Comment by Ronsenshi
1 day ago
> 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.
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?
It's incredible the change over the last few years even on the hardware side. I go to the supercomputing.org conference annually and saw folks advertising "AI power distribution units". There used to be a lot of neat innovation, and now every last thing has to have "AI" in the title, it's infuriating
> No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code.
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!"
...
It's like the entire software industry is gambling on "LLMs will get better faster than human skills will decay, so they will be good enough to clean up their own slop before things really fall apart".
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 one hand, it’s extremely tiring having to put up with that section of our industry.
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!
I can't help but think of a video of a talk by someone- uncle Bob maybe?- talking about the origin of the agile manifesto.
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.
Some of the heads like Altman seem to be putting all their chips in the "AGI in [single-digit number] years" pile.