Remember the days when people experimented with and talked about things that werent LLMs?
I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.
Now it's all LLMs all the time and it's so goddamn tedious.
I go to tech meetups regularly. The speed at which any conversation end up on the topic of AI is extremely grating to me. No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code.
At what point are we going to see the loss of practical skills if people keep on relying on LLMs for all their thinking?
I can't even say that's definitely a losing bet-- it could very well happen-- but boy does it seem risky to go all-in on it.
On the other, if a large portion of the industry goes all in, and it _doesn’t_ pay off and craters them, maybe the overhyping will move onto something else and we can go back to having an interesting, actually-nice-to-be-in-industry!
He framed it as software developers were once the experts in the room, but so many young people joined the industry that managers turned to micromanaging them out of instinctual distrust. The manifesto was supposed to be the way for software developers to retake the mantle of the professional expert, trusted to make things happen.
I don't really think that happened, especially with agile becoming synonymous with Scrum, but if this doesn't pay off and craters the industry, it seems like it'd be the final nail in that coffin.
And then you give in and ask what they're building with AI, that activation energy finally available to build the side project they wouldn't have built otherwise.
"Oh, I'm building a custom agentic harness!"
...
(And similar to the two, I expect many of the initial ideas for LLM application to be bad, perhaps obviously stupid in hindsight. But enough of them will work to make LLMs become a lasting thing in every aspect of people's lives - again, just like electricity and the Internet did).
~80% of the usage patterns i see these days falsely assume that LLMs can handle their own quality control and are optimizing for appearance, potential or demo-worthiness rather than hardcore usefulness. Gas town is not an outlier here.
When the internet and electricity were ~3 years old people were already using it for stuff that was working and obviously world changing rather than as demos of potential.
That 20% of usage patterns that work now arent going away but the other 80% are going to be seen as blockchainesque hype in 5 or 10 years.