Bug Blindness
- ID
- 19520
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 30 Aug 2026, 8:21 AM
- Fetched
- 01 Sep 2026, 8:03 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://danluu.com/bug-blind/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.5
- Created
- 01 Sep 2026, 8:07 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_agent_userssaas_founders
What happened
Dan Luu argues that 'bug blindness'—noticing or failing to notice software bugs—is mostly a trainable attention skill, not a difference in what users encounter. He reports repeatedly finding severe product flaws that internal teams rated as working well, and now uses LLMs to simulate normal users and reproduce issues across many scenarios, confirming the bugs aren't corner cases. The piece includes examples of poor search results from Google, Bing, and Kagi.
Why it matters
If you ship products, don't trust internal 'it works' consensus—use LLMs to role-play as non-technical users interacting with your product and log every friction point they hit. This is a cheap, concrete QA step most teams skip, and the article suggests the gap between internal perception and real-user experience is often severe enough to sink launches.
Discussion angle
Try running a live experiment during the call: pick one person's product or side project, prompt an LLM to act as a confused first-time user, and see what bugs or dead-ends it surfaces that the builder never noticed.