Software is a mess. Everything feels bloated and sluggish. Bugs pile up. Updates break more than they fix. Even basic apps demand absurd amounts of computing power. And innovation? If you count shuffling UI elements or slapping a ChatGPT button onto everything, sure.

The problem isn’t bad engineers. It’s that building software has turned into an obstacle course. Every step—writing, reviewing, deploying—is buried under layers of tools, approvals, and abstractions. A simple change takes weeks. We spend more time wrangling complexity than shipping code. No wonder quality is tanking, and real progress feels nonexistent.

So how did we get here? More importantly, how do we stop making it worse? Fixing the Googles and Metas of the world might be out of reach, but your projects don’t have to follow the same path. This talk is about cutting through the mess—how AI, smart tooling, and better developer workflows can actually help instead of adding more noise. Let’s figure out how to build good software again.