You know the moment. Your favorite app updates overnight, and suddenly the button you’ve tapped every day for three years is gone. A new AI assistant you never asked for is front and center, asking about your day. The settings menu now requires a treasure map. It feels like the people who built this have never actually used it.
You’re right. They haven’t. And it’s not incompetence. It’s something worse.
Software is literally driving them insane.
Not the Howard Hughes kind of insane. Not “wash your hands thirty times a day” insane. It’s a quieter, more dangerous insanity: the inability to tell the difference between the world and the digital model of the world.
A hammer can never be mistaken for the house it builds. Software can.
Think about it. Hardware is grounded in physical reality. A bad hammer breaks. A badly engineered bridge collapses. But software is pure abstraction. You can build a stunning digital simulation of a city and call it a revolution. You can craft a social network that literally rewires attention spans and call it a community. The abstraction feels real. It responds. It validates you. The market pays you. And then something terrifying happens: you start believing you’ve conquered the actual domain.
One commenter on the original post nailed it: “Tech leaders misinterpret rewards from the market in conquering some abstract representation of a facet of a domain with conquering the domain itself. Then they become egomaniacal.”
Did you conquer commercial real estate? Or did you build a slide deck that impressed investors? Did you fix healthcare? Or did you create an app that scheduling bots use? The line blurs. And then it disappears entirely.
This is why the software you use every day keeps getting worse. Not gradually. Aggressively. The bloat isn’t an accident. It’s the product of leadership that has lost all contact with the actual, sweating, struggling human being on the other side of the screen.
Money doesn’t ground you. It floats you further from reality.
When you have a billion-dollar war chest, you don’t get feedback. You get validation. Every launch looks like a success because your marketing team can manufacture any narrative. Every answer to “do users want this?” comes from a focus group you paid to not offend you. The market rewards the illusion of conquest, not the real thing. And here’s the twist: it rewards it so well that you never have to confront the truth.
Software development untethered from the practical realities of the customer is what drives people insane. When developers are forced to interact with real users, the freewheeling madness gets damped massively. But in the modern tech stack, who talks to users? The intern might. The CEO doesn’t. The CEO looks at dashboards, trends, and stock prices. Those are all abstractions too.
So the delusion compounds at the top. Capital doesn’t keep you sane. Capital subsidizes your insanity. It buys you bigger screens, smoother demos, and more excuses.
Market success isn’t a reality check. It’s a delusion amplifier.
You’ve felt the result. Every time your app “improves” without getting better, that’s the smell. Every time a login screen asks you to rate it with five stars, that’s the taste. Every time you have to google “how to cancel subscription,” that’s the sound of a leader who has mistaken their own vision for your reality.
This isn’t a bug in your software. It’s a systemic feature of capital-heavy development, where the abstraction is so successful that the people building it no longer need to respond to the actual world.
And here’s the painful part: they’ve convinced themselves they’re building the future. Maybe they are. But if you’re building a future that real people never asked for, swallowing it with a smile, you’re not a visionary. You’re just insane.
The user isn’t the center of the universe. The abstraction is. And that’s the problem.
The next time your software updates and gets worse, don’t just get angry. Remember that you’re looking at the output of a person who has lost the plot. Not because they’re stupid. Because software did what it always does: it gave them a world where they are gods, and everyone else is just a metric.
The cure isn’t more AI or more funding. It’s forcing the people at the top to sit in the customer service queue, to use their own product from a clean install, to feel the rage of losing their data. It’s the only way to remember that the map is not the territory.
FAQ
Q: Isn't this just about a few bad tech leaders? Plenty of companies make great products.
A: Sure, the exceptions exist — and they usually share one habit: they refuse to let scale isolate them from reality. The moment a CEO stops doing customer support, demos, or real user testing, the abstraction loop closes. It's not individuals; it's what software does to your brain when you're shielded from consequences.
Q: What's the practical takeaway for someone building software?
A: Stay small as long as you can. Force your team to interact with users directly. Ship boring, essential features that solve real problems. The goal isn't to impress investors with a clever abstraction. It's to help a human accomplish something. If your roadmap doesn't start with a customer pain, it starts with your own ego.
Q: But aren't ambitious projects like self-driving cars or AI pushing humanity forward?
A: They are — but the delusion starts when you believe the demo is the reality. A simulated freeway is not a freeway. A chatbot that passes a test isn't a true conversational partner. The moment you think you've solved driving or intelligence because your model works in isolation, you're already insane. Real progress requires humility, not grandiosity.