Just figured I'd post about this here, because I'm now seeing huge shifts on my team and in the rest of the industry in general, and the reality of what's happening in tech is no longer aligned with public opinion. Ofc, I'm talking about AI.
Just as a preface, a little about me is that I have a doctorate in Computer Engineering, and I have about a decade of experience working across companies including Intel, Microsoft (Xbox), and Meta (Oculus). I've also been a huge AI skeptic. Out of 40+ people in my research lab in grad school, I was the only one NOT working on AI/ML. With that out of the way...
2026 is the year of AI. It's not hype anymore. It's here. Is it perfect? No. But the absolute latest models (as in, within the last few months) are now "good enough." It is genuinely useful, mostly correct, and orders of magnitude faster than humans at tasks like research and software development.
As of the past few weeks, no one on my team writes code themselves anymore. This is also the pattern seen by any colleagues I have across the industry. If you work in tech, as a software engineer, the medium-term future of your job is piloting 3-5 AI agents in parallel like a coked-out, somehow-nerdier Shinji.
Just figured I would fire the alert flares here as the general public (and especially gamers) are still violently anti-AI. But the reality is that the genie is now out of the bottle and the tools are so good that you now are dumb if you don't use it. It makes things that were previously impossible simply due to lack of RoI completely doable. I will point to the recent Animal Crossing PC port as an example of this.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't immediately shit all over devs who use it (homebrew or indie, especially), because you're going to be scaring away a lot of cool projects for no reason.
Just as a preface, a little about me is that I have a doctorate in Computer Engineering, and I have about a decade of experience working across companies including Intel, Microsoft (Xbox), and Meta (Oculus). I've also been a huge AI skeptic. Out of 40+ people in my research lab in grad school, I was the only one NOT working on AI/ML. With that out of the way...
2026 is the year of AI. It's not hype anymore. It's here. Is it perfect? No. But the absolute latest models (as in, within the last few months) are now "good enough." It is genuinely useful, mostly correct, and orders of magnitude faster than humans at tasks like research and software development.
As of the past few weeks, no one on my team writes code themselves anymore. This is also the pattern seen by any colleagues I have across the industry. If you work in tech, as a software engineer, the medium-term future of your job is piloting 3-5 AI agents in parallel like a coked-out, somehow-nerdier Shinji.
Just figured I would fire the alert flares here as the general public (and especially gamers) are still violently anti-AI. But the reality is that the genie is now out of the bottle and the tools are so good that you now are dumb if you don't use it. It makes things that were previously impossible simply due to lack of RoI completely doable. I will point to the recent Animal Crossing PC port as an example of this.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't immediately shit all over devs who use it (homebrew or indie, especially), because you're going to be scaring away a lot of cool projects for no reason.
