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My biggest takeaway from “LLMs are useful for some aspects of writing software, and lots of people like it” is still that the existing tools we made for writing software are bad. 🧵👇

Thomas Spooks 🎃👻💀

@thomasfuchs.at

5 July

The last 20 years were spent on ever more complex layer cakes of frameworks, humongous IDEs and more new and “improved” programming languages that I can count—yet many programmers prefer a chatbot over them.

Thomas Spooks 🎃👻💀

@thomasfuchs.at

5 July

How did the tools get so bad? It’s a mixture of ego-driven hubris, gate-keeping and tech-wanking. I think both proprietary platforms and open source have been harmful to quality; both contributing to cancerous cruft, overwhelming complexity and toxic environments.

Thomas Spooks 🎃👻💀

@thomasfuchs.at

5 July

The sheer amount of knowledge a developer has to have to implement even a trivial application today is mind-boggling when compared to to say the 1990s. And most of this knowledge isn’t about deep technical topics or about software design; it’s wrestling with ever-changing deep fried layer cakes.

M. Tucson

@mtucson.bsky.social

5 July

Seems to me you missed the Enterprise Java Stack, software has decluttered a lot compared to the 90s and 20xx

Thomas Spooks 🎃👻💀

@thomasfuchs.at

Java Enterprise Edition was first released in December of 1999. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

5/7/26, 6:51 pm0 reposts0 likes

M. Tucson

@mtucson.bsky.social

5 July

Not too relevant in any case. I just found the comment amusing, reminded me of 2012-ish, when node dev complained of a framework explosion and an excess of complexity, when it was orders of magnitude simpler than the usual JEE suspects

M. Tucson

@mtucson.bsky.social

5 July

1999 would be the 90s right? You’re probably referring to J2EE. By the time it was released Enterprise Java Beans among other RMI-based Java Enterprise solutions were there (and CORBA even earlier)