#8 The Progress Paradox - Stagecoaches to AI
🥨 Snack #8: Every generation's "simple past" was someone else's nightmare
« Prev Snack | No next yet
Category: Life bytes
A few years ago, I was crossing the street with my 7-year-old son. Traffic was heavy, cars everywhere.
“You know,” I said, “in my time, there weren’t so many cars. Much safer for kids to cross streets.”
He looked up at me with those matter-of-fact eyes kids have and said:
“I know, Dad. You were using horse carriages back then...”
I opened my mouth to protest. Closed it. And started laughing.
That moment stuck with me.
The Pattern That Never Changes
Years later, that conversation echoes every time I hear someone in tech say “the old ways were simpler.” My son was 7. He had no real perception of time. But somehow, with that one line, he captured something I’d forgotten:
Every generation has the same conversation.
And every generation is both right and wrong.
What We Remember vs. What We Forget
The father remembers:
Fewer cars on the road
Kids could play in streets
Quieter neighborhoods
What he forgets:
Horse shit everywhere
No traffic lights or safety regulations
Epidemic outbreaks
Limited mobility (couldn’t travel far)
Horses kicked and bit children
In Technology World?
Same truth: every era thinks it’s the most complicated.
Senior Dev: “Code was cleaner before all these frameworks!”
Junior Dev: “You mean when you manually managed memory and wrote your own XML parsers?”
Both are right. Both are wrong.
Fewer frameworks ≠ Better software (We had fewer problems because we solved fewer problems).
Simpler codebases ≠ More stable (We just couldn’t scale to handle today’s challenges).
“The old way” ≠ Actually better (We remember the constraints as simplicity)
Why This Matters for Software
What we’re nostalgic about:
Monolithic codebases (”everything in one place!”)
Manual deployments (”we knew exactly what was deployed!”)
Limited dependencies (”no npm hell!”)
What we’re forgetting:
Deployment took weeks of manual work
Single point of failure killed everything
Can’t scale teams beyond 5-10 developers
“Works on my machine” was an accepted excuse
No automated testing or CI/CD
Progress Isn’t About Fewer Problems
It’s about having better problems to solve.
Horse carriages didn’t have traffic jams. But they couldn’t scale to modern city populations.
Monoliths didn’t have distributed tracing complexity. But they couldn’t handle modern user loads or team sizes.
Manual deployments didn’t have CI/CD pipeline failures. But they took months and had zero rollback capability.
Kubernetes isn’t “simple.” But it solves problems that were literally impossible in 2005.
The CEO One-Liner
“Legacy nostalgia mistakes fewer capabilities for fewer problems.”
We don’t have more complexity today because we’re doing it wrong. We have more complexity because we’re solving harder problems.
The Stagecoach Drivers Said the Same Thing
When cars were invented, stagecoach drivers complained:
“These automobiles are dangerous! Too fast! Too complicated! Nobody knows how to maintain them!”.
They were right about the problems. They were wrong about going back.
My Personal Reflection
My son is a teenager now. He probably doesn’t remember that conversation. But I do. Because every time a senior dev tells me “code was cleaner before frameworks”, I hear a 7-year-old’s voice: “You mean with stagecoaches, Dad?”.
Some patterns never change. Even when everything else does.
Cheers!
Miro - The TechMetaphorist
Want More Software Stories?
This Snack is part of the 8bytes! The Software Restaurant newsletter, where complex tech concepts become digestible stories.
Here I serve:
🍕 Full comic episodes (bi-weekly)
🥨 Quick Snacks like this one
No spam. No sales pitches. Just tech stories that even your grandma can understand (and your manager will pay for).
Illustration credits: Comic scenes conceptualized by 8bytes! and rendered by Nano Banana.