This post isn’t about AI, LLMs or agents per-se. Today’s thought is inspired by Kent Beck, who’s excellent podcast Still Burning has him exploring the new world of agentic coding with others in the industry doing interesting things.

If you do listen to anything from him in the last year, you’ll hear him say the same phrase in relation to augmented coding: Nobody knows.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a throwaway, hot take, but I think it’s actually one of wisest things to bear in mind. There is a lot of noise in the industry right now around generative AI, but I think the big LLM providers are playing a mind-trick on everyone. The AI companies seem to have endless money and investment, the smartest people working for them, and a huge following of people reporting on every product increment, every opinion and every prediction. Surely that has to mean something, right?

No. Correlation is not causation, and good marketing is just that - good marketing. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei can tell you that their technology will upend the whole software engineering industry, but they don’t know that. Nobody knows.

It’s the same for the endless articles, social media posts, advertisements, and podcast episodes dedicated to what the next big thing in AI will be. They can talk about the things they’ve tried, cool party tricks, and surprising outcomes of experiments, but they can’t know the long-term impact of these small, isolated demos. Nobody knows.

As for how much money is being thrown around, well - that’s just how speculative venture capital works. We have come out of a particularly interesting point in time where VC investment was flat. The theory goes because COVID messed with the “natural order” of investment. What seems more likely is that for the period of ZIRP (Zero Interest-Rate Policy) VC wasn’t able to produce any actual transformative technology. Think about it - how many hype cycles did we go through in the 15 or so years from the early 2010s? Augmented reality? blockchain/web3? NFTs? VR? self-driving cars? low-code/no-code? 3D printing? In fact, if you watch what happend over the years of Gartner’s hype cycle of emerging technology, you’ll see the right-hand side stops showing any technology dots moving into the “slope of enlightenment” or the “plateau of productivity”. The macro-economic conditions allowed extremely cheap experimentation, but none of it really lived up to the hype as VC kept searching for the next big thing.

Then ChatGPT changed everything. It recaptured the feeling of magic that we hadn’t last seen since the mobile revolution. Money piled in. More. And more. And more. And more. Right now it’s hard to see the industry as anything but completely overheating with money and people wanting to capitalise on that.

And with all that money, comes a whole lotta noise. It’s actually really, really hard to see what is making any inroads towards real transformative technology. More and more and more dots are pilling high on the “technology trigger” and “peak of inflated expectations” part of the cycle, but still not a huge amount moving beyond it into even the “trough of disillusionment”. The result is just noise. Lots and lots and lots of noise, and not a huge amount of actual useful advice, because nobody knows.

Which is why the best thing you can do for yourself in this crazy world is not to listen to it all and stop chasing every next-big-thing. Especially don’t listen if anyone is telling you they do know. Give yourself time, not because you “have to act now”. Nor because “You’ll be left behind”. Give yourself time to understand these technologies, and to evaluate them but at your own pacing. Don’t worry about missing out if you don’t try the latest trend - just catch the next wave.

If you do experiment it’s also important to be aware of yourself - observe how you feel and respond when using them. Really dig into the detail of how much time and effort and mental toil different approaches take. Experiment and observe on your own terms. It’s OK to feel anxiety, or frustration, or excitement, or nothing at all. Those are all valid, but they are not the whole, and they are not the end.

Don’t follow the hype - the most likely outcome is that you’ll end up tired and disillusioned. Nobody knows where this will actually land. So give yourself time to think and experiment - this is how you’ll engage and discern what is just hype, what is just cool, and what may actually be applicable to your future.

Stay sane, and stay healthy.