The fat abstraction stack is reaching its economic limit.
So is the model built around it.
For decades, proprietary software could justify itself by controlling the interface, hiding the machinery, and selling access to progressively higher layers of abstraction.
Operating system.
Runtime.
Framework.
Cloud.
Control plane.
Managed service.
Subscription.
Each layer promised simplicity.
Together they produced dependency.
Now the economics are turning against the stack.
Software labour is becoming harder to price in unstable fiat.
Infrastructure costs keep accumulating.
Security attack surfaces expand with every dependency.
Senior engineering knowledge gets reset by constant technological churn.
And increasingly, the most valuable optimisation is not adding another abstraction.
It is deleting one.
This is where closed systems face their hardest problem.
A proprietary platform must continuously justify the toll booth.
An open system only has to keep working.
As compute becomes cheaper, open-source tooling matures, protocols stabilise and organisations rediscover boring primitives, the economic premium on owning the abstraction begins to collapse.
The future may therefore look less like:
MORE SOFTWARE.
And more like:
LESS SOFTWARE.
FEWER LAYERS.
OPEN PROTOCOLS.
LONG-LIVED SYSTEMS.
LOCAL OWNERSHIP.
VERIFIABLE BEHAVIOUR.
That convergence creates massive DAMAGE.
Not destruction for its own sake.
Damage to unnecessary abstraction.
Damage to vendor lock-in.
Damage to unverifiable claims.
Damage to technical churn masquerading as innovation.
Damage to an economy that survives by repeatedly making solved problems expensive again.
The great software opportunity is no longer another layer above the machine.
It is restoring a direct, inspectable and verifiable relationship between the operator and the machine.
When the abstraction empire contracts, verification becomes more valuable than presentation.
And that is the terrain DamageBDD was built for:
Define the behaviour.
Execute it anywhere.
Verify what actually happened.
Produce the proof.
The next software cycle may not be an expansion.
It may be a controlled demolition.
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