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The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to int

The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to internalize the fact that the chatbots they use hallucinate. It really is 'different', though, in the same way the Internet was. It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble popped half-way through that period of time. AI might 'underwhelm' for another five or ten years. And then it won't. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.

mortenjorck 8mo ago
"AI is a bubble!" "AI will change everything!" Few seem to understand that both of the above can be true. The parallel you draw to the internet revolution is apt; dot-coms were both a bubble and changed everything.
- almosthere 8mo ago
  it literally describes the gartnerhype cycle. this article is pointless, the only thing that matters is what survives it with over 1m users. AI will have billions of users when GHC is on the back end.
naravara 8mo ago
I think a good analogy will be the way word processors changed printing. Suddenly anyone with access to a computer had the ability to do professional level editing and layout. Most of them didn’t have the taste or skills to use the tools to the fullest, but it still opened up a ton of possibilities that weren’t available before because it was never practical to hire an actual professional to do a poster for a dinky church bake sale before. But now, church bake sales can have pretty slick looking posters (and websites) depending on whether any of the volunteers cares enough to get. The stuff LLMs will democratize will be a lot more impactful than nice posters for car wash fundraisers though. So in that sense it will be different, but I don’t think it will crack the market for proficient experts in the field in the same way photoshop didn’t destroy graphic design and CAD didn’t destroy drafting. It may get rid of the market for a lot of the second-tier bootcamp grad talent though, so I wouldn’t be getting into that right now if I could help it.
- doyougnu 8mo ago
  I think this is exactly right. I've been thinking of "this time" as similar to the advent of digital spreadsheets. Spreadsheets existed for thousands of years but spreadsheet programs transformed spreadsheet work that took hours or weeks into seconds. You still had to know what you were doing, and if you knew what you were doing you were easily 10x faster than those that didn't. I think we are in a similar situation with code generation now, then only difference in my mind is that LLMs come with a massive platform risk. Who's to say that one day anthropic decides my company is too much of a competitor to use their tool (like they've already done with openai) or what if they decide that instead of pulling their product from my use they just make it generate worse code, or even insert malicious payloads. A dependence on these tools is wildly more risky than dependency on a word processor or a spreadsheet program. It reminds me of the arguments around net neutrality and I cannot fathom how people building on top of, and with, these tools do not see the mountain of risks around them.
  - hdgvhicv 8mo ago
    We have a generation of computer programmers who have known nothing but building on top of AWS. Vendor lockin at a career level. Most were building on top of Microsoft before that. Platform agnosticism and open source and specifically the ownership and control was mostly niche. I don’t see that changing.
  - naravara 7mo ago
    For now the code assistance mostly works within your existing IDE and dev tools. So as long as there is rough parity across the different model vendors I think it should actually be pretty straightforward to swap between them. In fact the few enterprise tools I’ve seen shipping now have a drop-down to pick which model you want to use per instance. You can pick Gemini to do one thing and Claude to do something else and Llama for a third thing if you want. They’re all outputting into conventional programming languages so they can all read and proof each others’ work.
MaybiusStrip 8mo ago
The only people underwhelmed by AI in February 2026 are people who have formed an identity around being AI skeptics over the last couple years and are struggling to shed it. I haven't met anyone who has seriously used the new models who isn't a at least a bit awed and disturbed.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- selridge 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- skeeter2020 8mo ago
  This statment is really annoying and getting boring. There are A LOT of us who have built careers evaluating technology with healthy skepticism, finding where it works and were it doesn't, excited to share & learn - and we've heard "this time it's different" many times. Now because we refuse to jump in without that same nuance and thought, and proclaim "everything's different over night!" we're branded as ludites when we're really trying find a balance. I don't hear people saying "nothing is going to change", but I do hear questions about the timeline and if the current levels of investment match returns. Branding these people as stuck in some sort of negative identity is bullshit.
  - shruggedatlas 8mo ago
    What is your position on AI?
    - skeeter2020 8mo ago
      in a nutshell: AI - even if transformative and in the future a widely used general-purpose technology - is normal technology. I reject the technological determinism that is being fed to us, especially the idea that AI itself is an agent in defining its own future. I think adoption and the post-adoption spread will be slow & uncertain (relative to the current messaging) regardless of where it ultimately takes us. I think the absolute societal impact is grossly overstated, and the roles of institutions shaping the path underestimated or ignored.
buzzerbetrayed 8mo ago
What world are you living in where AI is underwhelming currently? I can’t even comprehend this. Are you just not using it or something?
- thomassmith65 8mo ago
  There aren't many situations today that make one think: Why doesn't this business have a website? Why is there no wifi here? Why do they send these forms in the mail instead of email them? Why can't I talk to this gadget with bluetooth? Why can't I file this form electronically? Why is there no electronic version of this book? That was not the case, prior to the 2010's. There was the promise of new technology, but the reality was underwhelming. With AI, we're still in 1998 or 1999. People like yourself, and most people on HN, see the promise, and benefit from what AI can already do. Still, AI has yet to benefit the average person much, if at all.

mortenjorck 8mo ago

"AI is a bubble!" "AI will change everything!" Few seem to understand that both of the above can be true. The parallel you draw to the internet revolution is apt; dot-coms were both a bubble and changed everything.

almosthere 8mo ago
it literally describes the gartnerhype cycle. this article is pointless, the only thing that matters is what survives it with over 1m users. AI will have billions of users when GHC is on the back end.

naravara 8mo ago

I think a good analogy will be the way word processors changed printing. Suddenly anyone with access to a computer had the ability to do professional level editing and layout. Most of them didn’t have the taste or skills to use the tools to the fullest, but it still opened up a ton of possibilities that weren’t available before because it was never practical to hire an actual professional to do a poster for a dinky church bake sale before. But now, church bake sales can have pretty slick looking posters (and websites) depending on whether any of the volunteers cares enough to get. The stuff LLMs will democratize will be a lot more impactful than nice posters for car wash fundraisers though. So in that sense it will be different, but I don’t think it will crack the market for proficient experts in the field in the same way photoshop didn’t destroy graphic design and CAD didn’t destroy drafting. It may get rid of the market for a lot of the second-tier bootcamp grad talent though, so I wouldn’t be getting into that right now if I could help it.

doyougnu 8mo ago
I think this is exactly right. I've been thinking of "this time" as similar to the advent of digital spreadsheets. Spreadsheets existed for thousands of years but spreadsheet programs transformed spreadsheet work that took hours or weeks into seconds. You still had to know what you were doing, and if you knew what you were doing you were easily 10x faster than those that didn't. I think we are in a similar situation with code generation now, then only difference in my mind is that LLMs come with a massive platform risk. Who's to say that one day anthropic decides my company is too much of a competitor to use their tool (like they've already done with openai) or what if they decide that instead of pulling their product from my use they just make it generate worse code, or even insert malicious payloads. A dependence on these tools is wildly more risky than dependency on a word processor or a spreadsheet program. It reminds me of the arguments around net neutrality and I cannot fathom how people building on top of, and with, these tools do not see the mountain of risks around them.
- hdgvhicv 8mo ago
  We have a generation of computer programmers who have known nothing but building on top of AWS. Vendor lockin at a career level. Most were building on top of Microsoft before that. Platform agnosticism and open source and specifically the ownership and control was mostly niche. I don’t see that changing.
- naravara 7mo ago
  For now the code assistance mostly works within your existing IDE and dev tools. So as long as there is rough parity across the different model vendors I think it should actually be pretty straightforward to swap between them. In fact the few enterprise tools I’ve seen shipping now have a drop-down to pick which model you want to use per instance. You can pick Gemini to do one thing and Claude to do something else and Llama for a third thing if you want. They’re all outputting into conventional programming languages so they can all read and proof each others’ work.

MaybiusStrip 8mo ago

The only people underwhelmed by AI in February 2026 are people who have formed an identity around being AI skeptics over the last couple years and are struggling to shed it. I haven't met anyone who has seriously used the new models who isn't a at least a bit awed and disturbed.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
selridge 8mo ago
[flagged]
skeeter2020 8mo ago
This statment is really annoying and getting boring. There are A LOT of us who have built careers evaluating technology with healthy skepticism, finding where it works and were it doesn't, excited to share & learn - and we've heard "this time it's different" many times. Now because we refuse to jump in without that same nuance and thought, and proclaim "everything's different over night!" we're branded as ludites when we're really trying find a balance. I don't hear people saying "nothing is going to change", but I do hear questions about the timeline and if the current levels of investment match returns. Branding these people as stuck in some sort of negative identity is bullshit.
- shruggedatlas 8mo ago
  What is your position on AI?
  - skeeter2020 8mo ago
    in a nutshell: AI - even if transformative and in the future a widely used general-purpose technology - is normal technology. I reject the technological determinism that is being fed to us, especially the idea that AI itself is an agent in defining its own future. I think adoption and the post-adoption spread will be slow & uncertain (relative to the current messaging) regardless of where it ultimately takes us. I think the absolute societal impact is grossly overstated, and the roles of institutions shaping the path underestimated or ignored.

buzzerbetrayed 8mo ago

What world are you living in where AI is underwhelming currently? I can’t even comprehend this. Are you just not using it or something?

thomassmith65 8mo ago
There aren't many situations today that make one think: Why doesn't this business have a website? Why is there no wifi here? Why do they send these forms in the mail instead of email them? Why can't I talk to this gadget with bluetooth? Why can't I file this form electronically? Why is there no electronic version of this book? That was not the case, prior to the 2010's. There was the promise of new technology, but the reality was underwhelming. With AI, we're still in 1998 or 1999. People like yourself, and most people on HN, see the promise, and benefit from what AI can already do. Still, AI has yet to benefit the average person much, if at all.