Posted by meetpateltech 1 day ago
Do we have new words for smaller amounts or is this inflation at work?
Oh, nevermind, it’s some MS dude.
The AI fatigue is real, and the cooling-off period is going to hurt. We’re deep into concept overload now. Every week it’s another tool (don’t get me started on Gas Town) confidently claiming to solve… something. “Faster development”, apparently.
Unless you’re already ideologically committed to this space, I don’t see how the average engineer has the energy or motivation to even understand these tools, never mind meaningfully compare them. That’s before you factor in that many of them actively remove the parts of engineering people enjoy, while piling on yet another layer of abstraction, configuration, and cognitive load.
I’m so tired of being told we’re in yet another “paradigm shift”. Tools like Codex can be useful in small doses, but the moment it turns into a sprawling ecosystem of prompts, agents, workflows, and magical thinking, it stops feeling like leverage and starts feeling like self-inflicted complexity.
This is why I use the copilot extension in VS code. They seem to just copy whatever useful thing climbs to the surface of the AI tool slop pile. Last week I loaded up and Opus 4.6 was there ready to use. Yesterday I found it has a new Claude tool built in which I used to do some refactoring... it worked fine. It's like having an AI tool curator.
I also keep getting job applications for AI-native 'developers' whatever that means.
The “I’m so tired of being told we’re in another paradigm shift” comments are widely heard and upvoted on HN and are just so hard to comprehend today. They are not seeing the writing on the wall and following where the ball is going to be even in 6-12 months. We have scaling laws, multiple METR benchmarks, internal and external evals of a variety of flavors.
“Tools like codex can be useful in small doses” the best and most prestigious engineers I know inside and outside my company do not code virtually at all. I’m not one of them but I also do not code at all whatsoever. Agents are sufficiently powerful to justify and explain themselves and walk you through as much of the code as you want them to.
My issue is that we’ve now got a million secondary “paradigm shifts” layered on top: agent frameworks, orchestration patterns, prompt DSLs, eval harnesses, routing, memory, tool calling, “autonomous” workflows… all presented like you’re behind if you’re not constantly replatforming your brain.
Even if the end-state is “engineers code less”, the near-term reality for most engineers is still: deliver software, support customers, handle incidents, and now also become competent evaluators of rapidly changing bot stacks. That cognitive tax is brutal.
So yes, follow where the ball is going. I am. I’m just not pretending the current proliferation is anything other than noisy and expensive to keep up with.