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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: 0.208s | 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. knightinout ◴[22 Apr 25 17:02 UTC] No.43764194[source]▶
The tools are great such as Cursor, Windsurf, . but they only work upto a point of complexity. Beyond that, developer expertise comes into play. The tiny nuances of the application like which version of API to use, how to use them extra is dependent on the developer prior experience.

Tools like replit are idea to product and feel like it is prompt to a fixed typescript kind of stack based product.

The argument for the vibe coding side could be that best developers are able to write better prompts. But based on my experience, that stuff works only till mvp or medium complexity code and not for complete framework level code.

Also, regarding microsoft, I use Windows 11 home Edition of Microsoft and it crashed two times via updates. Although, i was able to restore it via restore point. A paid software product that doesn't cover user data protection in its warranty is not really a great product.