I’m expecting a similar future for AI, it will not deliver the “deprecating devs” part but it will still be a useful and ubiquitous tool.

We're a few years in. It takes time to figure things out and see returns.

The web and dot com boom and bust still led to several trillion dollar companies, eventually.

AI will transform my industry, but not overnight. My employer is within that 95%... but won't be forever.

[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant

"We wanted to make money with it, but we didn't immediately make a lot of money" feels very different from "the project failed to deliver what it set out to".

[1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...

e.g. I waste a lot of time with converting business requirements into a proprietary rule language. It should be simple tasks, but the requirements are freaky, the language is limited and I often need to look up internals of systems that produce data the rules act upon.

My bosses boss currently wants me to replace my work with AI. It can not work. It‘s setup for failure.

Except in this case, where AI can enable people with absolutely no experience in some area to produce something that at least superficially can seem plausibly viable, it's no surprise that the percentage of crap is even higher.

A huge fraction of people at my work use LLMs, but only a small fraction use the LLM they provided. Almost everyone is using a personal license

so yeah, targeted well thought out usecases that are handled well by LLMs will deliver value, but it wont replace developers or anything like that, which is what these people with barely an understanding of the tech's limitations have been claiming.

OpenAI hasnt "internally achieved" AGI. thats what people are calling bullshit on

Fixes one pain point good. Can’t really be applied to everything.

So just another tool, not a magic bullet like it is being marketed.

LLMs are receiving a level of investment that appears to be based on them being world-changing, and that just doesn’t seem to be working out.

Building a small script is easy for chatgpt, but actually leveraging the workforce consistently turns out to be a lot harder than the hype promised.

Exactly. The business world isn't remotely close to being rational. The technology is incredible, but that doesn't mean it's going to translate to massive business value in the next quarter.

The market reaction to this is driven by hype and by people who don't understand the technology well enough to see through the hype.

I'm not discounting the value of having ChatGPT just hand you the answer straight up. If you just want to get the task done as fast as possible that's a pretty cool option that didn't used to exist. But the old way wasn't really worse.

Effectively, yes: the promises are so huge, that even the impressive usefulness and value it brings today is dwarfed in comparison.

Here's the iPhone 13, it makes better pictures, lasts longer on battery, and plays games faster than the iPhone 12. Buy it for $699.

Now it has become:

Here's the iPhone 13, the greatest breakthrough in the history of civilization. But enough about that, let's talk about the iPhone 14. We've released a whitepaper showing the iPhone 14 will almost certainly take your job, and the iPhone 15 will kill us all, provided no further steps are taken. It's so powerful, that we decided to instill powerful moral safeguards into it, so it will steer you towards goodness, and prevent it being used for evil (such as looking at saucy pictures). We also find it necessary to keep a permanent and comprehensive log of every interaction you have with it.

You also can't have it, but can hold it in your hand, provided you pay us $20/month and we deem you morally worthy of accessing this powerful technology. (Do not doubt any of this, we are intellectually superior to you, and have humanity's best interests at heart, you don't want to look like a fool, do you?)

I wonder if I should have listened to the hype generators (which you sound like one) and just have created ‘passable’ models with help of an LLM, instead of exercising my brain, learning something new and getting out of my comfort zone.

At the risk of sounding controversial, I’ll add that I also have a diametrically opposed view of crypto’s utility vs LLM than you, especially in the long-term: one will allow us to free ourselves from the shackles of government policy as censorship expands, the other is a very fancy and very expensive nonsense regurgitator that will pretty much go on to destroy the Internet and any sort of credibility and sense of truth, making people dumber at large scale, while lining the pockets of a lucky few.

I remember in college during the late 90's the hype was that CASE tools (Computer Aided Software Engineering) was going to make software engineers irrelevant, you just tell the system your requirements and it spits out working code. Never turned out.

Today, the only way the amount of investment returns a profit if it replaces a whole bunch of workers. If it replaces a whole bunch of workers, well there will be a whole lot less people to buy stuff. So either the bubble bursts or a lot of people lose their job. Either way we are in for a rough ride.

Revenue is probably the wrong measure, it should be profit. And a startup that doesn't somehow turn into profit for its _customers_ usually doesn't see much traction.

They can either increase revenue (there's a lot of AI sales tools that promise just that), or, more commonly, reduce costs, which also increases profits. If it saves time or money, it reduces costs. If it doesn't do either of these things, you'd have to really enjoy the product to still pay for it.

Let me show you what I mean: Let's someone runs a grocery, and they want to make it more profitable. After looking at the value chain, they conclude the person growing the lettuces makes 10% of the profit, logistics makes 40%, and retail 50%.

So they conclude that the best way to improve the business, is to optimize the retail side.

Then you walk into the store and see the tiny withered lettuce on the gleaming fancy shelves.

If they decided to focus on where the value is created, and helped the farmer grow better groceries, everybody would've been happy.

That is even if you can time it correctly.

Better wait for a crash, see people panic sell thinking nvidia has any skin in the, game and buy the dip.

The thing about "vibe shifts" is that a big part of the shift occurs among people who have no idea what's going on. They've played with ChatGPT twice, talked about it at parties, and then invested $50,000 in NVIDIA stock. Or they're a corporate VP who doesn't understand this stuff but knows it's trendy and that it impresses the C-suite. When those people bail, the market retrenches hard, trading irrational enthusiasm for equally irrational panic and gloom.

My guess is that the highly-visible switch from the sycophantic GPT 4o to the underwhelming GPT 5 is what made this concrete in the minds of the least informed investors and customers.