when i first came to the bay area, i was shocked that the silicon valley was literally just a bunch of suburbs and boring office parks. i used to think this was very incongruous. i still mostly do, but now i at least have a story for why the vibe isn't literally maximally incongruous.

one software architectureintuition i have is that legibility and standardization are utterly essential. the move from "servers as pets"(each one bespoke and carefully hand crafted, when something goes wrong, going in and fixing that one server) to "servers as cattle" (standardize all of the servers to be exact clones, destroy and recreate each server any time something deviates even slightly from identical rather than try to patch things on that one server by hand) is a good example. or for instance, you generally want to make things use common interfaces wherever possible, even if that means some slight awkwardness or indirectness, because the value of being able to interchange things is so high.

modern car oriented cities are a great example of taking this intuition and applying it to the physical world. steamrolling the unruly nature of old fashioned cities and reshaping everything to fit a handful of standardized shapes. this is why driving in Palo Alto is so much easier than in, say, Boston, or SF - there are many fewer quirky intersections or unpredictable bike lanes or pedestrians.

another software intuition is in general it's worth taking on a pretty sizeable fixed cost as long as it makes things present a substantially simpler interface, or more reliably serve its purpose. for example, it's worth pulling in a thousand different versions of packages in your node_modules and wasting quite a lot of disk space and network bandwidth in order to eliminate dependency hell once and for all; or putting your application in a docker container so you don't have to worry about "works on my machine" ever again; or making file system blocks fixed sizes to make the accounting a lot easier, even if that wastes some space.

car centric cities are optimized heavily for a specific purpose - arbitrary point to point travel in the comfort of your own vehicle. there is a kind of elegance to this; and if you have dynamic pricing, and are unconcerned with the median experience, it makes the best possible experience better. it also comes with many disadvantages (horrible for pedestrians, inefficient use of land, low bandwidth, makes the vibes horrible) that have been harped on at sufficient length that i don't need to go into it in depth here; i still experience deep suffering every time i perceive south bay. but i think i now understand better why you would ever want to build things this way.