I started getting into webdev using PHP almost 30 years ago. So I'm probably biased. But when you're developing on just one machine in one language and you can do most of the stuff you need to do within that one system, you can make progress very fast, and the system can support you coding fast (I'm not proud of it but I was live patching production code via SSH and refreshing a web page as fast as humanly possible to make sure it didn't break).

I believe there are several ways achieve that analogy today, even though the technology we have access to (and our own demands) has exponentially grown in complexity. I am happy to see more people thinking about it.

[Side track: I am personally not a fan of "break it up into many tiny systems" (microservices, etc) since it removes that agility of logic/state moving around the system. I just see an attempt to codify the analog of a very large human organization.]

Now that AI lets a single person (and in some cases, no person at all!) write several orders of magnitude more code than they would possibly have been able to, the requirements of our systems will change too, and our old ways of working is cracking at the seams. In a way we're perhaps building up a whole new foundation, sending our AIs to run 50-year-old terminal commands. Maybe that's all we needed all along, but I do find it strange that AI is forced to work within a highly fragmented system, where 95%, if not 99%, of all startups that write code with AI while hiding it from the user, are essentially following the recipe of: (1) launch VM (2) tell AI to install Next.js and good luck.

I too have a horse in this race and have come to similar conclusions as the article: there is a way to create primitives on top of bare metal that work really well for small and large applications alike, and let you express what you really wanted across compute/memory/network. And I believe that with AI we can go back to first principles and rethink how we do things, because this time the technology is not just for groups of humans. I find this really exciting!