From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case.
This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.
You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards.
Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget about native, it’s webshit or else you can double those figures… for one platform. What’s that? Your TAM is only (the size of the entire home PC market circa 1995)? Oh forget about it then, you’ll never get funded”
It seems like we’ve gotten far less efficient.
I’m skeptical this problem has to do with code-writing, and so am skeptical that LLMs are going to even get us back to our former baseline.
Counterpoint: What might have happened is that we expect software to do a lot more than we did in the 90s, and we really don't expect our software features to be static after purchase.
I agree that we sometimes make things incredibly complex for no purpose in SE, but also think that we do a rose-colored thing where we forget how shitty things were in the 1990s.
Outside the specific case of Apple's "magical" cross-device interoperability, I can't think of many areas where this is true. When I step outside the Apple ecosystem, stuff feels pretty much the same as it did in 2005 or so, except it's all using 5-20x the resources (and is a fully enshittified ad-filled disjointed mess of an OS in Windows' case)...
> I agree that we sometimes make things incredibly complex for no purpose in SE, but also think that we do a rose-colored thing where we forget how shitty things were in the 1990s.
... aside from that everything crashes way, way less now than in the '90s, but a ton of that's down to OS and driver improvements. Our tools are supposed to be handling most of the rest. If that improved stability is imposing high costs on development of user-facing software, something's gone very wrong.
You're right that all the instability used to be truly awful, but I'm not sure it's better now because software delivery slowed way down (in general—maybe for operating systems and drivers)
Categorically, I cannot think of a single current software product that existed then, that I would rather be using. 90s browsers sucked, famously. 90s Photoshop is barely useable compared to modern Photoshop. Text editors and word processors are so much better (when was the last time you heard of someone losing all of their work? Now we don't even bother with frequent saving and a second floppy for safety). I can remember buying software n the 1990s and it just didn't install or work, at all, despite meeting all of the minimum specs.
Seriously, go use a computer and software from the 1990s or 2000s, you are forgetting. I'm also not convinced on your assertion that software delivery has slowed down. I get weekly updates on most of my programs. Most software in the 1990s was lucky to get yearly updates...