I have been thinking a lot about where software engineering is heading, and I keep arriving at the same conclusion: this time is different. I know how that sounds. Whenever people worry about the tech industry, the usual reassurance is that we have been here before. There was the dot-com crash, then the financial crisis, and both times the industry recovered and came back bigger. I do not think that reassurance holds anymore, and I want to show why rather than just say it. When I want to r...