At serious risk of sounding like a heretic here, but I’m kinda bored of talking about AI.
I get it, AI is incredible. I use it every day, it’s completely changed my workflow. I recently started a new role in a tricky domain working at web scale (hey, remember web scale?) and it’s allowed me to go from 0-1 in terms of productivity in a matter of weeks.
With that being said, it’s all starting to feel a bit… routine. I’m not here to argue that the pace of change has been incredible, but on a day-to-day basis I’ve sorta ran out of things to talk about. What makes this worse is it’s completely taken over mindshare across my section of the internet.
Hacker News, my favourite haunt, used to be full of interesting projects and problems being solved but this seems to have devolved into three different people’s (almost identical) Claude code workflow and yet another post about how you got OpenClaw to stroke your cat and play video games so you had way more time to… configure AI tooling. This all feels a little self-fulfilling.
Kagi small web is another great example of this effect. Here’s a challenge, open it up and press the ‘next’ button 20 times. What percentage of posts are AI related?
Before you write me off as ‘old man yells at cloud’, understand where I’m coming from. In the good old days (2023), before we called anybody who could open a Claude code terminal an ‘AI engineer’, being a ‘Product Engineer’ was the hot new term. The idea was that engineers should move away from obsessing over code to obsessing over the product value they were delivering. I loved this, it made loads of sense to me, but we seem to have regressed. It’s no longer the code we’re obsessing over, it’s the overgrown auto-complete we’ve developed to make the easiest part of being an engineer easier.
It’s like if I went onto the woodworking subreddit and they’d all stopped showing pictures of the tables they’d created and just started posting about the hammer they were using. But they were all using basically the same hammer in the same way, so they were just screaming the same shit at each other at the top of their voices.
What makes this worse, is our bosses have bought into it this time too. My managers never cared much about database technologies, IDE’s or javascript frameworks; they just wanted the feature so they could sell it. Management seems to have stepped firmly and somewhat haphazardly into the implementation detail now. I reckon most of us have got some sort of company initiative to ‘use more AI’ in our objectives this year. Management’s involvement in the SDLC has always been a thing, DORA metrics have been around for a while. But historically, it’s always been about the outputs. Faster deploys, time to respond. Now we’re measuring the number of tokens used per-dev, which is no more useful than lines of code ever was.
I guess what I’m saying, other than just having a general whinge, is tell me more about the cool shit you’re building rather than the tools you’re using to build it. And don’t forget that the whole purpose of coding, like any other craft, is to create something that delivers value for someone. Even if that someone is just yourself.
… And yes, I’m painfully aware of the irony of a post about moaning about posts about AI. Sorry.