Is the answer "because tools for themselves were one of the first things developers made"? That's like a forty year old market that's already gone through conso

Is the answer "because tools for themselves were one of the first things developers made"? That's like a forty year old market that's already gone through consolidation and commoditization. The author talks about how a lot of the tools currently being pitched are not that useful day to day - the static analyzer, say, that shows you the ten thousand things you could improve but never actually will. Lots of devs out there using print statements instead of proper debuggers, so even the existing tools often offer far more than they think they need to learn! From there, my guess would be that the space of truly useful groundbreaking tools that wouldn't be just competing with a good-enough free one or an established incumbent is pretty well explored. This isn't as true for new areas - Kubernetes management interfaces tend to majorly suck, say, especially if you aren't a keyboard fiend who's going to get the hang of k9s quickly - but new areas are also niches that could be risky to try to build a company in. And probably also still suffers from the "don't know what I don't know" issue. "Why aren't developers more interested in tools" is an interesting resulting question, to me, then. I think it probably has to do with the business-driven focus on building new systems and new features at high speed. We aren't building code to last for more than a few years, in many cases, so how deep is it justifiable to go on a particular block of it?