Recently I started to feel pressured by software that surrounds me. This post is a bit of whining about it.

Every day when I open my laptop I see a notification message saying that some apps have a new version released.
Please update and restart!
Even though the same apps have been updated a few days ago and I haven’t noticed any changes.

Is this agile software development?

Examples

Hugo

The static web site generator that this blog is using, has been updated 4 times in June 2026.

Firefox, Chrome and Edge

Starting September 2026 Firefox will be released every 2 weeks, as an experiment.
It aligns with similar changes for Chrome and Edge.

Next.js

At the moment of writing this post Next.js has 3779 github releases.

It is maybe unfair to call it out like this because these releases include canary and preview releases but even stable releases are happening every 2 weeks or so.

Illusion of productivity?

Faster shipping is not equal more value. If we measure it in a very basic way - more features == more value then maybe it is.

But I’d argue that with faster shipping we introduce new bugs, features that people didn’t ask for, the design changes that confuse existing users and unexpected API changes that all deduct same amount of even more value.

Software engineers are busy though. Keeping everything up to date is part of our job now. The smartest engineers I ever met, are paid extra per week to merge Renovate PRs (among other things to be fair).

Users are QAs now

Users are a QA department now that file bugs and contact support when something is broken, because we release so fast that there is no time to decently test our software.

Releasing faster though, helps us to fix bugs that we introduced because of faster releases, so I don’t think it’s going to end soon.

It is not agile anymore

It is exhausting.