The programmer ability decline is probably just because it's easy now. There are still amazing programmers, it's just that a "mediocre programmer" was hard to find before, when getting ANYTHING done took a ton of skill.
As long as the number of excellent programmers is steady or increasing, I'm not too disappointed if there's a bunch of average ones too, as long as those average ones have great tools that let them still make good software.
It does seem like some of the very top innovative projects are done by one person.
I have very little direct experience with software small enough for an individual to understand, but it seems like a lot of our modern mega-apps are elaborations on one really great coder's innovation from the 80s, and real knock your socks off innovation only happens every few years.
Engineers that don't understand or care about UX can be a really bad problem, attempting to bolt on a UI on something meant to be a command line suite is usually highly leaky.
The opposite seems to be slightly less of a problem, to a point, almost nobody writes sorting algorithms, and writing your own database is usually just needless incompatibility.
I definitely am glad it's a spectrum, because having absolutely zero idea about the real context gets you in trouble, and stuff like media codecs are hard enough we'd lose half the worlds devs(including me) if you needed to understand them to use them.
As long as the number of excellent programmers is steady or increasing, I'm not too disappointed if there's a bunch of average ones too, as long as those average ones have great tools that let them still make good software.
It does seem like some of the very top innovative projects are done by one person.
I have very little direct experience with software small enough for an individual to understand, but it seems like a lot of our modern mega-apps are elaborations on one really great coder's innovation from the 80s, and real knock your socks off innovation only happens every few years.
Engineers that don't understand or care about UX can be a really bad problem, attempting to bolt on a UI on something meant to be a command line suite is usually highly leaky.
The opposite seems to be slightly less of a problem, to a point, almost nobody writes sorting algorithms, and writing your own database is usually just needless incompatibility.
I definitely am glad it's a spectrum, because having absolutely zero idea about the real context gets you in trouble, and stuff like media codecs are hard enough we'd lose half the worlds devs(including me) if you needed to understand them to use them.