[pixl97]

>There isn’t a single day where I don’t have to deal with software that’s broken but no one cares to fix

Since when does this have anything to do with AI? Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way. If it's not going to cost the company in some measurable way issues can get ignored for years. This kind of stuff was occurring before the internet exists. It boomed with the massive growth of personal computers. It continues to today.

GenAI has almost nothing to do with it.

[hoytie]

I think the point the author is trying to make is that there are many problems in plain sight we could be spending our efforts on, and instead we are chasing illusory profits by putting so many resources into developing AI features. AI is not the source of the issues, but rather a distraction of great magnitude.

[socalgal2]

> Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way

All software is this way. The only way something gets fixed is if someone decides it's a priority to fix it over all the other things they could be doing. Plenty of open source project have tons of issues. In both commercial and open source software they don't get fixed because the stack of things to do is larger than the amount of time there is to do them.

[IcyWindows]

It's worth pointing it that the "priority" in both open source and closed isn't just "business priority".

Things that are easy, fun, or "cool" are done before other things no matter what kind of software it is.

[tylerflick]

All hardware eventually fails, all software eventually works.

[taikahessu]

Interesting take.

Also interesting would be to compare the qualities between them.

From my experience software has much much bigger probability of ending as eventually working, but not fixing the problem it was set out to do in the first place aka "building the right thing vs building it right". Which I guess is somewhat related to OP's dilemma.

[acdha]

Thought exercise: has any of the money Apple has spent integrating AI features produced as much customer good-will as fixing iOS text entry would? One reason for paying attention to quality is that if you don't, over time it tarnishes your brand and makes it easier for competitors to start cutting into your core business.

[simonw]

Apple's photo search has been an outstanding application of on-device machine learning models for almost a decade at this point.

FaceID has proven pretty popular tools.

[acdha]

Good point re:photo search - I should have been more specific about what class of AI tool I was referring to. Photos seems like Apple's traditional approach of focusing on the user experience, whereas a lot of the “Apple Intelligence” features really seemed like they were shipped on the schedule demanded by Wall Street analysts rather than something the Apple product teams must have been happy with.

[ako]

Text entry has been mostly fixed with AI: dictate, transcribe and cleanup with Ai works well for many use cases, especially larger texts.

[acdha]

iOS 18.6.1 still frequently replaces common words like “that” with typos like “yhst” (yes, I've reset the keyboard settings). Dictation does work fairly well but I should not have to dictate text because their keyboard input has regressed from where it was half a decade ago.

[dougdonohoe]

The point is that money that is going into GenAI or adding GenAI-related features to software should be going to fix existing broken software.

[pixl97]

Then you missed the point of my post. That money never did. It went back into the hands of the investors, the investors that are now putting money into genAI.