The AI Vibe Shift Is Upon Us

I’ve heard the story that SQL was originally sold as a language that non tech people could use to query databases. It’s mostly an utter failure at that, yet still immensely popular.

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.

I think one issue is time.

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.

5% saying it's helping their company is roughly in line with the lizard man constant. [1] There will always be people who will never admit a thing didn't work out as planned and those who just like to answer sarcastically. It's not unreasonable to assume that, if this report is even remotely accurate, it's pretty much 100% of people finding AI fairly disappointing.

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

It's roughly in line with Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.

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.

What I don't really underdstan is how having 10 juniors in a team, all the agentic code stuff, makes a programmer more productive.

You make „utilities“, those initiatives are about replacing complex processes, business-people-engineer communication and the engineers themselves with AI.

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.

Read the paper. The media is not providing a lot of missing context. The paper points out problems like leadership failures for those efforts, lack of employee buy-in (potentially because they use their personal LLM), etc.

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

> Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. [1]

"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...

They will be used to create new kinds of advertising. Commercials and banner ads that are indistinguishable from magic.

Ship gigabytes worth of SPA JavaScript for your shitty company homepage, probably

I work at an ewaste recycling company. I expect we'll see some high end Nvidia Tesla GPUs coming through, just like the Ant Miners (Bitcoin ASICs) a few weeks ago.

Maybe they will go back to mining crypto coins.

Epic paintball venues

i think thats a bit too defensive. the reasonable take has been that AI is definitely a game changer, like the internet was, but it was still in a bubble because people extrapolated the S-curve as though it was an exponential explosion. just like they did with the internet.

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

Why? Doesn’t sound different from any framework e.g. React.

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.

I mean, “it works occasionally, in extremely restrictive circumstances” could be said of nearly any previous tech bubble (crypto may be the one example that just never really delivered anything much at all); this even works for the _previous_ AI bubbles. Expert systems are still, slightly, a thing, say.

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.

Did we read the same article? I don't see that passage anywhere.

It’s like everyone started thinking being an influencer is the actual job as opposed to solving problems via automation. Like what is software if it’s not that?

Why would everyone do a victory lap if they are losing time and money

Software developers commenting on HN and elsewhere routinely focus on majorities, e.g., "80/20" memes, references to Zipf's Law, etc., and conclude without hesitation that if a small minority, say 5%, of software users do not follow a pattern that a large majority, say 95%, follow, the minority can be safely disregarded

Is it really suprising that people reading the MIT report might focus on the 95% instead of the 5%

IMO, the report is mostly about the 5% but as it happens people care about majorities like 95%

“A new way to learn Blender” is not a multi-trillion dollar industry, is the thing. “Oh, this is kinda neat, and occasionally useful” just won’t cut it at current levels of investment.

The old way was not really that you would spend 2 hours googling for the exact procedure you need, but that you would spend time following getting started tutorials, following along with example projects, and generally learn the entire program. Then when you go to make something specific, you'd be able to come up with the steps required yourself because you know the program.

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.

AI is pulled out every couple decades and over-hyped. It never matches the hype, then the term AI gets a bad rap, goes away, and the useful stuff gets a new name, like machine learning to shake off the bad connotations of AI. We saw this in the 60's 80', early oughts, and now today.

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.

Will chatgpt be able to do this after people stop creating the content it trained on? AI is an entropy machine. The people making the content that AI needed to ingest in order to be useful...will be fired because AI will take their jobs. Those people will stop posting and AI will be stuck in 2025. And so will every industry AI touches and absorbs. 3d tools will have to stay at 2025 levels to stay AI compatible. No more artistic development (sure 1 or 2 home hobby people will break though, but nothing like the hundreds of thousands of works in every niche we have today), no more job development, no more tools development. AI is an entropy machine.

> Is the cooling off because industry leadership promised agi last year and it’s not here yet?

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.

Then there’s me, spending my August learning Blender the manual way like we did before 2022 to escape the dreadscape of AI-infected software engineering, and discovering that, wow, I really enjoy 3D modeling to the point I might at least make it my hobby if not pivot my career to it.

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 really f*king hate this new brand of tech hype, how it used to be is:

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?)

> Is the cooling off because industry leadership promised agi last year and it’s not here yet?

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

It's "the rest". More complex projects, existing context (like infrastructure, code, business context, ...).

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.

That's a quote from Ed Zitron, whose entire schtick is that AI is a scam. It's independent of the article itself, and in particular the list of bearish observations near the top, all of which are independently verifiable.

I smile with glee when these people fail. The fundamental issue of modern capitalism is that its a coerce and exploitative system, true believers (who are in charge unfortunately) ignore this, and think money and value are the same thing.

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.

If you're alluding to the fact that a lot of startups run at a loss to capture as much of the market as they can, that is true. But I don't think that's the point here.

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.

the 'novelty of the ways' is usually not nearly as much a factor in adoption than if said change would contribute to the amassing of revenue.

lol

Nvidia has seen it coming. They did not over-leverage the boom themselves and will arise from a crash with a market lead, technical superiority, and a massive pile of R&D cashe.

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.

It had over 2% rises on Wed and Fri. I'm not sure your 50x short would last long before being wiped out.

Market can remain irrational, and all that.

Vibe shifts are real. The internet was always valuable, but oh my, did the vibes shift quickly in 2001. We went from "infinite money for painfully stupid ideas" to a near-total freeze on even the best ideas for a few years.

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.