--- title: Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric | daily.dev description: A critical look at the paradox of the AI-powered development era: despite access to increasingly capable models and promises of higher productivity, software... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/nothing-works-and-everyone-is-euphoric-cw83wzhjh twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric | daily.dev og:description: A critical look at the paradox of the AI-powered development era: despite access to increasingly capable models and promises of higher productivity, software... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/nothing-works-and-everyone-is-euphoric-cw83wzhjh og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/cw83wZHJH.png og:image:alt: Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A critical look at the paradox of the AI-powered development era: despite access to increasingly capable models and promises of higher productivity, software quality continues to decline. Real-world examples illustrate pervasive bugs in banking apps, Slack, LG appliances, and car infotainment systems. The author argues that KPI-driven culture and complexity accumulation are the root causes, not a lack of tools. While pessimistic about big vendors, the author sees an opportunity for individual developers to build better software as frustration with the status quo grows. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 293 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-29). **TL;DR:** Commenters broadly agree that focus-stealing by apps (especially on macOS) is a longstanding UX failure, and that software quality is declining due to a mix of AI, inexperienced developers, and product-manager-driven shortcuts; there's also a notable side-thread criticizing DHH/Omarchy and debating how to label his politics. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 40% mixed · 45% skeptical **The case for** - KDE Plasma on Wayland offers a configurable 'focus stealing prevention' setting that many commenters praise as a model solution. - Some commenters note that FOSS/Linux is increasingly providing better UX than commercial alternatives, driven by passion rather than profit motives. - Good human support can be a genuine business differentiator, as shown by examples like Consumer Cellular and Ting. **The pushback** - macOS has no meaningful protection against focus stealing, causing real-world accidents like sending private commands to group chats. - AI is accelerating the production of low-quality software rather than improving it, with AI-generated customer support responses cited as a concrete example. - KDE's focus-stealing prevention feature is reportedly broken at levels above 'Low,' undermining its practical usefulness. - Software quality is declining due to exponential growth of inexperienced developers and non-technical product owners prioritizing happy-path MVPs. - Omarchy's website offers only a video with no text documentation, frustrating technically-minded users who want information. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters are engaged and critical across multiple sub-topics—focus stealing, software quality decline, DHH's politics, and Linux/KDE as an alternative—with no clear consensus but a generally skeptical tone toward current software practices. **Hottest debate:** Whether apps should ever be allowed to steal focus automatically, with one commenter arguing there are legitimate use cases (e.g., returning to a main task) while the majority insist focus should never be stolen under any circumstances. **Open questions** - Is there a focus-stealing prevention setting that specifically blocks focus theft only while the user is actively typing, rather than a binary allow/block toggle? - Will GPU support on Linux (especially for newer Nvidia cards like the RTX 5080) improve enough to make Linux a viable daily driver for gaming in the near future? - Does CachyOS + KDE support HDR properly under Wayland? **Highlights** > > I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it when I have to use my work mac or windows computers. See here for docs, under "Focus stealing prevention" - https://docs.kde.org/trunk_kf6/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehavi... > — [frameset on hackernews · 6 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033527) > Any app should be ready to accept focus. It should never steal focus. When I start an app, and wait for it to launch, I am attempting to give it focus. I can withdraw that intent at any time by doing something else (e.g. switching apps) and the launching app should finish launching and wait in the background. > — [jagged-chisel on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033834) > A fantastic feature, but unfortunately currently broken (as in over- rather than under-zealous) for prevention levels other than 'Low': https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509990 > — [DicIfTEx on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034501) > I agree that software becoming worse (in some sense) but I don't blame AI. My experiences as a user haven't really changed. Streamers fail to cast to TVs. Browsers are devices which reliably and efficiently propagate red console text and 500s from companies to you. I still see bluescreens on public touchscreens. Uncle Bob nailed one reason why the industry isn't getting better: the growth of programmers is exponential, such that half of all programmers have less than n years experience (5?). I offer two additional reasons: Firstly, you hone your skills doing individual algorithms on a single thread, where it's OK to get it wrong and change it as many times as you like. When you get a job, you don't even realise you're in a distributed system and the getter/setter model you practiced on is woefully inadequate for interacting with partner systems, cqrs, event-sourcing, auditability, idempotency or whatever else is required. In short, 10 years of practicing writing for-loops and data-structures will not translate into building a system that customers can access via their phone and multiple tabs of a browser, at the same time as a database schema is being updated. Secondly, while I don't think there is any realistic alternative to agile development, it seems that nontechnical POs have captured the software lifecycle. 'Focus on happy path only, for the MVP' is how you build buggy software. Good developers can learn that this will guarantee the need for a rewrite in the future, but POs never will. It seems like the languages have been increasingly targeting the beginner segment (C++ -> Java -> JS -> Python), while the tasks have been getting more complicated (b2b distributed systems, 24/7 uptime, millions of users, resistance to hackers, machine learning, etc.) > — [mrkeen on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033399) > This is the absolute perfect encapsulation of the Linux problem and the Linux appeal: Yes, it has the magical setting to fix all of your problems and frustrations, and yes it’s a finicky broken bitch to actually get working for your use case. I say this with love. > — [Lord-Jobo on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035197) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033004) · 124 points · 293 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Software developers are not okay](https://daily.dev/posts/software-developers-are-not-okay-pzkon36n4) · Lobsters · 54 upvotes · 9 comments - [Your Developers Are Shipping More Than Ever. And Feeling Less Than Ever.](https://daily.dev/posts/your-developers-are-shipping-more-than-ever-and-feeling-less-than-ever--znrdahm5f) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/nothing-works-and-everyone-is-euphoric-cw83wzhjh) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/nothing-works-and-everyone-is-euphoric-cw83wzhjh","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/nothing-works-and-everyone-is-euphoric-cw83wzhjh"},"datePublished":"2026-07-24T10:22:44.930Z","dateModified":"2026-07-29T13:55:34.095Z","description":"A critical look at the paradox of the AI-powered development era: despite access to increasingly capable models and promises of higher productivity, software...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--qPvKM23u--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2009","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--qPvKM23u--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2009","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/nothing-works-and-everyone-is-euphoric-cw83wzhjh","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"productivity,ai-coding","timeRequired":"PT4M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Nothing Works and Everyone Is Euphoric"}]} ```