React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason
May 9, 2024
The evolution of software development over the past decade has been very frustrating. Little of it seems to makes sense, even to those of us who are right in the middle of it.We usually only notice trends and popular frameworks and libraries after they’ve exploded in popularity. By that time they’re often so far removed from their original context that their initial technical merit is a hard-to-distinguish quiet signal in the overwhelming noise of hype, grift, and false promises.
I’m a fan of systems thinking, of turning rhetorical “why does X” or “why don’t they just Y” questions into “why does X”.
Here Baldur Bjarnason argues the reason certain seemingly less than ideal solutions become entrenched is that they are actually goos solutions–just not in the way we intend them. Well worth a read, though you may not agree. Initially.
