I would argue that a good chunk programming tools don't reduce complexity at all. Just shifts it to well understood "accidental" complexity. Your program needs

I would argue that a good chunk programming tools don't reduce complexity at all. Just shifts it to well understood "accidental" complexity. Your program needs a way to store and retrieve key:value pairs. It's an inherent complexity your program requires. You solve it by using an industry standard product like Redis. Now your code doesn't contain any key:value logic itself! complexity avoided right? Nope just shifted and doubled or trippled in size to boot. No KV logic but now you have to have db libraries, parameter parsers and sanitizers, sockets between services, etc, etc, so on, and so forth. It's well trod ground, your IDE will generate 90% of that type of code for you. you throw a library or template or whatever at it and go about your day. Software isn't just your code. Now your application that needed K:V storage has the entire bug and exploit surface area of your code and Redis. Do this 20, 30, 100 times with other libraries and packages. Each time your code gets a little smaller, a little slicker looking and the actual running software is an unholy monster spread across an entire server cluster. Oh well, your code is clean and tidy.