The creativity and cleverness is still there. It's just being applied differently.
That kind of insight is very "clean" when it's being applied at the level of bare wires, or to code crammed into tens of bytes. It's harder to see when it's part of a large app or extensive system, but it's still there.
Developers today are neither more nor less clever. The solutions they come up with every day are just less broadly applicable, because the broadly applicable ones are either low-hanging fruit long since picked, or unnecessary drains of developer time that are better spent solving more domain-specific problems. Forty years ago I'd admire a programmer who could cleverly eke out a few bytes per record, but today (in most circumstances) I'd fire them for making their code less flexible and harder to maintain.
That kind of insight is very "clean" when it's being applied at the level of bare wires, or to code crammed into tens of bytes. It's harder to see when it's part of a large app or extensive system, but it's still there.
Developers today are neither more nor less clever. The solutions they come up with every day are just less broadly applicable, because the broadly applicable ones are either low-hanging fruit long since picked, or unnecessary drains of developer time that are better spent solving more domain-specific problems. Forty years ago I'd admire a programmer who could cleverly eke out a few bytes per record, but today (in most circumstances) I'd fire them for making their code less flexible and harder to maintain.