I keep wondering why does hardware still feel so fixed?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot while working on ESP-Mosaico. AI coding tools have made software incredibly fluid. You can change an idea, regenerate part of an application, test it, and try again in minutes.

Hardware still feels very different. Add a camera, sensor, button, display, or motor and you can quickly end up back in wiring, peripheral configuration, drivers, and rebuilding parts of the system.

That made us wonder: What would it take for hardware to feel as flexible as software does today? Is it modularity? Better tooling? Hardware context that software can understand? More automation?

Curious how other builders think about this.