So I actually would disagree with this. I think from the time ides have shown up quality has gotten worse. Photoshop 3 used to be much more performant than the modern day Photoshop. Slack is one of the worst performing apps I've ever had the misfortune of using. Overall, I think software quality has definitely declined from the earlier times.
The surface area of apis would be limited because you would be constrained by what you can keep in your head, but now you're free to just add hundreds of different methods.
One of my theories is that Java actually has so much sprawl is because how good the IDEs were for Java so I think overall, it definitely adds to brain rot.
> One of my theories is that Java actually has so much sprawl is because how good the IDEs were for Java
Not sure what came first - chicken or the egg - on that one, but I remember years ago discussing vim vs an IDE for writing code with workmates. We were writing PHP and I used a plain text editor at first then moved to an IDE, while the older devs stuck to vim. I pointed out that they probably couldn't do that if we were writing Java.
The surface area of apis would be limited because you would be constrained by what you can keep in your head, but now you're free to just add hundreds of different methods.
One of my theories is that Java actually has so much sprawl is because how good the IDEs were for Java so I think overall, it definitely adds to brain rot.