Software Used to Be for Us

I still remember the small software update that changed how I viewed my daily workflow. It was a tiny text editor, and the developer had added a single preference toggle that let you turn off the subtle blinking of the cursor. The release notes simply said that someone had mentioned it caused them headaches, so they fixed it. It was a quiet, considerate choice that did not try to revolutionize the world or dominate a news cycle. It just made my day a little easier. I am not against technological progress, and I rely on modern tools every single hour. But I deeply miss the era when software felt like it was built by people who cared about the person on the other side of the screen.

There was a time when good software meant something specific and tangible. Updates were usually small, frequent, and directly inspired by user feedback. Companies changed things because their support forums and help tickets told them that real people were struggling with a specific button or workflow. Because teams were smaller, someone actually had to sit in a room and personally defend the inclusion of every new feature. They had design constraints that forced them to be clear rather than complicated. The changelog acted as a clear contract with the user, explaining exactly what changed, why it changed, and what it did for you. Creativity came from working within those limitations, and developers had to think deeply about a problem instead of just throwing more code at it.

By the early 2020s, a major shift happened that changed everything. The most obvious, high-impact improvements to consumer software had already been made. Features like instant cloud syncing, universal search, lightning fast speeds, and polished user interfaces had reached a point of near perfection. The low-hanging fruit was gone, and creating genuinely useful new features required deep research or radical rethinking. This created a strange vacuum in the industry. Companies still had rigid release cycles, investor expectations, and large developer teams to justify, but they had fewer clear answers about what to build next. Artificial intelligence arrived precisely at this moment of saturation and filled the empty space, but filling a vacuum is not the same thing as having a clear, helpful direction.

This is exactly when the audience for software quietly changed. Product announcements stopped being written for the people who actually use the tools every day. Instead, they were crafted for quarterly earnings calls, tech press cycles, and competitor perception. The language we used to see shifted drastically. Words like delightful, intuitive, and faster were replaced by phrases like AI-powered, intelligent, and next-generation. Features began shipping not because they were fully ready or because users had begged for them, but because failing to ship them created a narrative risk for the company. Users stopped being the focus and instead became the medium through which corporations communicated their relevance to Wall Street.