I wanted the author to see how this relates elsewhere and identify the forces at work.

The solution is not just "do only what's needed by the customer".

There are emerging environments where the conditions don't force previously-rational decisions, and where assumptions no longer apply. New tools in the battlefields of yore, new beliefs and practices in cultures...

The stunning march of compute hardware in the last 50 years has changed many such conditions.

Those who work with new freedom - liberated from the strictures of old gods, able to harm enemies without putting themselves at risk, with the time freed from foraging to build - have to identify the new constraints and conditions at work.

And sometimes to make the conditions that make for sanity: Solon got ancient Greece out of a stagnating pickle by getting the wealthy to release the poor from debtors' jails but sign them up for the military that could defend lands and trade routes, if they subjected themselves to land-owner self-government and the annual ostracism of one person who went too far.

Capitalism used competitive markets to liberate but discipline business, but right now the scaling power of compute leads to winner-take-all, and the openness of the West is seeding closed systems (military or foreign) with the power to destroy the liberal governance that sustains it. In software we're stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: an Anthropic+OpenAI duopoly or Chinese control over the lifeblood of enterprise.

If there were someone who in the large had structured the freedom of software to make its practitioners and stakeholders sane, they'd be a good candidate to steer us through this situation, so this freedom wouldn't drive us insane.