I think you can get to "easier" if you have the a) budget to hire the people that are good enough and b) the time and discipline to create the abstractions so it gets easier over time.

Most shops will not have that kind of time and money, so the default will be "harder". Also, to be fair, most shops will not be led by individuals that understand why ensuring things get easier / faster is important in the short term, so that also complicates things a bit.

> Clean Code (the book, not the concept), etc.

Thank you for drawing the distinction. I've noticed that while ~80% of Uncle Bob's ideas are good, he doesn't seem to have been very good at implementing them, and he often does so in ways that contradict other principles. Much the same with Fowler and other names from that era/community.

> But the surprising thing was how "obvious" the dynamic was in both cases, even though the two cases are exact opposites of each other! If you ask one group or the other they'd just tell you that, well, that's simply how programming works. Of course things get (easier|harder) over time. That's built into people's fundamental understanding of what programming is and how to do it. And that's exactly what I mean by incommensurable paradigms.

Although I mostly see it get harder over time, it certainly feels like it's supposed to get easier.

That's an interesting point, and maybe that actually also explains the difference of people that believe that AI is making them more productive and people that believe it doesn't; if you never think about the architecture, then it becomes more slop over time, and it becomes harder to do anything. If you do think about architecture, development becomes easier and faster all the time. AI just accelerates both processes.

I’ve seen both side of the fence and if there’s one quality that seems to define that fence, it’s caring about the process. Both sides wants to archieve the same goal, but one care about the process (enough to make it less tedious) and the other don’t (whatever seems to work is Ok).

That’s why they say the best programmers are lazy. Not in the sense of avoiding any kind of work, but avoiding the kind of senseless stuff that’s surely to come down the line if you’ve not taken care of the process