> What we used to have is a big ball of mud. Modern languages made it easier to decompose a system into components. But what we really want is easily decomposing a system into modular components which is yet unsolved.

We need to take modularity a lot more seriously, and by this I don't mean just making things more pluggable, but also well-defined component boundaries and contracts on them.

Sadly a lot of this stuff is moving at a glacial pace, and little of it is mainstream. Design-by-contract was introduced 40 years ago, and yet no mainstream PL in use offers anything past the bare minimum (asserts). Niche tech like Ada SPARK is picking it up, but even there it took decades.

And now we throw AI into the mix and expect things to work. Madness.