Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way.

I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experience they have, the better.

I know some guys who were road warriors for many years —- everything from racking and cabling servers, setting up infrastructure, and getting huge cloud deployments going all the way to embedded software, video game backends, etc. These guys were already really good at automation, seeing the whole life cycle of software, and understanding all the pressure points. For them, AI is the ultimate power tool. They’re just flying with it right now. (All of them also are aware that the AI vampire is very real.)

There’s still a lot to learn, and the tools are still very, very early on, but the value is clear.

I think for quite a few people, engaging with AI is maybe the first time ever in their entire career they are having to engage with systems thinking in a very concrete and directed way. Consequently, this is why so many software engineers are having an identity crisis: they’ve spent most of their career focusing on one very small section of the overall SDLC, meanwhile believing that was mostly all there was that they needed to know.

So I think we’re going to keep talking for quite a while, and the conversation will continue to be very unevenly distributed. Paradoxically, I’m not bored of it, because I’m learning so much listening to intelligent people share their learnings.

Yes, AI or no AI, tell me about something actually interesting that you're working on.

Currently it feels a bit like everyone is talking about what new editor they're using. I don't care about that type of developer tooling very much. AI isn't coming up with some exciting new database, type system, etc etc.

"Look at how I'm able to web dev x% faster" because of LLMs is boring.

This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well equipped to deal with it.

My partner teaches at a small college. These people are absolutely lost, with administration totally sold on the idea that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory about how to apply it to pedagogy.

Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype, professors are a mix of compliant and (understandably) completely belligerent to the idea.

Students are being told conflicting information -- in one class that "ChatGPT is cheating" and in the very next class that using AI is mandatory for a good grade.

Its an absolute disaster.

How do I answer this without spamming: Yes, very much.

Everyone is in their own place adapting (or not) to AI. The disconnect b/w even folks on the same team is just crazy. At least it's gotten more concrete (here's what works for me, what do you do) vs catastrophizing jobpocolypse or "teh singularity", at least on day to day conversations.

What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. That’s become way less common now that everyone is building a layer up the stack. I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Then again, that’ll be the agent’s problem, not mine…

All that said, it’s extremely exciting. I’ve been in tech, in one way or another, for 25 years. This is the most energizing (and simultaneously exhausting) atmosphere I’ve ever felt. The 2006-2011 years of early Facebook, Uber, etc. were exciting but nothing like this. The future is developing faster than we can process it.

Among non-programmers, you always hear about some fool that fell in love with an AI girlfriend or whatever, but you never hear about the people who open chatgpt up once, tried some things with it, said to themselves "huh, that's kind of neat" and then lost interest a day or two later, having conceived of no further items to which AI could provide assistance.

I’m sad that it’s crowded out all the interesting stuff I used to love learning about on HN.

“Everything has already been said, but not yet by everyone.” — Karl Valentin

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Personally, I'm still very interested in the topic.

But since the tech is moving very fast, the discussion is just very very unevenly distributed: There's lots of interesting things to say. But a lot of takes that were relevant 6 months ago are still being digested by most.

It's a black box that thinks for me, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it times out.

I am extremely skeptical of AI products anyone builds. It's just using one black box to build scaffolding around another black box and then typically want to charge money for it. I don't see any value there.

I’m bored of using the AI for anything other than my work. Because with my work I can give very detailed and structured prompts and get the best results, while also being able to evaluate the answer. For everything else I’m kinda worn out by second guessing all the time or having to enter a long thread until I get a decent response.

AI is starting to look like a net negative for humanity. I remember the early days of OpenAI. I was super excited about it. There was a new space to uncover and learn about. I was hopeful.

Now I have this love/hate relationship with it. Claude Code is amazing. I use it everyday because it makes me so much more efficient at my job. But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day.

At the same time I see how much resources we are wasting on AI. And to what end? Does anybody really buy the BS that this will all make the world a better place one day? So many people we could shelter and feed, but instead we are spending it on trying to make your computer check and answer your emails for you. At what point do we just look up and ask… what is the damn purpose of all of this? I guess money.

Yes. Go to Mastodon. I accidently stumbled on Mastodon last night (I knew about it of course but largely ignored it). Of the 100 or so posts they were all cool stuff. Only one was AI related and it was more a researchy geeky thing than the brainrot "I fired all my staff an hour ago. They were not happy. CRLF. CRLF. I have an agentic circus and I am the ringmaster of 666 agents. CRLF....." crap you get on Linked in.

I'm old enough to remember being fatigued with so many people talking about making "apps". Programs that run on a phone. Before that everyone was excited about blogging. Web 2.0 ugh.

Before that we were excited about the wheel and the creation of fire. All capital drained into those ephemeral fancies.

The cycles cycle on.

I'm like 99% convinced that most of the AI conversation upvotes at this point is astroturfing. I just don't see the correlation with the sentiment I get from talking to people in the real world (mostly negative AI sentiment) vs what I see here

I think the advancements around models and such are still somewhat interesting but its all the hype around peripheral things like OpenClaw, agentic workflows and other hyped up AI-adjacent news that are getting pretty old.

Gosh how i miss the old HN Days… where one would actually code, read docs, and develop stuff and feel happy about it. Not write a prompt and watch a chatbox do all the work in a matter of seconds. It’s like we’re losing the meaning of building something… dk how to explain it more. But yeah, it’s tech! Nothing stays the same

I'm becoming more bullish on AI, but it's still frustrating how much of the metaphorical oxygen it's taking. I feel like I'm hearing less about developments in software tech outside of AI fields.

I’m confused why the hype and the investment got so high. And why everyone treats it like a race. Why can’t we gradually develop it like dna sequencing.

Yes, my wife asks me to shut up when I mention AI. Hah

I think what's crazy is the desire to replicate current day corporate structures. Look at this multi agent Jira story reading bot that builds stuff cause we let it churn overnight. Like the whole idea that you don't need that nonsense to build something amazing.

I'm largely bored of wrappers, what still interests me are the new modalities of models being released and progressed on like small local VLMs, voice to voice and tts

It's the most transformative technology I've clocked in my lifetime (and that includes home computers and the Internet).

Large organizations are making major decisions on the basis of it. Startups new and old will live and die by the shift that it's creating (is SaaS dead? Well investors will make it so). Mass engineering layoffs could be inevitable.

Sure. I vibe coded a thing is getting pretty tired. The rest? If anything we're not talking about it enough.

I wish there were a filter on Hacker News to hide all AI related posts.

No, well, I still enjoy the articles. The thing that always surprises me is the negativity in comment threads. I'm genuinely quite excited about AI based development. Yesterday I was playing around with developing a marketing plan for a market gap where we could leverage our product and finding what features in our product would need changing/adding to improve our offering. Quite interesting results!

No, but definitely tired of the "influencer" takes. You would think that this AI thing has been all but figured out, when really, even with the biggest openest claws we are still barely scratching the surface of a new era human-computer interaction

Edit:

      open claw, n8n, MCP, CLI
       agents, skills, tokens

            .------.
         .-'        '-.
       .'              '.
      /                  \
     /                    \
    /                      \

The worst part in all that noise: ask your customers what they need ; they will tell you "AI features". No matter what it is, or even how it compares to more traditional approaches when it comes to solving their pains. These two letters got beyond obsession.

I think it's kinda double whammy, one the one hand working with AI leaves a lot of 5-15 minute breaks perfect for squeezing in a comment on a HN thread, while also supplanting the sort of work that would typically lead to interesting ideas or projects, substituting it with work that isn't that interesting to talk about (or at least hasn't been thought about for long enough to have interesting things to say).

AI is fine. The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse.

AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

It is getting stuffy in the tech sector lately with all these AI postings but it's still a very new and very disruptive technology.

I also have to say that I don't use AI in my personal or professional life. And that is simply because I haven't felt any need to use it.

Very much so. I wouldn't mind some interesting projects or results. But it's very basic opinions or parables all over again.

Of course talking about AI is boring.

The analogy is someone from the 19th century talking about their slaves all day which is of course nonsense because they had other things to talk about.

Modern AI is a miracle. The math that makes it work is beautiful and really impressive. For example, if you wanted to map all knowledge on earth, how would you do it? AI answers that question by building a high dimensional vector space of embeddings, and traversing that space moves you through a topology of basically every concept that humans have.

Or another thought; why is it that a stochastic parrot can solve logic puzzles consistently and accurately? It might not be 100%, but it’s still much better than what you might expect from a markov model of ngrams.

Openclaw is only sort of interesting. How to vibe code your first product is uninteresting. Claims about productivity increase from model usage are speculative and uninteresting. Endless think pieces on the effects of AI slop are uninteresting. There’s a lot of hype and grift and bullshit that is downstream of this very interesting technology, and basically none of that is interesting. The cool parts are when you actually open the models up and try to figure out what’s going on.

So no, I’m not bored of talking about AI. I’m not sure I ever will be. My suspicion is that those who are bored of it aren’t digging deep enough. With that said, that will likely only be interesting to people who think math is fun and cool. On the whole, AI is unlikely to affect our lives in proportion to the ink spilled by influencers.

I don't think I'm quite bored. I'm exhausted/fatigued with the pace.

Yes — talking and hearing/reading about it. I don’t fault folks for being excited when first getting into ut, but it’s rare to hear anything new said. And what is new is increasingly niche and unlikely to have any application to what I do.

I am bored of Luddite people yelling at AI

It's just a buzzword that draws more attention and more clicks. I also use AI for some projects, but it can be annoying when companies try to incorporate it in places it doesn't belong.

yes. it's like a giant finger pointing at the moon, and everyone's talking about the finger.

You may be bored of AI, but because AI is not yet bored of us, turning away may be dangerous.

I'm kind of bored by AI promotion posts that pretend to be about something else.

I'm bored of the everyday Claude spam. I've used Claude extensively and it was very sub par.

Everything is fandom now. I grew up around people obsessed with Nascar and NFL. So much of the discourse sounds exactly the same. It beats listening to people talk about their dogs though.

So then...don't talk about it? Do your job. Go home. Spend time with family. Find some non-tech hobbies. The solution isn't to change the world but to break your social media addiction (and yes, HN/Linkedin/X are included).

The debate around "AGI" is the thing that gets me. People just moving goalposts and arbitrarily applying their own standards makes for a lot of wheel spinning

Talking about AI being boring is boring as hell for sure.

only of people constantly complaining about it like they have some special insight

Never tired of talking about AI. There are so many fascinating aspects to explore and papers delivering new ideas. It's a bit tiring keeping up with the new stuff but talking about what we've found is one of the things that makes it easier to keep up.

I'm somewhat tired of seeing the same rehashed claims of future ability, non-ability, profit, loss.

I actually like talking about the implications, future risks and challenges of AI. I have made submissions on ways AI should be regulated to benefit society. The problem is the assumption of what is happening and what will happen.

To many people seem to enter the conversation feeling that the absence of doubt is the same thing as being informed.

And especially people making claims based on premises that they seem to believe that if they build big enough towers on them, they will become true.

The number one thing that bothers me in all this, is people assuming the contents of the minds of others.

I find the pathologising of Sam Altman to be the most egregious form of this. It is one thing to disagree with someone's decisions, another thing to disagree with their stated opinions, but to decide upon a person's character based upon what you believe they are thinking in their private thoughts is simply projection.

I know this is an opinion of little worth to many, but my impression of Sam Altman is just a person who has different perspectives to me. The capitalist tech world he lives in would inevitably shape different values to me. What I have seen of him is consistent with a sincere expression of values. I can accept that a person might do something different to what I would, even the opposite of what I want while believing that they can be doing so for reasons that seem to be morally the right thing to do.

This also happened with cryptocurrency. Crypto advocates believe that it is a good thing for the world. Too many consider those who believe that crypto could benefit society to be evil. There is a difference between being wrong and being evil. No matter how certain you are you can still be wrong, in fact beyond a point I would say increased certancy would indicate a higher likelihood of being wrong.

So I'm happy to talk about AI. I have plenty to learn. I wonder if others went in with the goal to learn whether they would find it less tiring.

I deeply wish to hear about other tech trends; I get enough of use more ai, do more with less, and ship faster at work. I'd rather hear about new tools and techniques here