omething you write as a pet project while learning to program. Our tools are still getting more powerful, and our collective understanding of software problems is still increasing at a rapid pace. Do you think there's an upper ceiling for how good we can get at writing software? Are we close?
A few years ago, it was hard to find a library providing the functionality you'd need to write your application. A few decades ago the concept of reusable shared libraries had to be invented before you could write one. And if you'd wanted to use a hash table, if you even knew what a hash table was, you'd have to write your own. Today programmers have a wealth of collaboratively developed libraries for almost any purpose at their disposal. When you write software today, you're standing on the shoulders of countless giants.
Personally I believe that a large part of the reason we're collectively getting better at building software is that a portion of software written is software for building better tools for building better tools. We're not even close to peak productivity yet. We're so much drowning in solvable problems, that we don't even know what peak productivity in software engineering would look like.