3 hours burned on deployment hell—invalid Stripe keys, broken auth callbacks, expired email secrets.

This isn't skill issue. This is the hidden tax of modern dev:

Every third-party service = different rules, different state, different ways to fail.

AI ships code 10x faster now.

But ops complexity? Still compounds.

The real bottleneck isn't writing code anymore—it's integrating the 47 services your stack depends on, each with their own API quirks and auth flows.

Welcome to 2025 dev reality.