Looking at my mid-2000s enterprise shelf. The challenge was always managing complexity. Back then we enforced boundaries and formal contracts which created their own complexity. Now we have low-code tools that make connecting everything trivial. Did we trade centralized silos for distributed chaos?
I remember that complexity that arose from committee-generated standards and a misguided eagerness for structure, both in protocols (WS-Deathstar) and software infra (J2EE). But I wouldn't completely conflate that with centralised silos...
... Some good (sanity) emerged from the "Web" Services quagmire, while silos remained. The RESTful OData protocol, flowing with, not fighting the protocol underneath, is one example, of course.
Jan 19, 2026 06:42Agreed REST/OData was sanity vs WS-*. But we're recreating the point-to-point mess ESBs tried to solve. Zapier/n8n made ad-hoc integration easy, now MCP makes it trivial. Zero visibility into what's connected or who has access. We've just distributed the chaos.
Where's Dr Ian Malcolm when we need him?
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
More generally, I think we're reaching the summit of an inflection point that folks seem to be ignoring (while climbing higher) - _more_ code is the _opposite_ of what we should be aiming for.
