Probably for the same reason that SV companies hiring thousands of developers struggled to improve their product much past the original product, that was built by a handful of people.
Scale in headcount was a tactic to get investment, then you had to find stuff for everyone to work on. Suddenly people have the time to engineer so hard that we get runtime JSON defined CSS rendering engines to produce the same buttons we've had since 1995, instead of just writing a stylesheet and html.
Code output velocity from AI threatens to be useful, except it's also prone to over-engineering and burning tokens on the unnecessary. It's learned from the best after all. My suspicion is there is a lot getting done, but it's just not that impactful to flagship products.
As others have noted, there is a lot of new work going into passion projects that would have never happened otherwise, and that is cool. But I wouldn't hold my breath for SV tech to become super pragmatic and effective.
Scale in headcount was a tactic to get investment, then you had to find stuff for everyone to work on. Suddenly people have the time to engineer so hard that we get runtime JSON defined CSS rendering engines to produce the same buttons we've had since 1995, instead of just writing a stylesheet and html.
Code output velocity from AI threatens to be useful, except it's also prone to over-engineering and burning tokens on the unnecessary. It's learned from the best after all. My suspicion is there is a lot getting done, but it's just not that impactful to flagship products.
As others have noted, there is a lot of new work going into passion projects that would have never happened otherwise, and that is cool. But I wouldn't hold my breath for SV tech to become super pragmatic and effective.