alt Hacker NewsAlso reminded me of Kafka (Kafka as a database!) and microservices (monoliths are evil, microservices are the future). I'm sure we can dig up similar hypes on various scales throughout the history of this industry...
Perhaps so-called AI is slightly different from hypes like NoSql and microservices in that these reduced to usages that practically apply to only a fraction of the engineering population (albeit, it's still good for anyone to know about them even if we never use them), whereas AI will probably still affect us all even after the dust settles. Just in much less spectacular ways than is being trumpeted currently by some groups. Reminded me of No Silver Bullet: "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity. "
Technology moves fast and is prone to hype. While NoSQL and Kafka were certainly oversold, almost every mid-large scale tech company has at least one nosql system and kafka-like system in use. The proponents weren’t wrong, they oversold the impact.
There is other tech that did completely change how we do things. CI/CD, Containers, Kubernetes, distributed tracing etc. are considered standard now (but weren’t not that long ago).