I'm happy if LLMs and the semiconductor shortage will create a renaissance of native applications.
But would you give up packages, central repositories, downloads that Just Work without patching, public version control systems, open-source software, ... , and much of what they enabled?
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)
Getting packed into 2026 airline seats can be a "miserable experience". But that taken-for-granted human flight... a cramped seat in the effin clouds... is what? A century or two of focused effort, eventually massive effort, building that dream? Another century pursuing the dream of compact mechanical power? 10 millennia on metallurgy? So one's flight may have sucked, and there are many downsides to aviation existing... but living the dream of human flight, isn't living in a dream of no problems and effortless happily ever afters.
But yes, I'm so looking forward to agentic full-stack-ish rewrites, slashing through decades of accumulated stagnant cruft. Laptop-like angular-resolution HMDs are this-year-ish (though expensive, not mass market). And doing such rewrites by hand is a pain. Someone reports a Claude one-shot which installed a PICO Space Pro dev env, created a simple app, uploaded the apk to the headset, and responded with "ready for you to test"... and it was. Wild ride incoming. Though that's perhaps not a minimalist/efficient renaissance you had in mind? Still, in the midst of upset, there's opportunity to pursue visions which might not be viable in more settled times.
Then why do you need Automatic Updates ? If it works, don't fix it. /s
Later on, you'd hope the author created a `make.yourunix` or `INSTALL.yourunix` or README section for your unix, and that was nice. Then being able to simply say `./configure; make` and have it mostly just work... magic wonderful. Then basically "$ gimme name-of-the-thing", first for Perl, and then more and more others, eventually even python (but not C) - next level. And now we're at "Minion, build me an X", with an "and install whatever it is we need" implicit, quiet. That's, just, wow.
So from Objective-C and proto-C++ C-with-types, created hoping software might someday, maybe, be reused like hardware components... to now? So very living that dream.
Systemic problems everywhere, Woody!