> I miss the 70s when programming was the default way to solve problems.
When you get deep enough into writing a custom tool it starts doing things a generic tool would never accomplish (or it would have to be bloated with features no one needs) Hard coding values and constraints for personal use makes such elegantly simple interfaces.
For example, my agenda is a beutiful boulderdash-like grid of icons. The data is a set of arrays [1,2,1,0,0,1,1] and an object for special days. There are no setting, it has zero buttons to press.
I've made countless silly things other people could use if only they knew it existed.
I think they're more referring to several decades ago when someone had a software need they wouldn't get some off the shelf proprietary tool that costs $$$$ and is crazy bloated and locks you in. Instead they'd hire someone and that person would work with them to deliver exactly what they need and that solution would last for decades and the eventual off the shelf software that replaces it is widely seen as inferior by the employees.
There are famous stories of this. A highschool once had a student write their entire automated HVAC system on a C64 for free. It has worked really well for 3 decades, but they struggle to find replacement parts. They asked for bids to replace it from several companies and were flabbergasted to learn it would costs them an insane amount of money. So instead, they call up the kid (now an adult who still lives nearby), to occasionally do maintenance. Which solution is better? The OP is just talking about how they miss the times when a lot more people were going for the custom in-house C64 option.
There's still a huge consulting market for this kind of work.
You just have to target the right market segments. Large enterprise firms either have in-house teams or contracts with big enterprise-scale providers, so don't do this a lot, and tiny mom-and-pops tend to use off-the-shelf SaaS, and don't have the budget or internal skillset to manage these kinds of projects.
But there are many medium-scale businesses that are structured enough to have specialized use cases that the off-the-shelf stuff isn't optimized for, and which have enough cash to invest in custom solutions.
This is the same problem that comes with my desire to give up a smartphone. Getting rid of my phone doesn't make other people know how to give me directions to their house without GPS (among other problems).
At least with GPS, I've found a reasonable substitute to be an honest-to-god map. Here in LA the Thomas Guide is fantastic, but other places have "road atlases" that function similarly to my knowledge. In some ways I find it better than Google maps, because it's actually designed to be a map instead of a robot overlord dictating what you do.
So I build a little cli to generate my invoices. 100 loc and super simple.
I miss the 70s when programming was the default way to solve problems. Excessive abstractions and proprietary software often slow us down.