[theryan]

The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks is still a good read today and goes into depth about this topic. He called it the second system effect and considered it to be the most dangerous system an experienced developer will create.

His 'No Silver Bullet' theory may or may not stand up to what AI is doing today as well.

[skeeter2020]

From what I've seen it's standing up. His original statement/hypothesis is often misrepresented.

"there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."

If he had also included "volume" then AI would have disproved him! More anecdotally, the hands-on experiences of senior+ developers seem to firmly fall into the accidental camp, with the essence of software problem solving getting marginally easier as you'd expect with a new, powerful tool, but far from "solved".

[dasil003]

I agree with the quote as stated, but I would refactor it for a more powerful insight.

I do believe order of magnitude improvements in productivity and reliability are possible, but they don't come from technology or management technique, they come from simplicity. The simplest possible thing that gets the job done can be infinitely more reliable than whatever baroque contraption comes out of typical fog-of-war enterprise environments. The trick is having the judgement to understand what complexity is essential and how to distill things down to the most valuable essence. This is something AI will never be able to do, because the definition of value is in the eye of the human beholder.

[nemetroid]

It is interesting though that when he mentions AI as one of the non-silver bullets, one of the arguments is that the AI models of the time were problem-specific and not easily transferable.