Writing in his bog, Stetskov said: “The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is haemorrhaging more memory than most computers had a decade ago.”

If this happened 20 years ago, it would have triggered emergency patches, post-mortems and possibly a corporate witch-hunt. Now it’s just another ticket in the queue.

Stetskov reckons the industry has become so used to software disasters that even something this absurd barely registers.

“This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponised existing incompetence,” he said.

Stetskov argued that software has hit its physical limits, but leadership is still pretending it hasn’t. Modern applications are built on stack after stack of bloated frameworks, each one sold as a developer convenience while quietly bleeding performance.

“Today's real chain: React > Electron > Chromium > Docker > Kubernetes > VM > managed DB > API gateways,” he said. “Each layer adds ‘only 20–30%.’ Compound a handful and you're at 2–6x overhead for the same behaviour.”

That’s how a Calculator ends up eating 32GB of RAM. Not because anyone thought it should, but because no one noticed, or cared, until users started howling.

He warned that we’re living through the worst software quality crisis in history. AI assistants are wiping out production databases. Firms are spending $364 billion not to fix the problems, but to dodge them.

“This isn't sustainable. Physics doesn't negotiate. Energy is finite. Hardware has limits,” he said.

The winners, he argued, won’t be those with the deepest wallets or the best marketing decks. They’ll be the ones who actually remember how to engineer.