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by mschuster91 75 days ago
> People are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame.

Not to complexity, but to abstraction. The more something is abstracted away, the more fungible "developers" become, to the eventual tune of Claude Code.

No one cares that trying to debug a modern application is as hellish as its performance, the KPI that executives go for is employment budget.

2 comments

It might be really efficient when you "vibe" and don't know exactly what you want.

On serious projects, it feels like even Claude Code could be more efficient with simple technologies, providing near-instant build and debug. With reduced abstractions and output looking like input, it can better understand how to fix things rather than trying to guess how to manipulate framework state or injecting hacks.

I don't know if Next.js, TanStack, etc are more abstract than Rails, Django, etc. They're undoubtedly more complex though. I also find it hard to believe that it's some sort of conspiracy by management to make developers more fungible. I've seen plenty of developers choose complexity with no outside pressure.
Next certainly feels more complex than Laravel or Rails while only providing most of the view layer and a client-server protocol based on React.

You're still left alone with i18n, auth, and pretty much anything to do with the backend, all of which the Rails of this world have you covered.