For those that found that unreasonably boring, I asked AI for help.
Bug Blindness: Your Software Has Trained You
People use broken software so much that eventually they stop noticing it’s broken.
You double-click because one click sometimes doesn’t work. You wait before typing because the app eats keystrokes. You refresh when shit gets weird.
Eventually those aren’t “workarounds.”
They’re just how you use the software.
The author gives a great example: his mechanical mouse got progressively dirtier and tracked like shit. Instead of realizing the mouse was fucked, his brain adapted. He unconsciously learned weird hand movements to compensate.
Someone else tried it and immediately found it unusable.
He hadn’t fixed the problem. He’d trained himself to survive it.
Developers do the exact same thing.
They use their own software and think:
“Seems fine.”
Meanwhile they’ve memorized:
click → wait → don’t click that yet → refresh → ignore that error → now it works
Then a normal user shows up:
“What the fuck is this?”
And the developer says:
“Oh, you just have to…”
That sentence is the warning sign.
It gets worse when entire companies develop this blindness. The people closest to the software can actually become the worst people to judge its usability because they’re experts at surviving its bullshit.
They know all the rituals, quirks, flaky buttons, ignorable errors, and undocumented rules.
Eventually they don’t even realize those things exist.
The Takeaway
Good software isn’t software that technically can accomplish the task.
Good software doesn’t require users to develop survival behaviors.
And AI makes this even more important.
Generating another 20,000 lines of code is becoming cheap.
The scarce skill may no longer be writing the software.
It’s looking at what you built and realizing:
“Wait… this kinda fucking sucks.”
