It’s important to me that you understand the extent to which nobody knows what’s going on right now

I mean half the industry is just carrying on and treating AI like it’s just a coding assistant, like it’s a fancy upgrade from Intellisense™; but otherwise leaving the overall structure of what we call “Agile development” intact, and treating AI-generated code as though it were just like outsourcing, but quicker and with no timezone problems.

And the other half is treating skills and MCP servers as a new software distribution channel, building harnesses for their harnesses and throwing out decades of “best practices”, creating new job roles that merge every combinatorial variation of PM + TPM + UX + IC+ PjM + SRE + Ops, working toward a future where product, engineering, and design departments become A Guy and a fleet of agents pitted against each other.

And the thing is either one of those groups could be right, it could go either way. Maybe all this AI slop really will prove to be unmaintainable and we’ll all pay the price in a couple years after the damage has been done to all the codebases. Or maybe the future of software is ultimately just a single chat interface to the expensive AI that generates whatever you need on the fly. Could go either way.

It’s kind of crazy not knowing whether your industry still has a reason to exist.