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Ask HN: Were early stage products always so buggy?

10 points AbstractH24 | 1 comments | 21 Apr 25 21:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.231s | source

I help startups roll out tools for their go-to-market teams. These days, I keep coming across different products with small teams, the backing of notable VCs, and lots of potential, but then when I go to use them the UIs are just littered with bugs which prevent them from functioning. And often it has nothing to do with prompting, hallucination, or anything like that. It's simple things like "when I hit save, my data disappears."

I'm accustomed to working with buggy tools, nothing I do is mission-critical, so things aren't as thoroughly tested as a car might be before hitting the road. But it seems things are getting released with more and more bugs. Am I nuts?

Seems like there are three possibilities to me:

1. This is just what happens with products that are new to market. 2. People creating these products are relying too much on tools like Cursor that don't work right. 3. The pressure to keep up is getting faster and faster, so companies are releasing products that are less and less thoroughly tested.

My gut tells me it's a combination of 2 and 3, and this is a sign we're reaching a new stage in the AI bubble. But maybe I'm wrong and being overly cynical.

1. codingdave ◴[22 Apr 25 10:43 UTC] No.43760714[source]▶
The number of times you are going to run through the new functions of your software during QA is in the hundreds. Automated testing only counts as one test because it does the same test over and over... it is a solid practice, but it is a safety net against regressions, it is not actually putting the software through new environments, scenarios, and usage.

But get that software out in the field, grow its userbase, run it for years, and you have thousands if not millions of different uses of it. Take all the bugs that come out of that, fix them, and you have software that is less buggy.

So sure, inexperienced teams put out bugs. I do, too... more than I should. Hopefully the egregious one's where it simply does not work never get to production. But the more nuanced bugs and their eventual fixes come from the software running in the wild.

So if you are the pilot user for new products, you will see all those early bugs.