> So, let’s ask again, why? Why is this jump concentrated in software about AI?...Money and hype

Don't get me wrong: there are real productivity gains to be had, but the reality is that building small one-offs and personal tools is not the same thing as building, operationalizing, and maintaining a large system used by paying customers and performing critical business transactions.

A lot of devs are surrendering their critical thinking facilities to coding agents now. This is part of why the hype has to exist: to convince devs, teams, and leaders that they are "falling behind". Hand over more of your attention (and $$$) to the model providers, create the dependency, shut off your critical thinking, and the loop manifests itself.

The providers are no different from doctors pushing OxyContin in this sense; make teams dependent on the product. The more they use the product, the more they build a dependency. Junior and mid-career devs have their growth curves fully stunted and become entirely reliant on the LLM to even perform basic functions. Leaders believe the hype and lay off teams and replace them with agents, mistaking speed for velocity. The more slop a team codes with AI, the more they become reliant on AI to maintain the codebase because now no one understands it. What do you do now? Double down; more AI! Of course, the answer is an AI code reviewer!. Nothing that more tokens can't solve.

I work with a team that is heavily, heavily using AI and I'm building much of the supporting infrastructure to make this work. But what's clear is that while there are productivity gains to be had, a lot of it is also just hype to keep the $$$ flowing.

People will dismiss this critical-thinking shutoff loop as doomer conspiracy, but it's literally the strategy that ai founders describe in interviews. Also people somehow can't or don't remember that uber was almost free when it came out and the press ran endless articles about the "end of car ownership", but replacing your car with uber today would be 10x more expensive. Ai companies are in a mad dash to kill the software industry so that they can "commoditize intelligence". There will be thousands of dead software startups that pile slop on slop until they run out of vc funny-money.