>I think we can consolidate all the important knowledge and pre-packaged work, [...]. I think we can make it so nobody ever has to go through the painful proces

>I think we can consolidate all the important knowledge and pre-packaged work, [...]. I think we can make it so nobody ever has to go through the painful process of learning by trial and error ever again. Just an fyi... that goal is only possible for ideas that have stabilized and broad consensus has converged into widely accepted best practices. Yesterday's "hacks" that are insanely complex get vetted (or modified and replaced) and eventually get folded into the baseline of Normal Things Everybody Knows. But... the world isn't standing still and it evolves in complexity. Therefore, there's always new complexity that requires new hacks that everybody reinvents. At a high level, the cycle looks like: chaos --> create order --> new chaos again We see a chaos of hacks and complexity. We then notice recurring patterns in the disparate hacks and extract some unifying principle that can "simplify" the complexity. If we stop here, it seems we've tamed disorder and everything should be able to be documented and people can stop wasting time repeating everyone else's past mistakes. But all we've really done is raise the baseline of systems sophistication. There's always a new delta of chaos and complexity. E.g. In the 1980s, sysadmins might implement a rudimentary sync of userids with a shell script and copying "/etc/passwd" files around. But we notice that's chaotic and stupid and doesn't scale. So we rationalize the system with a more unified technology such as a LDAP identity server. But utopia is still not achieved because while LDAP might be ok for employees' sign-on accounts, it's not suitable for millions of customer accounts of a B2C web business. The complexity treadmill is neverending! >GruntWork, I love what you're doing, but I'm also hoping to make your business obsolete. If companies like GruntWork and AWS are properly doing their job, they will never be obsolete because the changing world keeps throwing new demands at us and this constant delta of new chaos is always there that needs to be "solved".