Japanese Cars and the Tech Industry

I've been working in "tech" for years doing so called embedded software. It's the type of software that runs in an electronic gizmo you might own, like a Roku, or a cable modem, or a stereo, bike computer or whatever. There are countless such items out there in the world, and there's some team of software people making them work.

In the past 10-15 years, I'd say that particular niche of tech, like the rest of tech, "jumped the shark". At some point in the early 2000s, maybe around 2008-10, the task of writing that type of software subtly shifted from creating something new to "integrating" existing components that other people wrote. That same thing happened all through the tech industry.

"Integrating" systems seems much easier than creating things from scratch, but it often doesn't work out like people hope and generally products based on that approach end up being pretty janky and fragile. Tech gizmos "created from scratch" can also be janky, but in my experience, the products built more or less from scratch did not have the "janky" characteristic.

Anyway, I think the "integrated tech junk" problem will get significantly worse over the next few years because of AI generated slop code, which will take the "engineer" job down another notch from being an integrator to being a slopmaster.

I think this is actually a great opportunity in tech similar to the opportunity Japanese car manufacturers had in the 70s and 80s. They focused on reliability and value when the big three in the US were focused on style and marketing. I guess the analogous scenario in tech would be to make software and devices that actually work instead of focusing on AI generated slop, or "natural language" AI interfaces.