Tooling Advances Prove Brooks Right

Every advance in software tooling proves Brooks right.

Each new tool — Agile, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, AI code generation — eliminates accidental complexity while leaving essential complexity untouched. This makes the craft dimension proportionally more dominant over time, not less. The ratio moves against directive governance: as the accidental gets automated away, what remains is increasingly the irreducible design judgment that no reporting chain can transmit and no metric can capture.