics of AI call anything made with it slop. I think this is too easy. You can write shitty code, broken interfaces and buggy functions without help from a machine. Humans did all that first. The problem is AI does it faster.
More software is coming. These are my observations on quality, written down so we can aim for it on purpose rather than hit it by accident.
So what is quality software?
Quality software does not break. This sounds too obvious to say aloud, but it’s the starting line. The polish, the taste, the craft: all of it sits downstream of this one fact. Software that breaks is not quality software, however handsome it looks while it works. It works offline. It works on your phone. It works when your connection hangs or when your battery dies. You never notice any of this.
Quality software does not demand attention. The best software is quiet. It does not announce itself, interrupt you, or ask to be admired. Loud software, forever pushing badges and banners and tours of features you never asked for, is usually the software with the loudest marketing, and the two facts are related. A tool confident in its work does not keep reminding you it is there.
Quality software knows its limits. Limits of size first: every megabyte and every button is a claim on your machine and your attention. Restraint is respect. Secondly, limits of purpose. What does this software do? What do I want it to do? We look to software to solve a problem, not solve all our problems. Software that tries to do everything does nothing you can rely on. Which is to say, it breaks, in some way or another, and we are back where we started. We are seeing this a lot today, as companies race to “be agentic” they are also forgetting why we used them in the first place. The slop-creep is real now that features are easier to create than ever.
Quality software fixes fast. Nothing is unbreakable. The test is not whether a thing breaks but what happens next. The break is found, the fix is pushed, and the fix arrives without ceremony. Updates come, do their work, and leave you where you were, only slightly better off. You should not have to attend to your own tools.
it comes down to software that respects the user. Respect is also why I believe AI needs boundaries. The boundary that matters most to me is writing that a human is expected to read. Let the agents build the software. The words we put in front of people should be our own. Slop there is not a quality problem. It is a respect problem.