Software Has Changed

A tweet from Jamon Holmgren inspired some thoughts about how software has changed, from a developer's perspective. He says:

I've been spending a lot of time talking to experienced software engineers lately and when you get in a 1:1 candid conversation, everyone is rather shell-shocked by how quickly and drastically things have changed.

It's true.

We're building faster, but not necessarily better. We're building more, but not necessarily more of the right things. We've traded flow states for "thinking…" states. We throw away code without a thought because experiments are cheap.

But that also means the good devs do more. We're not exhausted from writing every piece of code by hand, so we have the time and energy to review, polish, refactor, and add those extra features. We can solve technical debt before it ever lands in main.

I still love this field, but it changed overnight. It's not the world I chose to live in, but I'm making the best of it and learning to build faster than I could before. I think at a higher level now, and that helps avoid tunnel vision.

A question I find myself pondering: if the end result is solid code that I've thoroughly reviewed and trust, does it truly matter how it was created?