AI is obviously useful, but I’ve started to feel burned out by the constant stream of AI, specifically the “this changes everything” discourse.
I think this is the major technological shift I’ve witnessed in my relatively short career and there’s a weird pressure to constantly keep up or risk falling behind (see all the layoffs).
Thoughts? Concerns?
But I hear you, it feels like all the AI stuff has just cemented that I want to read stuff by humans and make stuff on my own. Artisanal code written by people like Bellard will always be more interesting than any AI thing.
But people eventually found out that the additional productivity of the latest webdev framework wasn't worth rewriting everything to use it, at least not every time a new one came out. Yeah, there was a massive hype cycle for each new thing, but eventually the hype wasn't enough to make everybody care, because the payoff just wasn't enough.
The same thing happened with CPUs. There was a time when people really cared about new generations of CPUs. The performance difference really mattered. Now nobody cares. (All right, not totally nobody. Gamers may care. People who need absolute maximum performance care. Some enthusiasts care. For most people, though, the next greatest CPU really isn't going to move the needle much.)
I think AI is already at that place. Yeah, there's still a massive hype cycle. Who cares? Nobody has any mechanism for forcing you to care. Is the payoff really there for switching everything over to the new model, yet again? And if it's not, then who cares about the hype and the buzz? Ignore it and go on with your life. Move up every now and then, if the benefit is there, but not every new release. And don't feel guilty for not moving up.
Somebody could figure out a mathematical formula for percentage "better" a new release is, and how much disruption switching causes, and based on that how often it's worth switching. But I don't have to have the formula to know that if things come often enough, and the improvement is small enough, it's just not worth it.