Dan Luu on why he sees hundreds to thousands of bugs per week while most people see none — not because he uses computers differently, but because everyone else is hitting the same bugs and not noticing. The mechanism is human: we are extremely good at ignoring the negatives in things we’re fans of, and that blindness is strongest about our own work.
How bug blindness works:
- Most people hit the same bugs and don’t notice them — “computer literacy” is really a library of non-conscious workaround habits (the Google Docs title-overwrite dance, the WiFi-off-before-login ritual at Microsoft)
- Dogfooding mostly fails: programmers are expert bug-workarounders, so they literally don’t perceive the issues their habits exist to avoid
- Teams ship confidently broken: internal comments say “great, it works well” while the product only works with non-intuitive workarounds — the Blackboard employee who believed users loved the most-hated software in education
- Fans rationalize away evidence everywhere: Volvo forums on reliability, search-engine fans defending spam-filled results, Discourse engineers whose code cheated LCP metrics
The trainable part:
- Pointing out bugs to receptive people works — “years or even a decade later, people will sometimes tell me they see bugs everywhere now”
- Willful blindness is infinite, but the receptive get cured; the skill compounds
- It matters more than ever with coding agents, which make low-quality software cheap to produce and quality improvements cheap to make — but you have to notice the possibility first
Takeaway: if a product seems severely flawed when you use it, it probably is. Quality blindness is a fixable failure mode — and noticing is a compounding career skill.