I was looking at my social feeds recently, and it feels like everyone is suddenly an AI productivity guru or all knowledgeable about AI (ironically I write about AI a lot as well). People are just throwing together these half-baked agents and AI solutions, not even checking if they solve a real problem or if any quality is there, and bragging about inventing some “10x workflow”. Well, not really bragging themselves, but rather asking AI to brag about it, which makes it even worse.

I believe this year is just so much FOMO and oversaturation fatigue for all of us, software engineers. I no longer know where it is worth spending my time. Last weekend I spent some time setting up OpenClaw because that seems to be a hot thing right now. Before that I was vibe coding different things, playing with LLM integrations, Agents, tools or whatever the latest cool thing was. You can spend lots of time learning a tool or an approach, and a month or two later, it’s completely obsolete because the next “best thing” just dropped. It’s overwhelming. For the most part, it is all just noise. It is increasingly more and more difficult to figure out what the signal is. The signal-to-noise ratio just went really really bad. These days whenever I see a post by someone I try to quickly gauge if that is typical AI text and I mostly ignore it in those cases, if not, I try to see if there is some substance to whatever is written and if there are any opinions expressed, if so, that seems to be a genuine piece of work and it draws my attention. I am starting to develop an allergy to AI generated text.

I am not an AI denier. It is extremely useful and great but the hype is just over the board. What goes up will inevitably settle down, and we just need to figure out how to ride the waves. I’ve written about this in the past. The tools will inevitably change but the underlying shift in our industry is permanent. Our software engineering jobs are destined to change. There is no question about that. There is also a lot of uncertainty over which other jobs will be displaced by AI. With the current trends, it looks like anything that has to do with text and image processing can be replaced and anything that has anything to do with operating in the physical world (think plumbing) or requiring human judgment might take longer to get replaced. I spoke to some of my non-tech friends and they express fear of being affected by AI as well.

All I can say for now is that we need to keep adapting to remain relevant. So while I don’t like all of the hype, if I don’t sample around, try things out I might miss on one of the things that wasn’t a hype and be left behind as the industry moves forward.