Every generation of developers thinks software is getting simpler.
It's not.
We're just getting better at hiding complexity behind APIs, frameworks, and packages:
- We used to manually bundle JavaScript files. Then came Webpack. Today, many developers just use Vite or Next.js.
- We used to build authentication from scratch. Today, we use Clerk, Auth0, or Supabase Auth.
- We used to set up analytics pipelines ourselves. Today, we call "analytics.track()".
- We used to manage servers. Today, we deploy to Vercel or Render.
The hard part never disappears.
It just moves lower in the stack