The 2016 launch of No Man’s Sky and the 2020 launch of Cyberpunk 2077 were catastrophes. No Man’s Sky fell so incredibly short of the promises the founder shared over the years – from smaller ones like rivers on the surface of planets, to huge ones like seeing other players – that some people felt it must have been a scam all along.

The other game was a simpler case study: Cyberpunk was buggy as hell. Not just the abysmal performance, but also the overall quality. People called it “the Hindenburg of videogames” and made YouTube compilations and listicles of its often hilarious bugs: cars exploding for no reason with perfect comedic timing, intimate body parts protruding through the clothes, and the infamous T poses.

In an unprecedented move, Microsoft slapped a big warning atop Cyberpunk’s app store listing, and Sony pulled it from their store altogether.

But it is 2026 now, and both games redeemed themselves. For years after the launch, the No Man’s Sky team worked hard on adding promised features:

Over a decade on from its initial reveal, No Man’s Sky both manages to remain the same game it was at launch while also bringing almost every single missing feature (and dozens of new surprise ones) into the title – implementing them intelligently and with great consideration for how it will affect the core of the game. They achieved their redemption years ago, yet continue diligently with massive update after massive update.

No other title has done what Hello Games have managed to achieve. And the best part? Every single update, patch and addition to the game was and is 100% free, with no falsified hype or build-up to each update.

Cyberpunk 2077 had a redemptive arc of its own, too, highlighted and contextualized in this 17-minute video from gameranx. Today, both games are rated “very positive” on Steam, and are actually still gaining daily players.

So, wonderful comeback stories, right? Depends on how you look at it. It’s great that both these games ended up being good products, but perhaps not as great that it was all happening in the open.

The videogame industry tried to get creative about it and established an idea of “early access”: being able to purchase an incomplete game earlier, and watch it get better while the publisher receives funding to keep going. But for every Minecraft there is Godus, and for every Kerbal Space Program there is The Day Before. Plus, neither No Man’s Sky nor Cyberpunk launched in early access with attendant caveats and discounts. (By the way, Wikipedia’s entry for early access is worth checking out – it’s so eloquent I’m surprised not to see any warning boxes.)

There seems to be ongoing and perhaps rising frustration with companies releasing software products too early and fixing them in flight, if at all. Already in 1996, Geoff Duncan wrote about his annoyances with that:

What Beta Means Now: […] In many cases – particularly with Mac Internet software – “beta” doesn’t mean anything close to what it used to. We’ve seen programs in public beta that not only contain innumerable known bugs the developers are aware of and plan to fix, but also accumulate major new features through subsequent releases. Similarly, we’ve seen products that change fundamental system and technology requirements during beta – details which should have been etched in stone long before. Beta often means what “alpha” or even “development build” used to mean.

Subsequently, Google and other web-first companies diluted the meaning of beta labels even more.

The trend of premature launches extended to devices, too. About two years ago, AI assistant gizmos from Humane and Rabbit were pilloried by audiences for launching in an effectively unfinished form. Both devices failed in the market; MKBHD’s video reviews of Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1 remain both entertaining and informative watches.

AI complicates this even further in many ways. I enjoyed Pavel Samsonov’s recent post on his blog Product Picnic analyzing another disastrous launch: Grammarly’s writing advice feature that replicated well-known authors who never agreed for their likenesses to be used this way:

Reading between the lines, Mehotra’s interview paints a picture that I think many tech workers will find familiar: features are conceived, coded, and shipped as quickly as possible. He is happy to admit that the feature was a mistake… in retrospect. But in the moment it actually mattered, critical thinking was swept away by the false urgency of pushing things out.

It is worth reading in full and following the links, too; I watched the mentioned (tense) interview, and was similarly frustrated with the CEO’s lack of accountability or even a hint of an explanation of why the feature was launched to begin with. Key line from Samsonov’s post:

If you don’t know what are you trying to learn when you ship a prototype, do not ship a prototype.

This becomes even more important as the difference between a prototype and a final product is now thinner than a retina pixel. Both No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk had, at least, well thought through foundations.

I understand that for some people gen AI software building tools is a discovery – perhaps for the first time – of a genuine joy of creation. But there’s also the other, newish side, a sort of “cult of velocity” where people show screens filled with agents coding things as if the world needed every possible app right this second.

Velocity and urgency can be important, but it’s hard to be careful and thoughtful when you’re going really fast; unsurprisingly, some don’t know what to do with that newfound AI-powered speed or realize the importance of thinking about crucial aspects other than time to market. (When digital cameras came around, the barrier to entry for photography was drastically lowered – it was possible to take a lot of photos without worrying about cost or quality. Tons of people took tons of objectively subpar photos; some were the end goal, some were a stepping stone toward more photographic mastery. However, I am not sure I remember people on either side ever bragging “I took over 1,200 photos today!”)

All this could be contrasted with movement of slow software (the name is part of a bigger slow movement although has unfortunate connotations in tech – it’s slow as in “speech,” not slow as in “beer”). Jared White in 2023 defined it as:

• Sustainable software. Architecting and writing code in ways which are easily understandable and maintainable over time, requiring few dependencies and a rate of change that is healthy for the underlying ecosystem.
• Thoughtful software. Working through feature development and making decisions based on what will benefit the userbase over the long term, placing mental and social health as priority over immediate gains or selfish interests.
• Careful software. Seeking to understand the ways software might be used for harm, or itself be harmful by taking attention away from more important concerns in the broader culture.
• Humanist software. Recognizing that most software—at least in application development—is primarily written for humans to understand and reason about with ease across a wide array of skill levels, and that relying on complex code generators or “generative AI” tooling to resolve complexity instead of simply building simpler human-scale tools is an industry dead-end.
• Open software. Looking to established collaborative software movements like open source and the standards bodies responsible for open protocols to inspire how we build and maintain software (regardless of licensing).

I don’t really have a conclusion for this meandering post, as I am not sure a snappy conclusion is possible. Perhaps some of the links above can provide inspiration or food for thought about urgency, reputation, and doing things in the open.

Some patterns I’m noticing are:

• Velocity is never an end goal.
• Velocity is only one of many ingredients of software building.
• It is necessary to think of people who will experience your work-in-progress as it is, not as it might one day be.