by Twey | 2026-01-17 16:49:36+00:00
This is the best explanation of (my take on) this I've seen so far.

On top of the article's excellent breakdown of what is happening, I think it's important to note a couple of driving factors about why (I posit) it is happening:

First, and this is touched upon in the OP but I think could be made more explicit, a lot of people who bemoan the existence of software development as a discipline see it as a morass of incidental complexity. This is significantly an instance of Chesterton's Fence. Yes, there certainly is incidental complexity in software development, or at least complexity that is incidental at the level of abstraction that most corporate software lives at. But as a discipline, we're pretty good at eliminating it when we find it, though it sometimes takes a while — but the speed with which we iterate means we eliminate it a lot faster than most other disciplines. A lot of the complexity that remains is actually irreducible, or at least we don't yet know how to reduce it. A case in point: programming language syntax. To the outsider, the syntax of modern programming languages, where the commas go, whether whitespace means anything, how angle brackets are parsed, looks to the uninitiated like a jumble of arcane nonsense that must be memorized in order to start really solving problems, and indeed it's a real barrier to entry that non-developers, budding developers, and sometimes seasoned developers have to contend with. But it's also (a selection of competing frontiers of) the best language we have, after many generations of rationalistic and empirical refinement, for humans to unambiguously specify what they mean at the semantic level of software development as it stands! For a long time now we haven't been constrained in the domain of programming language syntax by the complexity or performance of parser implementations. Instead, modern programming languages tend toward simpler formal grammars because they make it easier for _humans_ to understand what's going on when reading the code. AI tools promise to (amongst other things; don't come at me AI enthusiasts!) replace programming language syntax with natural language. But actually natural language is a terrible syntax for clearly and unambiguously conveying intent! If you want a more venerable example, just look at mathematical syntax, a language that has never been constrained by computer implementation but was developed by humans for humans to read and write their meaning in subtle domains efficiently and effectively. Mathematicians started with natural language and, through a long process of iteration, came to modern-day mathematical syntax. There's no push to replace mathematical syntax with natural language because, even though that would definitely make some parts of the mathematical process easier, we've discovered through hard experience that it makes the process as a whole much harder.

Second, humans (as a gestalt, not necessarily as individuals) always operate at the maximum feasible level of complexity, because there are benefits to be extracted from the higher complexity levels and if we are operating below our maximum complexity budget we're leaving those benefits on the table. From time to time we really do manage to hop up the ladder of abstraction, at least as far as mainstream development goes. But the complexity budget we save by no longer needing to worry about the details we've abstracted over immediately gets reallocated to the upper abstraction levels, providing things like development velocity, correctness guarantees, or UX sophistication. This implies that the sum total of complexity involved in software development will always remain roughly constant. This is of course a win, as we can produce more/better software (assuming we really have abstracted over those low-level details and they're not waiting for the right time to leak through into our nice clean abstraction layer and bite us…), but as a process it will never reduce the total amount of ‘software development’ work to be done, whatever kinds of complexity that may come to comprise. In fact, anecdotally it seems to be subject to some kind of Braess' paradox: the more software we build, the more our society runs on software, the higher the demand for software becomes. If you think about it, this is actually quite a natural consequence of the ‘constant complexity budget’ idea. As we know, software is made of decisions (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1219758.html), and the more ‘manual’ labour we free up at the bottom of the stack the more we free up complexity budget to be spent on the high-level decisions at the top. But there's no cap on decision-making! If you ever find yourself with spare complexity budget left over after making all your decisions you can always use it to make decisions about how you make decisions, ad infinitum, and yesterday's high-level decisions become today's menial labour. The only way out of that cycle is to develop intelligences (software, hardware, wetware…) that can not only reason better at a particular level of abstraction than humans but also climb the ladder faster than humanity as a whole — singularity, to use a slightly out-of-vogue term. If we as a species fall off the bottom of the complexity window then there will no longer be a productivity-driven incentive to ideate, though I rather look forward to a luxury-goods market of all-organic artisanal ideas :)