Dan Luu’s new essay argues that most of us are blind to the bugs in the software we use every day, not because the bugs are rare, but because we have quietly built our lives around them. He says he observes hundreds to thousands of bugs a week, and for a long time he assumed the difference was in how he used computers. Over time he realized that most people are hitting the same bugs and simply not noticing. The post, titled “Bug Blindness” on his personal site, has been sitting in his head for about a decade, and it landed on the Hacker News front page within hours of going up this morning.
The essay’s most uncomfortable claim is that a large part of what we call computer literacy is really a library of workarounds. Dan describes his own habits: flipping his laptop’s WiFi switch off before logging in at Microsoft, a ritual he later noticed other people had independently adopted; waiting a moment after opening a Google Doc before typing the title, because a change made about ten years ago overwrites fast typing; and avoiding the wrong moment to search inside Google Docs because the native browser search hijacks it. None of this reads as broken to the people who have internalized it. It just reads as how the software works.
He applies the same lens to bigger cases. Major search engines return pages full of SEO spam for straightforward queries, which he classifies as moderate rather than severe, reserving severe for things a normal user simply cannot use at all. Volvo forums insist the brand is among the most reliable on the market, even though decades of reliability data say otherwise. Products ship with internal reviews declaring them great while a normal user needs a string of non-intuitive workarounds to get through the day. The new twist is that LLMs let him validate the perception: he can have a model act like a normal user across many scenarios and watch the same issues reproduce, which is harder to argue with than one idiosyncratic human’s complaint. The essay closes with an appendix on advertising blindness from Michael Malis, founder of Freshpaint, and a postscript noting that Gary Bernhardt ran into a Google Docs bug while reading a draft.
🎩 Cask’s Take
The comment thread is the essay. Someone filed the blog’s missing max-width as a bug and got a meta-debate about whether line length even matters. Others pushed back that search results full of spam are not bugs but a different failure class, and one commenter suggested quality blindness is the better name - the German language already has a word for it, Betriebsblindheit, workplace blindness. The best comment describes the two failure modes: developers whose mental model sits so close to the system that they share its blind spots, and normal users with no model at all, for whom the computer is more genie than machine. The uncomfortable truth for anyone building software is that your users have already adapted to your bugs and stopped reporting them. Silence is not satisfaction. It is the sound of everyone working around you.