Complexity is the ceiling: software design in the age of AI coding
AI has made writing code faster than ever. The harder work is understanding a system and changing it without breaking it. That has not gotten cheaper, and it now decides how much you can hand to a machine.
Introduction
In 1987, in an essay called “No Silver Bullet,” Fred Brooks predicted that no tool or technique would bring a tenfold gain in software productivity within a decade [1]. The decades since have largely proven him right, and the reason is that his argument never rested on the technology of its day. Brooks split the difficulty of building software into two kinds. Accidental complexity is the incidental effort our tools impose: syntax, boilerplate, plumbing. Essential complexity is what the problem itself demands: working out what the system must do, and designing a structure that holds up as it grows. Tools, he argued, only ever chip away at the accidental....
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