Startups are glorified spreadsheets in the same sense that you and I are glorified collections of atoms. Technically correct (spreadsheets are turing complete after all) but totally useless as a model of how they work.

I’m just making the point that most software dev work is not novel.

You’re either making a productivity app where CRUD and UX are pretty well known patterns.

Or a scalable web system - also very well tried territory.

Or analytics and data processing - again well trod.

If you’re not a good pattern matcher you might think every UI framework, or your next API abstraction, is some next general theory of relativity.

But otherwise the major novelty in most software project pursuits is going to be the context, people, and industry your building it into not the tech

Right, fair enough, I agree with that.