> tamed through more responsive (agile) dev practices Sure, for a given project, you can make it more or less complex by taking different approaches. But there

> tamed through more responsive (agile) dev practices Sure, for a given project, you can make it more or less complex by taking different approaches. But there's some lower bound on essential complexity and when the product itself requires a lot of features that interact in complex ways, your essential complexity is going to be high. And once the complexity gets too high, every new feature you add starts making future features even harder & slower to add. (A few caveats: 1. You can of course argue that it doesn't really "need" all those features, and everyone would be better off by sacrificing a little on the user experience to make it a lot less complex, less buggy, cheaper to build/maintain, etc. 2. By the time you run into these issues, the program is large enough that some accidental complexity has snuck in, and it can be hard to estimate how much of your problem is from that vs how much is from the essential complexity.) Anyway, If a project never gets to that size where the essential complexity becomes unmanageable, then great. I'd agree it's probably a mistake to introduce extra complexity with microservices or anything else, and certainly some people make this mistake (or miscalculate whether their project will stay small and simple). But if it does get to that point, some of these solutions you mention like microservices can be an independent, constant complexity cost. Ideally each microservice itself is a small app with manageable complexity. On the other hand, a naive, monolithic app will continue to have its essential complexity grow super-linearly with variables like time, lines of code, number of developers, etc. The bet is that by introducing the new thing, you can bring the overall complexity of the entire system down. So my short answer would be "no" - in many large projects, essential complexity is growing faster than accidental complexity. This has led to a proliferation of tools to help bring it under control, and yes, if you look at these tools in isolation they are pretty complex. (And there are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of companies using these tools, if it is all just a waste of time then there's a massive business opportunity waiting for someone to undercut them)