You're added premise is an implicit point of Luu's article. Or perhaps the point is that Brooks' framing doesn't really apply when you can avoid programming al

You're added premise is an implicit point of Luu's article. Or perhaps the point is that Brooks' framing doesn't really apply when you can avoid programming altogether. The silver bullet is open source. The ability to utilize the millions of hours of other people's work to accomplish your programming task is the game changer, and is what makes formerly complicated tasks trivial. The essential complexity of the software I deal with is about two orders of magnitude more complicated than stuff I dealt with 20 years ago. I'm not sure that 20 years from now it will be another two orders of magnitude, but perhaps with utility computing and higher level orchestration concepts, it very well might be.