I no longer build software

Why not? Technology has opportunity costs. Usuless "easier" technology makes us slaves to it and to increased infrastructure.

Opportunity costs, diminishing results -- all those are good questions to ask.

But this misses the finer point of how much is lost in the process of scope-narrowing, formalization, and automation. Or rather, of how losslessly you can truly make such a conversion.

For each well-established technology, it’s interesting to ask this question: given an unlimited budget, is the technology still used? Or is raw manpower used instead? Or some combination of the two?

Truly useful technologies, to me, are the ones that are still used in some capacity even by the ultra-rich, either directly, or because the manpower they hire will themselves use the technology to make their job easier.

A good example of a truly-useful technology is a washing machine. Nobody is hand-washing (cotton) clothes any more, no matter how rich you are. Even if you have a professional laundry service, they’re putting your clothes into a washing machine.

Navigation isn’t quite at that level yet. Your Uber driver uses a GPS auto-nav, but a city guide usually doesn’t, because a city guide is asking a different question — not “how to get there” but rather “which well-known route would the client favour, if I took a few hours to lay out the differences in fine detail.” Which is a question both of subjective inference of the client’s tastes, in a way that would require learned personalization in an automated equivalent; and of a bunch of context factors unique to every city, in a way that makes it hard to reproduce in a narrowed-scope app (rather requiring individual city-by-city coverage, the way only a monopolistic behemoth can achieve.)

So, theoretically possible, but not likely something we’ll see done for a long while, at least until we see some other meta-technological advance (e.g. GPT-4) that makes one or the other part dead simple.

- The arbitrary deadlines that serve no purpose. Example: we have to update our app every week/month because reasons.

- The utter lack of understanding of the concept of feature completeness. Example: operating systems that update every year for no good reason whatsoever. What's the point of updating from Mojave to Catalina as a user? What new does it bring? How does it empower the user in a way not before possible? No one knows because it does not. It merely moves things around for the sake of change.

- No one wants to understand what they're abstracting away. People keep piling abstractions upon abstractions yet can't answer the basic questions about how their operating system works at low level.

- Fashion. A lot of it. Basically, if you're doing Android, you MUST want Kotlin and Jetpack and Compose. Same for web — SSR is soooo 2010, gotta make that news website a single-page application because how come would we not use React. IMO, fashion has no place in engineering.

- This "we'll always be able to ship an update" attitude. This is the worst. No one wants to make high-quality software any more, they want to move fast and break stuff at the expense of the end-user sanity. I can't understand how this way of thinking came to exist tbh.

- Business incentives. They ruin everything, but it's especially felt in software engineering.

- Priorities in general. No one is considering what they're making a tool to help the user achieve something. They're making these monstrosities that always put their own interests before those of the user. Dark patterns, purposely inconvenient and awkward UIs, spammy notifications that don't correspond to real events, you name it. In my book, that's not the way to go.