The selling point was you just do the bare minimum and otto figures out what other specific things you need to get your project up and running. That's not scope, that's magic.
Lots of useful, successful things appear to be magic (especially in their selling points). Early Heroku is a great example in this space.
I didn't see anything in the initial premise of otto that was technically untenable. We could speculate about the "challenges" - the scope was too wide/unbounded, it was open source, it was a distraction from other company goals, it didn't gain enough early traction - but that's simply speculation without details from the creators.
I didn't see anything in the initial premise of otto that was technically untenable. We could speculate about the "challenges" - the scope was too wide/unbounded, it was open source, it was a distraction from other company goals, it didn't gain enough early traction - but that's simply speculation without details from the creators.