Comment by japhyr

> Previous industrial revolutions externalised their costs onto environments that seemed infinite until they weren't. Software ecosystems are no different: dependency chains, maintenance burdens, security surfaces that compound as output scales. Technical debt is the pollution of the digital world, invisible until it chokes the systems that depend on it. In an era of mass automation, we may find that the hardest problem is not production, but stewardship. Who maintains the software that no one owns?

This whole article was interesting, but I really like the conclusion. I think the comparison to the externalized costs of industrialization, which we are finally facing without any easy out, is a good one to make. We've been on the same path for a long time in the software world, as evidenced by the persistent relevance of that one XKCD comic.

There's always going to be work to do in our field. How appealing that work is, and how we're treated as we do that work, is a wide open question.