What's this about?
Dan Luu argues that most people, including engineers, have stopped perceiving the bugs they encounter constantly — reporting that he easily observes hundreds to thousands per week. Users quietly reroute their workflows around broken paths and stop registering that anything is wrong.
What is "bug blindness"?
Perceptual adaptation applied to software. You always click through that dialog twice because once doesn't work. You never use that filter because it drops rows. You save before that operation because it sometimes crashes. None of these register as bugs any more; they have become how the software works. The consequence for anyone building things is that user reports systematically undercount defects — not because users are tolerant, but because they have genuinely stopped seeing them.
What's the community saying?
- The observation that resonates most: users adopt mind-bending workflows that somehow accomplish what they need, chosen specifically to avoid the worst consequences of bugs, very quickly and without ever mentioning it.
- The pushback on the framing: "hundreds to thousands of bugs per week" should read "hundreds to thousands of things I consider bugs" — the author includes things that function but displease him, which is a definitional stretch.
- The thread's best joke is that the blog itself has no max-width, so text lines grow infinitely — which the author would not consider a bug, as he distrusts the research on line length and readability.
- Somebody found markup on the page that raises an exception in the browser, which is a bug by anyone's definition.