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.