Great piece, very straightforward examples, although I did have to squint for quite a while to grok the Closure portion.

I am currently building a piece of very modular software and it has been the hardest-to-design project of my entire career. I would never be allotted this amount of time-effort at any job I have held to make something this robust and clearly defined. Many aspects of this project have taken 3-5 rounds trying-and-trashing to get an abstraction that is uncomplicated.

This is precisely why vibe coding is so successful for building tiny isolated scripts, and so disastrous for anything else. It's just really dang hard to build something large and simple.

Personally, I'm big fan of those pipes mentioned. And the tooling that can be created around those _simple_ "primitives". Comparison to Google drive is obscure, in a way that it compares one gigantic piece of software into these small and simple.

Bottom line is probably true, but if you are an open-source maintainer mentioned, and you have only so few hours to spend, you just cannot create those gigantic softwares either. You need to choose from the cards on your hand.