The nature of software prevents experience.
This feels like a profound statement about programming work. And at the same time, I find myself pushing back on it in that we end up encountering things that are enough like something else but can’t be encapsulated in a library that experience still counts, whether that surfaces in the form of common practices (algorithms, design patterns, programming idioms, etc.) or just plain experience (I’ve seen this king of bug before).
Out of context, I intended it to express an ideal, that we should strive to encapsulate our experience, of those similarities.
One barrier is insufficient data to formalize just what that similarity is, and how it applies across different scenarios, especially when hidden amongst other factors.
Arguably, ChatGPT is a way of capturing such similarities - though not in a library.
I agree your suggestion of standard practices is difficult to capture. They are a kind of language for communication with other programmers, so encapsulating them defeats their purpose. Debugging is another good one - if the same type of bug keeps coming up, can we automate it away? If so, is that solution "software".
Another task that is difficult to capture is defining the problem, because this involves the world, with all its detail and complexity to cut through - though some would say that "isn't software".
In the case of the widget factory, you get many attempts at building exactly the same thing. In a typical software project, there's only ever one thing, and with each change in each increment, you're constantly changing the design and construction of that single, increasingly complicated thing.
From this perspective, both the case studies of the Empire state building and the Polaris missile system are much better approximations of how incremental design and delivery work in software projects than the mental model of a factory churning out indistinguishable widgets.
One can argue most floors in the empire state building are pretty similar, so experience gained while designing and building the 3rd floor can apply to the 53rd, and to some degree that's true. But if we mistake our floor building for zipper manufacturing and conclude this means we will be able to keep adding another 25 floors per quarter and extending the height of the building indefinitely, as we gain more and more experience at building floors, boy are we are in for a big surprise. The floors aren't independent, the project is to design and deliver a single system - the building - each increment during the project modifies that single thing. We'd better have some people involved who are thinking really hard about how the entire system is going to come together, what constraints the whole system is under, and testing our design and build assumptions.
That you could also apply to all other kind of craft (music, painting, sculpture, woodworking, building, etc.): you _could_ understand it of having a limited set of tools, techniques and vocabulary, to serve about often the same kind of output.
But now, output still vary greatly to the accustomed eye/ear/body, and how you get to that output even more so.
Experience (and taste, which refines with it) will always make a difference: how the need is understood, which technique to apply, which hypothesis to form, which to explore or relegate, how to plan/distribute work (on one’s own or on a team), how it will feel working on it, how people will be satisfied, how fast, how well, how costly, etc. all the way to the finished « thing ».
Edit: a very specific/limited example: working on the very same project from the different perspectives of a large worldwide consultancy team, a local-based design/tech studio, or a two-people startup team will be a hell of a ride because from project to tech to business to people, expectations, vocabulary, behavior, speed of execution, focus, know-how, freedom to experiment, tools, so many stuff will differ.
But we are all to be « haunted » by our own experience if we are to live, and to have to know how/when not to take it into account (which in itself is some form of experience too).