We are in it.
I have often wondered what it must have felt like to work in tech during the dot com bubble around the year 2000. To watch people pour money into companies with no revenue and crazy valuations. To feel like you were either getting rich or getting left behind. And then to wake up one morning and realize the party was over, but the internet wasn't.
I think about that a lot these days.
Every week there are new startups, tools, new models. If you are not using the latest thing, you are supposedly falling behind.
But if you do jump onto the hottest new stack, surely that means you are winning, right? Right? It is exhausting. And it is also incredibly exciting.
How we build software is breaking apart and reassembling into something else.
Six months ago, spinning up a prototype meant a sprint or two. Now I can have something ugly but functional by lunch. Work that used to require deep expertise now just require knowing how to prompt.
That sounds like progress, and it is, but it also makes me uneasy. Because if the hard part is no longer the code itself, then what have I actually been getting good at all these years?
I used to believe seniority meant you had seen enough codebases to pattern-match faster than everyone else. Now I am not sure. When the tool can pattern-match too, what is left? Judgment, maybe. Taste. Knowing when the AI is confidently wrong. But honestly, nobody knows which skills will age well and which ones are already rotting. That part is uncomfortable and I do not think people talk about it enough.
Which tools will survive? Are we building on solid ground, or on another bubble waiting to burst? Maybe both.
If history repeats, most of this hype will fade. Many companies will disappear. Entire stacks will be forgotten.
But the underlying shift will stay.
Just like after the dot com crash, the internet did not vanish. It became infrastructure.
I suspect AI in software will follow the same path. The noise will settle. But the core shift is real. Something did move. And when we look back at these years, it will not be the hype we remember. It will be the moment everything actually changed.
The weird part? We are not watching history happen. We are shipping it.