[mancerayder]

> We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse.

I actually relate to that. It used to be cool and exciting to update to see what new things are coming for free. I was just looking up what Fedora Workstation 45 might bring.

Updates on phones, TV's, cars and non-Linux operating systems on PC's/laptops are downright scary to me now. What will they add that I don't want? What more connectivity to the external world are they going to wire in?

MacOS lost everyone's trust by ruining the experience, but even before it happened that trying to resize a window makes it feel like life will be at 80 years-old, hunting a tiny invisible border, even before that there wasn't anything exciting.

What Microsoft I think did (and I can't prove it), before I moved off of Windows 11, was to bundle all changes in "required security updates." So you have no choice but to update (or go through special settings to turn it off, or just defer it), but when the machine comes back you have a new Welcome prompt to some new connectivity to something nefarious. AI features I never asked for, that's the most recent dark pattern here.

[xingped]

Yep, this 100%. When I see a "pending update" notification or icon somewhere, the first thing I think is "I don't want to update, they're just going to break something new". I _hate_ updates now. Doesn't matter what software it is, with the small exception of video games. (Except Dead By Daylight. Behavior, the devs, are the most hilariously incompetent devs on the planet, but at least their incompetence is confined to their own game.)

[zrobotics]

The only software I've been excited about an update for in years has been games, that seems like the only category where devs actually add features people are excited about. For example, the latest KCD2 patch added a fun but brief new quest [0].

Not universal though. Besides your example, even for single player games patches can be basically malicious. I've had Fallout 4 locked on updates for like 3 years at this point, everything Bethesda has added has degraded the experience for zero upside. But I can't think of any software besides a game where I have been anything but dreading an update in years. Slack wants to update? Great, it'll probably break/degrade my work flow in some minor way, and they're one of the lesser offenders on my work machine.

[0] https://steamdb.info/patchnotes/23914554/

[DiskoHexyl]

Lots of games’ updates break popular mods, introduce launchers and/or break linux compatibility and/or online mode, remove music with expired licenses, censor something and increase system requirements.

Sadly we’re way past the point where games became like all the other software in that regard

[account42]

This would be less of a problem if patches are something you still installed deliberately - instead we have to fight Steam to let us play the games we already have a working install of.

[bee_rider]

I think games are the exception because they are

* relatively small purchases

* paid for directly by the user

* expected to be enjoyable

Most other software fails at least one of those tests, reducing the ability to shop around and make an informed decision.

[classified]

We can't change the fact that commercial OS vendors are all feudal overlords now, but the lawmakers are letting them get away with it and that is something we might still be able to change.

[account42]

We can also choose a different OS, at least for real (non-phone) personal computers.

[classified]

As long as we're not forced to use applications that are only available on neo-feudal OSs, yes.

[madeofpalk]

> * paid for directly by the user

hahahahah. Games are steering further and further to this not being true. Where each player explicitly doesn't pay for it, and instead they contain an increasing series of dark patterns in order to steer players to fleece their money in a series of microtransactions.

[bee_rider]

You have a good point, there are some games with terrible business models too. I just don’t play them, haha.

[account42]

Unfortunately enough do play them that those practices are spreading.

[hulitu]

> The only software I've been excited about an update for in years has been games

I don't. The only thing i want to see when i want to play is: Please wait, downloading update.

[formerly_proven]

I really look forward to new Fedora releases.

[benoau]

I really look forward to Pop OS updates... but it's because they broke a bunch of stuff and stripped most apps down to their basics.

[pigeons]

Including the linux kernel.

[dosisking]

I dread Linux kernel updates. Still running a 4.4 era kernel. Kernel versions have always been hit or miss, some are good, others introduced a new bug. Sometimes it's necessary to upgrade glibc as well which is a huge pain.

[mancerayder]

KCD2 is number 1 of a small number of updates I am excited about.

[djaro]

Maybe this is because video games can always add more features. Realistically, what useful feature could even be added to Word? I want to write text. It lets me write text. Program done. I dont see why Word would ever need an update other than maintenance or a security patch.

[lokar]

I remember when OS vendors shipped à la carte patches. You could pick the ones you wanted (to some extent).

[chii]

you can still do it: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=windo...

hopefully it doesn't get removed.

[inigyou]

Factorio or Minecraft change things every update.

[xingped]

I don't play those, but I know at least with games like those, where players like to play on specific versions, there's usually ways to stay on a specific version without too much hassle.

[herbst]

I stopped with Microsoft buying minecraft. But before that they didn't change but add things.

I can't remember a single time I was disappointed because something changed.

[inigyou]

Microsoft purchase was during 1.8. large-scale terrain structure completely changed in 1.7. 1.5 completely changed the redstone meta. 1.4 completely changed the villager meta as you could now zombify and cure villagers and more changed meta because beacons existed. 1.3 added villager trading, making mining obsolete for some people. 1.3 also overhauled the internal structure of singleplayer so that you can have network latency in singleplayer. 1.2 increased the world height, making your max height builds no longer impressive. Beta 1.8 added hunger so you can't just exist indefinitely, and endermen who aggressively stole blocks in that version. Beta 1.6 fixed several fun glitches.

[galleywest200]

At least Minecraft is generally additive as opposed to mucking up the previously working mechanics.

(This of course is excluding things like the big “Flattening” of data structures that happened around 1.13 or so)

[inigyou]

The post-Microsoft meta is that glitches are valid game mechanics. TNT duping has been in the game longer than Notch controlled the game. But some other glitches get fixed.

[Gigachad]

This goes for most games where glitches end up becoming protected features. Being fun is more important than being correct.

[charcircuit]

How do you measure fun? People will always rush to that excuse if it's not properly defined. And not everyone finds the same things fun. Especially if you are looking to try and 10x your audience.

[hamandcheese]

> > We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse.

You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.

Proprietary software isn't built for users anymore. But (some) FOSS still is.

[zem]

> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.

speak for your clearly non-pulseaudio-using self (:

[mort96]

Pulseaudio has been painless for like a decade and a half. Yes, it has a rough start and was probably made default in many distros before it ought to, but it's fine.

[greatgib]

Pulse audio is ok until you plug or unplug things like earpieces and bluetooth speakers and then you want to do a videocall and random devices are the active ones. And then you find no obvious way to be able to record both input and output...

[unknownfuture]

Lol because that never happens on any other OS. Plug my Mac into my dock, uses my DAC. Great. Unplug. Connect Bluetooth headphones. So far so good. Plug back into dock. Now it's... the built in audio? Huh?

I'm honestly surprised how often in Linux PA with WirePlumber just does the right thing most times, IME.

[zx8080]

MacOS is the worst. I got to reconnect my bose bluetooth headset 3-4 times every time I have a zoom call because no sound.

On contrast, my linux laptop does not have any issue with the same headset and it gets connected instantly.

[greatgib]

Obviously Mac is terrible, as a Linux user I would clearly not use it as a baseline of how it should work.

[leni536]

Use pipewire and its pulseaudio facade.

[Chu4eeno]

Last I tried that (because everyone claimed it was magically better at everything) sound just randomly broke (I had no idea why, debugging pipewire is a nightmare), and since I switched back to pulseaudio everything just works again (and seems to use less CPU, but that could be selective memory).

Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but we spent decades hammering out all the incorrect (for pulseaudio) assumptions in every layer of the stack and papered over impedance mismatches, and then people decide to rewrite from scratch again (though I'll admit I was a vocal pro-dmix anti-pulseaudio hater for a long time).

[leni536]

I have the opposite experience, in particular with bluetooth audio. YMMV

[marcosdumay]

Good thing that Debian pushed that thing into "non-core compatibility tools" status. It and NVidia drivers were always the things that made upgrading risky.

Relatedly, systemd stopped breaking a while ago. Either distros stopped keeping it up-to-date or people can learn.

[murderfs]

And also clearly not a GNOME user...

[overfeed]

It's no coincidence that PulseAudio and Gnome are Pottering-authored/Pottering-adjacent software.

[readread]

Anything with the Red Hat stink, these days. Which, yeah, a lot of that’s Poettering.

If they haven’t been executing a plan to make it extremely painful to maintain a distro that differs significantly from whatever Red Hat’s preferences and ways of operating are (so, making it harder to justify anything but “screw it, we’ll just use red hat, everyone else is just the same thing but with less ability to steer the direction of the OS”), damn the effects on UX, the traditional modular nature of Linux systems, and general open source ecosystem health… well, they’ve sure done a great job of it, so it’d be pretty crazy if that isn’t what they’ve been doing.

[ajnin]

Latest venture of the ilk behind all that : device attestation for Linux (Amutable). Yes, they clearly have an agenda and are being quite successful at pushing it.

[account42]

Or a KDE user...

For some reason they just can't help themselves from "improving" the themes that people are already using instead of creating new ones that people can choose if they want extra white space or whatever is hip now.

[altruios]

pulse audio's pain points were in setup for me, and in setup alone. using it has been a breeze.

[zem]

an update last year broke some laptop microphone settings that in 30 years of using linux I had had no reason to even know existed. took me literally a couple of weeks to figure out what was going on and fix it. it was admittedly the first time in many years that it broke anything, but when it did it did so in style.

[vitally3643]

I felt like I got slapped in the face when I updated Audacity to see a goddamn cloud login service for the audio equivalent of Notepad.

[Tanoc]

Tenacity was developed because of that one Tantacrul video where he accidentally revealed that Audacity was going to start telemetry. Audacity tried to claim it was just basic stuff like OS version and hardware, then realized that people were still angry and decided to just push as far as they could. That video was like their turning point. The fact that even Audacity could fall to that showed a lot of people that even the basic stuff nobody ever thinks about can turn into something imposing and hostile.

[behnamoh]

> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.

As someone who's been burnt several times with CachyOS (Arch) updates, I don't think this is true.

[bhaak]

Arch is bleeding edge. Breakage is expected there. It breaks so others can be stable.

Thank you for your service.

[Gigachad]

So many Linux user problems are self inflicted. It’s almost a demonstration why proprietary platforms limit your options so much when users choose to shove a stick in their bike spokes and complain it let them do that.

[behnamoh]

Nope, we're talking about updates to the OS, not users messing around and shoving a stick in their bike spokes.

[voakbasda]

Choose a niche distro, deal with niche update issues.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Using Cachy since about two years now. Never had any stress with it. Maybe it's about the random combination of components, hardware, driver/firmware quality? If you've got a bad combo, it will always crap out at some point in time. But so do others, too. Just on different combinations.

[unsungNovelty]

Arch is not "bleeding edge" . It's latest stable version of packages/software.

[ludston]

The fact that Arch is bleeding edge has been an explicit part of the Arch philosophy for as long as I've been using it (for 20 years now). It breaks a lot less frequently than it used to.

[unsungNovelty]

I personally think the whole bleeding edge argument is funny. Imagine me telling macOS27 is bleeding edge. Or any stable version of software u use is bleeding edge and that we should wait 6 months before using it.

Arch reflects the state of linux. I will never say it's perfect. But rolling releases give u the latest stable version of software. Like I said, I've found arch to be easier to fix. I've been burned too many times cos of Ubuntu and the lots.

[ragall]

Upstream developers declaring a release as "stable" isn't sufficient to make it so. Distros and users are the ones who decide what is stable and what isn't.

[MrDrMcCoy]

Trouble is, there's an enormous gap between when maintainers accept that a package as stable and when it actually makes it into the next release. I'd be plenty happy waiting an extra month or two for a stable release, but am not thrilled with waiting a year or more for one.

[unsungNovelty]

I've had more problems in point releases in my last 15years of using Linux. The problem and issues usually happen because of the said holding off of outdated software. If it's desktop computing, Arch (or rolling releases) are the best option. Arch, when it breaks, it's also the easiest to fix. I'll agree with you if it's about server side of things.

I wrote a lil about it all here: https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/01/2024/a-linux-distro-r...

[Chu4eeno]

Arch actually has testing repos (and has had for as long as I can remember), plus other project-specific testing repos like kde-unstable when upstream is taking a very long time to push out a new actually stable release. It also has lts packages for projects that offer those (like the kernel), and sometimes stays on old versions and backports fixes if the upstream definition of stable is too out of whack.

People seem to believe arch is much more yolo than it actually is (though forks of arch have tended to be pretty yolo, and I assume cachyos is a bit yolo as well based on the issues people have).

[QwenGlazer9000]

Arch users are basically beta testers. Near same day updates with upstream.

[amrit3128]

Exactly, though it's mostly community software and not corporate backed oss. Zig has been taking an interesting direction, emacs is still getting features after 50 years, ladybird is turing out nice, and a ton of other things

[Citizen_Lame]

Richard Stallman was right all along.

[daemin]

Ubuntu is still annoying with it's daily popups asking to update the system and then most times requiring a system restart. In some ways it is worse than Windows.

[SapporoChris]

Software & Updates->Updates->Automatically Check for updates:{Daily,Every two days,Weekly,Every Two Weeks,Never} and Security Updates{Display Immediately,Download Automatically,Download and install automatically}

There are even more options you can select.

[antsar]

If you want Ubuntu without the annoying, that's Debian.

[daemin]

I will probably be installing that on my servers soon. Luckily I don't need to use it as a desktop machine any more.

[dosisking]

Updating glibc is a huge pain.

Using a new version of gcc or clang can cause a lot of problems. I try to avoid updating those.

[consp]

I've had plenty of issues with old bundled GCC compilers which were fixed in later versions. I'm feeling this is a psychological thing, not necessarily software related. (Doesn't invalidate the feeling though)

[Chu4eeno]

It has to be a pain, everything depends on them (or rather, should, you still have holdouts like go fucking up things like NSS, holding back posix_spawn etc.).

In their defense the people working on glibc and gcc are pretty intelligent and spend a lot of time thinking about how everything they do affects their users, though they make mistakes like all humans (and LLMs I should say by now).

[thewebguyd]

> was to bundle all changes in "required security updates."

Kind of...Cumulative Security Updates on Patch Tuesday still do not contain new OS features, and on pro editions of windows you can at least, last time I used Windows (maybe this changed?), still skip quality updates & feature updates.

What Windows does do is tie all the "connected experiences" crap to out of band updates via the store/AppX packages which background update automatically, so when you reboot after a patch windows will run its post update OOBE and push all those features agian/turn them on. So technically not bundled with security updates, but a dark pattern that disrespects users nonetheless.

[basilikum]

Not exactly the same, but Microsoft shipped the "Backup" or some similar name software that is actually just a OneDrive client in a Windows 10 LTSC update. LTSC is specifically for not getting such feature updates. They also changed the folder icons in the graphical shell at some point.

[Grombobulous]

The funny thing is that there’s a relatively high amount of hype this year around iOS and macOS being a stability and performance release with very few features, on purpose.

Look up some beta impressions or try the public beta yourself. Apps launch faster and a whole bunch of random stuff is fixed and smoothed out.

So not only are we getting a really great performance and stability release in the height of the AI era, disproving this “AI isn’t making software better” claim, but we now can make a pretty solid connection to the DRAM shortages being one of the biggest performance and efficiency motivators of the last few decades.

Why do you think Apple cares to make apps launch 40% faster? It’s because they don’t want to be selling iPhones that are losing money because they’re packed with expensive RAM and storage.

I just can’t agree with you that this software is anywhere near the kind of misery you’re describing.

To head this off at the pass, I’m not even a macOS user…I switched off to Linux last year. I also didn’t like Liquid Glass and oddly I got tired of the notch more than anything. I also just needed more storage in my computer and didn’t want to pay Apple 3x more than street pricing for 2TB.

[CTDOCodebases]

I agree with you but I think it's worth pointing out that this is a new occurrence.

It's not just the performance of software but the UI and features themselves. The constant UI redesigns leave legacy users disoriented. It seems like they often just change things for the sake of changing things. On iOS three main pain points for me that used to be better are:

1. Search. It finds the settings for an app but not the app itself. Or the search doesn't even find the setting even though I have typed the name of the setting in word for word.

2. The timer. Previously I would set a timer and see the result on the lock screen. Perfect. Then they added a control to stop the timer from the lock screen. So timers are accidentally stopped after brushing the lock screen by accident.

3. Turning Caller ID on and off. Sometimes it just lags out and doesn't do anything.

[mobelkh]

> disproving this “AI isn’t making software better” claim

one company deciding a feature freeze is not disapproving anything, in fact, it means things have gotten so bad, apple who used to have higher standards for their releases, had to pull the brakes and fix their shit

[chii]

> bundle all changes in "required security updates."

And that is why i have setup a managed organization setting in windows to stop automatic updates (which includes security updates). I manually vet each individual security update, and download and apply them myself. I don't let windows update on its own.

Similarly to android. I don't let it update, unless i know i need the update. And i'd like to do the same with apps too, but companies have put in things to prevent people like me - deprecating old versions and forcing users to use newer versions (things like whatsapp, or youtube are prime examples).

[bravoetch]

Old business models: Add value for the end-user, sell it on for a profit.

Current business model: venture capital is the end-user now. Grow the investment by addicting customers to some distraction. Nothing else matters.

[Gigachad]

MacOS 26 was clearly rushed. iOS 27 seems to be an absolutely massive refinement update. Basically everything is faster and more polished.

But on the title, yes software is not even close to “solved”.

[linzhangrun]

As a Fedora user, I can say very clearly that Fedora is also very buggy...

[tmoertel]

Counterpoint: I have been running Fedora Linux on multiple systems for about two decades, including on my daily drivers, and it's been pretty much solid.

[yesnomaybe]

I have been on fedora 6 months now, done the upgrade from 43 to 44. All went well. Took all scare away from me. Admittedly, I run a more sophisticated ZFS boot manager (ZBM) setup and snapshot my entire OS (root FS) before any updates or upgrades. That helps but I was really impressed with the 43->44 being so effortless.

Updates only annoy me here, not scare me like they do in macOS or iOS.

[linzhangrun]

Right at this moment, my mouse cursor cannot figure out what scale it should use across three monitors with different resolutions and scaling, and has become a blurry group of pixels.

GNOME has also frozen the whole system for several seconds multiple times recently. Codex says it is a problem with the time component. I am still dealing with another recent problem where the system sometimes takes forever to boot, but after a forced restart it enters the system normally within seconds. Grok 4.5 says this is also GNOME's component fault.

[Chu4eeno]

It sounds like Wayland.

When you decide to suddenly stuff some of the most complex pieces of software together (the X server and the compositor which sometimes also double as a desktop shell) into giant codebase/process with seemingly no proper plan or roadmap and make up the specification along the way (or just don't, wayland still has no proper XACE replacement, so kiosk tooling etc. is ad-hoc), you get Wayland in its current form.

Rant over; if you want to actually find out what is making stuff stall, maybe try bpftrace, DTrace or SystemTap (depending on what your distro ships and what tooling is more familiar/suited to you)? Or just run `perf top` and see if anything stands out.

For the boot run `sudo systemd-analyze critical-chain` and see what it is waiting on. And be ready for the nightmare that is the systemd "design": https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/

[linzhangrun]

Fedora 44 removes X11 :)

[rurban]

I'm using Ubuntu and Fedora daily. Ubuntu is the one causing trouble all the time, Fedora rarely. That's why companies choose the worse system, Ubuntu. Worse is certainly not better

[e40]

When I updated my Homepods to 26.5.2 I wasted 4 hours trying to get them back online. It was a complete nightmare. I never really figured out why it was so hard. I just kept getting errors and if I didn't keep trying they would have been as good as bricks.

So, I 100% agree with you.

[pastel8739]

I’ve had a little bit of this excitement when an update comes out with Zed. Updates are frequent, and while it’s totally usable it’s still immature enough as a full IDE that the improvements are often something that will directly improve how I use it. So that’s been nice. But this is the only example I’ve had where I’ve felt this in years and years

[endorphine]

I never had this dread after switching to Debian.

[ThePestoParagon]

I get to say a lot of "i told you so" to my wife these days. She used to call me an old man for being a stick-in-the-mud and not updating my phone's apps. When I have them working the way I want: why would I want to update things and risk changing that?

These days she's swearing up a storm whenever an update breaks or removes things.

[ayaros]

The removal of window chrome was a gigantic mistake and we're all paying for it every day. Having to tolerate the extra mental overhead caused by the removal of such affordances in UIs every single time I use a computer makes me wonder whether we're all actually dead and in hell... Like that old SMBC comic where a guy in heaven stubs his toe every hour, and realizes it's actually hell. That's what this is.

And don't get me started on OS updates...

[0xfaded]

Tesla just released an infuriating update which adds an incomprehensible number of UI nags to start self driving, despite there being a hardware lever that already does so.

There's even a big button that says "Start Self Driving" in the valuable visual real estate where the speed limit once was.

[ahartmetz]

I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

[fuzzfactor]

There does seem to be growing incentive to make more and more people feel this way . . .

[dhorthy]

the one good thing about the current ios version is that it is the best it will ever be from this point forward. all future versions will be worse

[eluusive]

The new "cloud" UI is wful. Who thought this was a good idea? I hate MacOS Tahoe.

[risyachka]

The only way something can be “solved” if it is eliminated. Otherwise it is never solved.

[customguy]

You can solve a puzzle, but what would "eliminating" a puzzle even mean?

[chongli]

Soak it in nitric and sulfuric acid, let it dry, then light it on fire?

[customguy]

A riddle is not a physical thing but okay, let's say you want to destroy an instance of a riddle that is in a book: how do you know it's in that book without looking, and therefore copying the riddle into your own mind? This is known as the Pink Streisand Paradox.

[chongli]

Your comment said puzzle. I usually think of those things as made of cardboard or wood (really fancy ones), i.e. jigsaw puzzles. Since they're made of cellulose, you can turn them into nitrocellulose and then burn them very quickly!

I do love the Pink Streisand Paradox though. I think the solution involves technology: you build a riddle-recognizer that scans the book for you and tells you whether or not the riddle is present, without telling you the words of the riddle.

But that further raises the question: how do you know it's the riddle you're looking for? How do you know what riddle you're looking for if you don't know the riddle itself?

[customguy]

Sure, but when I said a puzzle I was thinking of something more abstract, like software development getting solved. To be nitpicky, I'd say without a mind to pose a question nothing in the material world by itself is a puzzle. It's just some cardboard or wood with no meaning. When the last person who can read is gone, is a book still a book? My knee-jerk reaction to "does a falling tree make a sound with nobody around to hear it" always was of course it does, what a stupid question. And it sure produces pressures waves in the air, but are those "sound" without anything to consider them such?

> But that further raises the question: how do you know it's the riddle you're looking for? How do you know what riddle you're looking for if you don't know the riddle itself?

Yeah, I was just gonna say. E.g. you ask "Is the riddle in this book?" and it replies "Which one? Specify the riddle."

Maybe with just a bit more technology though.. e.g. something that scans you and the whole world, to find out all riddles that exist, and what sort of riddle you probably would like to eliminate, if you were aware of it. It destroys those riddles, and then itself.

Since we're just riffing in the middle of nowhere anyway: I think it might be an arms race between finding the riddle that destroys the crazy (making) machines, and the machines destroying the ability to come up with riddles first. It might actually already been written how this'll play out roughly:

> Eddie eventually stumps Blaine with unsolvable "riddles" that are actually stupid jokes from his childhood. This forces Blaine to try to "lower" his intelligence to levels necessary to answer, which ends up driving him completely insane and causes his computer to crash. Eddie then proceeds to shoot the computer

[conartist6]

comprehensive.

[account42]

If you know the solution, it's no longer a puzzle.

[hellectronic]

I can relate too. I reached a point (as a software engineer), that shitti functioning software annoys me so much. Functions that are just annoying that no one really asked about, functions that are so bad designed that I really ask myself who the beep is really responsible and accountable to sign off this crap. AI should help us really make this small but time consuming implementations better too, not just shipping more and more crappy stuff.

[lofaszvanitt]

AI is here, time to create something new and shiny.

[TacticalCoder]

> AI is here, time to create something new and shiny.

The AI we have in 2026 cannot do that or it'd have already been done. I use AI daily: it saves some time. But it produces an infinite amount of insecure, unnecessary, sloppy-pasta.

And that sloppy-pasta doesn't make software any better.

[Citizen_Lame]

AI is fine, if the thing you want to produce is relatively small and self-contained.

But as soon as you have real, complex project is falls apart. Perhaps when we reach 10M tokens context this will change.

[lofaszvanitt]

That's why you, the human, are in the loop. Sloppy pasta can be avoided with careful prompting.