Every year or two I like to re-read my 25th Anniversary Edition of Mythical Man Month (which included No Silver Bullet). Every time I pull out something different.

I think that the willingness to rely completely on OSS libraries has fundamentally changed SWE practices from 2004 when I earned my first paycheck. We all just agreed that it's okay to use this library where you don't know who wrote it, there is no contract on it, and everyone just accepts that it will probably have massive security holes, and you hope the maintainer will still be around when those are announced. This was not true in 1986, and it mostly wasn't true in 2006, but it feels like every week we get more announcements on new CVE's that it turns out half the internet- very much including products people paid real hard currency for- were using. And we just accepted it.

And yeah, mostly the ability to CD a new deployment immediately- plus force a download of a patched version- meant we could get away with it, but it trained us all to accept lower quality standards. And I feel it in my bones, that the experience of using software is markedly worse than in 1996 or 2006, despite vastly more CPU, RAM, and disk.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/