"It has become less a field of engineering and more of a speculative gold rush, complete with a quasi-religious fervor that is completely disconnected from the reality of what these tools can actually do."

I wholeheartedly agree--the hype has become toxic, just like in 2001 when the bubble burst. I think the author overestimates what will be salvageable from this. What I witnessed back in 2001-2003 was beyond comprehension. Find someone who worked for Northern Telecom back then to explain their experience of not only losing their job, but also their retirement (the entire 401K was in company stock). The former workers I encountered still lived in denial about the stock's worthlessness even into 2005, but it was finally, inevitably de-listed and the last remnants of those dead 401Ks was swept away.

In RTP, the amount of office space that was built out has never been fully utilized to this very day.

These tech bubbles come and go, but leave enormous craters of destruction in their wake.

A bubble assumes there is a bell curve to the system. So far, all graphs show it is going up, either linear or curving upwards. This shows there hasn't been a hint (yet) at slowing down. Until there is some sign, don't assume a bubble.

Unlike past bubbles, there are only a handful of publicly traded AI stocks, which have notably preformed poorly despite considerable AI hype. This bubble is limited to private companies. Also the AI market is capable of accommodating many entrants and each getting a high valuation and filling some sort of niche, instead of the old Google vs Yahoo or Apple App Store vs Google App Store duopolies or winner-take-all markets like with seen with MySpace vs. Facebook. There is Eraser, Claude, Anthropic, etc. Each fills some sort of purpose and has strengths and weaknesses. In past bubbles, the market was more concentrated among a few names or interchangeable. So this means looking it from the lens of past bubbles may not work.

Except it might not be a bubble if companies are using it in production.

>> a legitimate, if incremental, step forward in developer productivity

It’s not incremental it’s revolutionary. Nothing has come before that has such power and capability.

Not going to happen, this bubble knows what it’s doing.

The author misses the forest for the trees. He's accurately articulating the current state of tools he's using but isn't acknowledging or extrapolating the next derivative I.e the rate of improvement of these tools.

That being said, everything is overvalued and a lot of this is ridiculous.

The AI "bubble" if you call it a bubble, it currently provides most of the oxygen for transistor improvements. Had it not been AI, Smartphone and PC alone would not be able to scale the 2 - 2.5 years improvement cycle alone.

And as someone who have seen the PC, Internet and Smartphone cycle. I will say ChartGPT ( or AI ) adoption cycle is way faster than anything I have seen.