PC accessories have been easy during the era of ifixit, though.

I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card.

Oh, so many fun evenings working out which devices could share IRQs and configuring software to work around the corner cases that developed. Serial mice, PS/2 mice, plus bus mice of several different varieties. XT, AT, and PS/2 keyboards. The veritable plethora of mutually-incompatible CD-ROM interfaces.

A clock card: A whole friggin' card with a clock chip and a battery, just to keep track of wall time. (And the software to make it work.)

I even remember SCSI, which was famously renowned for the number of goat sacrifices that were required to to make it work. (Except, I remember SCSI very fondly. CD burner, reader, 7-disc Nakamichi changer, flatbed scanner, DDS tape, and a few IBM Ultrastar 9ES hard drives all sharing the same bus? Sure, why not? It worked. But it took some care to get there.)

It's simple today. Want more storage? SATA is easy (and everyone will make fun of you, but USB 3 works great for a hard drive in a desktop rig). m.2 is compact, and only has a couple of variations. Video cards -- even multiples of them -- just slot right into motherboards and they don't even have jumbers to configure. Sound cards are forgotten. RAM comes in standard forms that only change once every decade or so. Input devices, basic NICs, and video capture stuff can just plug in with USB. The USB ports themselves can be multiplied using hubs.

It's pretty good today, isn't it? Am I missing something?

> Am I missing something?

lol. the original statement was that AI written code is a mess "under the hood"

And I tried to say - cars were "simple/fixable under the hood", then emissions made them a mess then some (specific) cars became simple/fixable again.

but my analogy wasn't clear, so I tried saying that computers went the same way.

started out with simple s-100 bus/pc with slots... but at some point they became no-user-servicable-parts-inside (per ifixit) but some have gotten servicable again.

in summary - I think AI can make a mess, but maybe AI can make clean/maintainable code someday.

maybe there will need to be an AIfixit.com to rate models.