[helsinkiandrew]

I'd say that the article left out Software Reuse - talked a lot more about in the late 90's early 00's than now.

You could argue that coding with LLM's is a form of software reuse, that removes some of its disadvantages.

[bluGill]

If you have been in the industry for a few decades you will be able to think of several hundred "silver bullets" that made great promises - some even turned out to be great ideas, but none where the 10x revolution that they promised.

The article is a good summary of major movements through the decades without so much that whole point is lost in the details. I would have put in a slightly different set of things if I wanted to write that article, but the point would still stand and I would leave out many things that could be put in but would be too much noise.

[vladms]

Maybe that's due to Amdahl's law applied to software. Everybody imagines that task X which is improved by 10x is 100% of the total work, so you will get 10x overall benefit, when in fact might be something like 20% of the work, so your overall benefit is only 1.21x .

[utopiah]

I'm not familiar with Software Reuse but if it's about re-using software itself one advantage of a live codebase is that it's understood in the head of a human being. That means when an issue is opened, a person remembers if it's a new issue or not. It's not "just" semantic search where that person knows only if it's genuinely new or not (and thus can be closed) but rather why it exists in the first place. Is it the result of the current architecture, dependency choice, etc or rather simply a "shallow" bug that can be resolved with fixing a single function.

[zozbot234]

It's talked about a lot now, too - that's ultimately what is meant by such terms as Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM).

[richm44]

SBOMs are more an attempt to solve some of the problems introduced by software reuse. https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/sbom/ has some interesting talks about the successes and failures of them.