Second Win11 emergency out of band update to address disastrous Patch Tuesday

Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.

Really needs to be studied.

It's like they started making structural decisions a decade ago that are now overwhelming their ability to deliver basic functionality.

I realize there were always problems like this, I live through Windows ME, but it does feel qualitatively different now with advertising being forced into the product, performance of no consideration at all, etc.

How do you patch something that was written by another colleague, using an LLM, that you also need an LLM to figure out?

How do you find the subtle bugs? Working with LLMs I noticed, they try to implement things from scratch. I asked it to output the md5 hash of some string in the api response, it went on to implement the md5 algo and then called it. I simply did not have the time to check correctness so asked it to import a library I know. Someone might just have gone with it, shipped to prod and then bugs.

It also introduced slight changes in the intended flow of your program, that if you aren’t fully aware, are unnoticeable until they compound and you’re too deep to go back because now 10 different weird behaviors are in prod, you’re not sure what the cause is or if they were actually intended. You just have no frame of reference because maybe you didn’t build all of it as part of a team. And those are the things you should have had tests for, but when you were writing the code yourself you were coding with intent, so you know when something was off.

Now you build at the speed of thought and no longer know all the intents, only that the end result satisfies loosely written requirements.

The start menu search is turning blank and shows a white screen whenever I search anything. Similar to how react apps break. It's been like this for 6 momths, across two laptops, fresh install of 25h2.

I still have my Windows 11 machine, but I haven't booted into it in a couple months now.

The "Windows is going to be an agentic OS" announcement was the last straw.

Linux and Mac it is.

How's that AI tools doing for you Microslop ?

And this is why I'm still running Win10 LTSC. No bloat, super fast, still gets security updates.

Look I have no idea if this is related, but I have noticed recently, talking to other developers, that the addiction / allure of the speed that coding with AI agents gives you is leading to a relaxation of their standard quality bar. This doesn't even feel like the evil overlords whipping them more, it is self-inflicted.

When you can get multiple different agents to all work on things and you are bouncing between them, careful review of their code becomes the bottleneck. So you start lowering your bar to "good enough", where "good enough" is not really good enough. It's a new good enough, which is like you squinting at the code and as long as the shape is vaguely ok, and the code works (where that means you click around a bit and it seems fine), it's ok.

Over time you lose your "theory"[1] of the software, and I would imagine that makes you effectively lower your bar even further, because you are less attached to what good should look like.

This is all anecdotal on my end, but it does feel like quality as a whole in the industry has tanked in the last maybe 12 months? It feels like there are more outages than normal. I couldn't find a good temporal outage graph, but if you trust this: https://www.catchpoint.com/internet-outages-timeline , the number of outages in 2025 is orders of magnitude up on 2024.

Maybe this is because there are way more, maybe this is because they are now tracking way more, I'm not sure. But it definitely _feels_ like we are in for a bumpy ride over the next few years.

[1] in the Programming as Theory Building sense: https://gareth.nz/ai-programming-as-theory-building.html

I’m genuinely wondering if they’re using llms to code windows. Is that likely?

If it compiles - ship it.

Vibe patching

Last Thursday windows 11 forced an update on my Acer machine.It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device. It took me a reformat to solve the issue.

I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse.

Microsoft is an end stage software company that has exhausted natural growth in its desktop segment. When that happens to a company that is beholden to Wall Street the only ways are to start shitting on their "customers" and their employees. Cut costs and try engage in dark patterns and other shenanigans in order to keep getting the customer money and show growth. The relationship turns adverserial. I think this already happened way before but I speculate that the aggressive drive to slop and vibe coding while reducing head count is now coming around to start showing their effects in the software quality.

I further speculate that before they had some senior/principal engineers that were the backstop holding things together but they've been let go too now. So there's nothing to stop AI slop taking over.

Is it only cloud storage files? I've noticed that in 2026 my windows 11 machine is slower than ever before, by a lot- barely able to render web pages.

I was hit by this. Could RDP into machines using the regular client, but could not access Dev Boxes via Windows App. Getting real sick of the low quality AI slop.

I for one am enjoying my last few months of Windows 10, stable, responsive, no surprise updates at last.

are they vibe coding?

it is so annoying when Jonathan Blow says batshit unhinged shit about "the collapse of civilization" and he is kind of right.

Using React in core parts of the Windows Shell, Microsof's inability to design and release an application using non-web technologies, and the sluggishness and lagginess and bloat of Windows in general has finally pushed me to dual boot Fedora on a separate drive.

It is very nice having an Operating system that respects the Hardware I own and makes efficient use of it. My experience has been very good so far. Every device in my custom built desktop PC worked immediately. The only driver I had to build and install was for my XBOX Wireless dongle.

Gaming has been really damn good. I installed Steam and my games just worked. No fiddling around with configs or anything. Even installing a custom Proton version to try it out is very simple.

I've been on Fedora now for nearly a month and only boot into Windows for work. Eventually, I might get rid of Windows entirely. It'll take a massive U-turn from Microsoft on the philosophy for Windows for me to change my opinion now.

Hyphens please.

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Slop Tuesday

#winning

People are blaming vibe coding but the real culprit was hiring leetcoders in the first place. I genuinely believe the stark decrease in quality of most products across the industry has been driven by that.