I was there for the early days of the internet, but honestly nobody needed to tell me the internet was cool. I tried it once and it was very obviously something I wanted, even with a shitty 28k modem and waiting hours on 2k/s downloads.

AI is useful for some things, but to me it's not "internet" level of useful, especially since in a lot of ways it's just a weird probabilistic wrapper on all the knowledge that was already available for free on the internet anyway. Actually, yesterday I was trying to lookup an API function in a game engine and I had google hallucinate the function call twice in a row, and all I could think was "I really just want good search again".

A lot of what I see happening with coding agents isn't actually that different from how people were (badly) building web-apps in the past -- grab a fuckton of stuff off NPM and copy paste from stack overflow (RIP) with a bit of glue code. Now the agent does that for you, but it's not like a lot of thought or skill went into that style of development in the first place. I feel like the main people saying that coding is dead are the ones that weren't doing it very well in the first place. Even in my personal project where I let AI off the leash a lot more than I would in a professional job.. almost all the features that I managed to bust out quickly were more to do with a rich open source ecosystem than Claude's glue code. (IE, I didn't need to invent a text editor because code mirror is already good, I didn't need to write a bunch of frontend components because there are plenty of good UI libraries, I didn't need to write a fancy graph editor because react-flow is fantastic -- 90% of my leverage is a good ecosystem, not AI.

Anyway, as I suppose a bit of a hater, I don't actually hate LLMs themselves, I hate everything around it -- the annoying grifty hustle culture, the incessant hype, the forced usage, the slop apocalypse, the fact that it's about to set the economy on fire and most of all the intent to degrade peoples skills and intellect in an awful race to outsource our thinking to things that don't think. It's not that there isn't interesting tech in there, it's that it's just that when you consider its effects the positives don't outweigh the negatives.