If you don't like them, simply avoid them and try not to get upset about it. If it's all nonsense it will soon fizzle out. If the potential is realized one can always join in later.
Surely these coding agents, MCP servers and suchlike are being coded with their own tooling?
The tooling that, if you listen to the hype, is as smart as a dozen PhDs and is winning gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad?
Shouldn't coding agents be secure on day 1, if they're truly written by such towering, superhuman intellects? If the tool vendors themselves can't coax respectable code out of their product, what hope do us mere mortals have?
People like Jensen saying coding is dead when his main selling point is software lock-in to their ecosystem hardware.
When you evaluate hype and the artifacts things don't really line up. It's not really true that you can just ignore the hype because these things impact decision making, investments etc. Sure we might figure out this was a dead end in 5 years, meanwhile SW dev industry collectively could have been decimated in the anticipation of AI and misaligned investment.
In the meantime if you're a software practitioner you probably have more insight into these tools than a disconnected large company CEO. Just read their opinions and move on. Don't read them at all if you find them distracting.
It's the same shit as all the other VC funded money losing "disruptions" - they might go out of business eventually - but they destroyed a lot of value and impacted the whole industry negatively in the long run. Those companies that got destroyed don't just spring back and thing magically return to equilibrium.
Likewise developers will get screwed because of AI hype. People will leave the industry, salaries will drop because of allocations, students will avoid it. It only works out if AI actually delivers in the expected time frame.
In my experience the "catastrophe hype", the feeling that the hype will disrupt and ruin the industry, is just as misplaced as the hype around the new. At the end of the day large corporations have a hard time changing due to huge layers of bureaucracies that arose to mitigate risk. Smaller companies and startups move quickly but are used to frequently changing direction to stay ahead of the market due to things often out of their control (like changing tariff rates.) If you write code just use the tools from time-to-time and incorporate them in your workflow as you see fit.
Meta (nee Facebook) were already really large before smartphones happened. And they got absolutely murdered in the press for having no mobile strategy (they tried to go all in on HTML5 far too early), so I'm not sure they're a great example here.
Also, I still miss having the Qwerty real keyboards on blackberry, they were great.
Needless to say, there are hundreds of thousands of such CEOs. You're a self-employed driver contracting for Uber Eats? You can call yourself CEO if you like, you sit at the top of your one-man company's hierarchy, after all. Even if the only decision you make is when to take your lunch break.
saying "You can become a CEO too if you found a company and take that role" is just like saying you too can become a billionaire if you just did something that gets you a billion dollars. Without actually explaining what you have to do get that role, the statement is meaningless to the point of being wrong.
I'm talking about the difference between filling out some government form, and the real social power of being the executive of a functioning company.
To help me steelman your argument, you want to scope this discussion to CEOs that produce AI assisted products consumed by billions of users? To me that sounds like only the biggest of big techs, like Meta maybe? (Shopify for example has roughly 5M DAUs last I checked.) Again if you aren't interested in entertaining my point of view, this can absolutely be the last post in this thread.
No AI/tech CEO is going to achieve that by selling AI for what it is currently. What raises more capital, promotes more hype, and markets better? What they say (which incidentally we're discussing right now, which sets the narrative), or the reality, which is probably such a mundane statement that we forget its contents and don't discuss it on HN, at dinner, or in the boardroom?
A CEO's words isn't the place to look if you want a realistic opinion on where we are and where we're going.
I'd love to but if multiple past hype cycles have taught me anything it's that hiring managers will NOT be sane about this stuff. If you want to maintain employability in tech you generally have to play along with the nonsense of the day.
The FOMO about this agentic coding stuff is on another level, too, so the level to which you will have to play along will be commensurately higher.
Capital can stay irrational way longer than you can stay solvent and to be honest, Ive never seen it froth at the mouth this much ever.
Do you have an example of this? I have never dealt with this. The most I've had to do is seem more enthusiastic about <shift left/cloud/kubernetes/etc> to the recruiter than I actually am. Hiring managers often understand that newer technologies are just evolutions of older ones and I've had some fun conversations about how things like kubernetes are just evolutions of existing patterns around Terraform.
Also I mean, plenty of companies I interview at have requirements I'm not willing to accept. For example I will not accept either fully remote roles nor fully in person roles. Because I'm working hybrid roles, I insist my commute needs to be within a certain amount of time. At my current experience level I also only insist in working in certain positions on certain things. There is a minimum compensation structure and benefits allotment that I am willing to accept. Employment is an agreement and I only accept the agreement if it matches certain parameters of my own.
What are your expectations for employment? That employers need to have as open a net as possible? I'll be honest if I extrapolate based on your comments I have this fuzzy impression of an anxious software engineer worried about employment becoming more difficult. Is that the angle that this is coming from?
* during the data science uber alles days they'd ask me to regurgitate all sorts of specialized DS stuff that wasnt relevant before throwing me into a project with filthy pipelines and where picking a model took all of about 20 minutes.
* I remember the days when nosql and "scaling" was all the rage and being asked all sorts of complex questions about partitioning and dealing with high throughput while the reality on the ground was that the entire company's data fitted easily on to one server.
* More recently i was asked about the finer details of fine tuning llms for a job where fine tuning was clearly unnecessary.
I could go on.
It's been a fairly reliable constant throughout my career that hiring tasks and questions have more often been driven by fashion and crowd following than the skills actually required to get the job done and if you refuse to play the game at all you end up disqualifying yourself from more than half the market.
I run up 200-300M tokens of usage per month with AI coding agents, consider myself technically strong as I'm building a technical platform for industry using a decade of experience as a platform engineer and building all sorts of stuff.
I can quantify about 30% productivity boost using these agents compared to before I started using Cursor and CC. 30% is meaningful, but it isn't 2x my performance.
There are times when the agents do something deranged that actually loses me time. There are times when the agents do something well and save me time.
I personally dismiss most of the "spectacular" feedback from noobs because it is not helpful. We have always had easier barriers to entry in SWE, and I'd argue that like 80% of people are naturally filtered out (laid off, can't find work, go do something else) because they never learn how the computer (memory, network, etc.) _actually_ works. Like automatic trans made driving more accessible, but it didn't necessarily make drivers better because there is more to driving than just controlling the car.
I also dismiss the feedback from "super seniors" aka people who never grew in their careers. Of the 20% who don't get filtered out, 80% are basically on Autopilot. These are the employees who just do their jobs, are reliable enough, and won't cry that they don't get a raise because they know they will get destroyed interviewing somewhere else. Again, opinion rejected mostly.
Now the average team (say it has 10 people) will have 2 outstanding engineers, and 8 line item expenses. The 2 outstanding engineers are probably doing 80% of the work because they're operating at 130% against baseline.
The worst will get worse, the best will get better. And we'll be back to where we started until we have better tooling for the best of the best. We will cut some expenses, and then things will eventually normalize again until the next cycle.