A lot of software is forced upon people against their will, and purchased bu people who will never use it.

This obscures things in favour of the “quality/performance doesn’t matter argument”.

I am, for example, forced to use a variety of microslop and zoom products. They are unequivocally garbage. Given the option, I would not use them. However, my employer has saddled us with them for reasons, and we must now deal with it.

Yes, I think the market will enforce this. A bit. Eventually. But the time horizon is long, and crummy software with a strong business moat can out-compete great software.

Look at Windows. It's objectively not been a good product for a long time. Its usage is almost entirely down to its moat.

Yes, both the article and GP are making that exact point about it mattering from a customer's perspective.

Even if you're confident you can stop your own company from shipping terrible products, I worry the trend is broad enough and hard enough to audit that the market will enforce it by pulling back on all purchases of such software. If gamers learn that new multiplayer games are just always laggy these days, or CTOs learn that new databases are always less reliable, it's not so easy to convince them that your product is different than the rest.

Yes, there's every reason to believe the market will weed out the AI slop. The problem is, just like with stocks, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. While we all wait for executives to learn that code rigor matters, we still have bills to pay. After a year when they start trying to hire people to clean up their mess, we'll be the ones having to shovel a whole new level of shit; and the choice will be between that and starving.

As someone who also falls into camp one, and absolutely loves that we have thinking computers now, I can also recognize that we're angling towards a world of hurt over the next few years while a bunch of people in power have to learn hard lessons we'll all suffer for.