Comment by abtinf

Here's my "pro-stagnation" argument: stagnation and stability are pretty much the same thing. There's a lot of infrastructure that we take for granted because it always works (water purification and distribution, bridges and roads, electrical generation and transmission, automobile engines, the quality of gasoline, the safety of food, etc). You trust that these things will work the way you expect, because they don't change very quickly. Is that stagnation or stability?

Code that changes introduces new bugs, new bugs can be new security issues. A lower velocity would hopefully mean less changes but higher quality, more thoroughly tested changes.

Let's start by fixing the language. It's not stagnation, it's predictability.

Civil and mechanical engineering are not static fields. They come up with new materials, new methods, new ideas. They have tooling to understand the impact of a proposed change and standard ways to test and validate things. It is much easier to predict how long it will take to both design and build things. These are all good things.

We would all benefit from fewer cryptoAI startups and frameworks of the week and more robust toolchains tested and evolved over decades.