Yeah this is what kills me. Most of the problems we solve are pretty simple. We just made the stacks really painful and now LLMs look sensible because they are trained to reproduce that same old crap mindlessly.

What the hell are we really doing?

What looked sensible to me is designing a table, form and report in Microsoft Access in 30 minutes without requiring 5 engineers and writing 50k lines of React and fucking around with kubernetes and microservices to get there.

LLMs just paste over the pile of shit we build on.

cold take speculation: the architecture astronautics of the Java era probably destroyed a lot of the desire for better abstractions and thinking over copy-pasting, minimalism and open standards

hot take speculation: we base a lot of our work on open source software and libraries, but a lot of that software is cheaply made, or made for the needs of a company that happens to open-source it. the pull of the low-quality "standardized" open source foundations is preventing further progress.