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I think building modern software is not programming any more. Now is about putting together libraries and open source plumbing, doing a bit of customization then testing, testing, monitoring, then figuring out why things aren't working.

I remember writing a lot more simple stuff. Whole applications with maybe a handful of libraries. It was great.

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Spot on. This is why MIT moved away from feeding undergrads SICP: it was a sad realization that the reality of modern software development was less about building/understanding a world from first-principles, and more about finding yourself in a sea of libraries/frameworks and having to do enough "basic science" on them to discover how to make them do what you want (reliably).

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