Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other,... — Alan Kay

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

Author: Alan Kay

Insight: We often think of complex software as a sign of progress—the more features, the more impressive. But Kay's pyramid metaphor points to something uncomfortable: a lot of what we call sophisticated tech is actually just accumulated cruft, held together by sheer effort rather than clever thinking. A website that takes five seconds to load, an app that crashes occasionally, a system where nobody quite understands how everything connects—these aren't rare edge cases. They're normal. The real insight here isn't about programmers being lazy. It's that when we build through pure force—adding features, patching problems, hiring more people to maintain the mess—we're treating symptoms, not causes. The result works, technically, but it's fragile. Change one brick and something else cracks. This applies beyond software too: organizations, institutions, even our own lives can end up as pyramids. We maintain complicated systems through sheer willpower because fundamentally rethinking them feels too risky or expensive. What makes this quote sting is that the alternative—elegant, structural integrity—requires stopping to think. It means saying no to quick fixes. In a world that rewards speed and visible output, that's genuinely hard.

Source: ACM Queue, A Conversation with Alan Kay, Vol. 2, No. 9, Dec/Jan 2004-2005