Two things can be true at once. I am becoming convinced software engineering as an industry is forever changed by LLM coding agents. I also think the AI hype is way overblown. Folks are out here talking about curing cancer and solving climate change with AI. I think it’s much more likely that AI is just normal technology and something more akin to cloud computing than the iPhone. So AI can be great and amazing and also perfectly normal. That makes complete sense to me.
Something Benedict Evans wrote on LinkedIn today hit me as related.
I love that phrase "Apple treads its own path." It's hard to do that. Seriously hard. It's why there really is only one Apple. It's also why a company like Amazon has done more with cloud infrastructure than category defining products. I love generative AI as technology, but it's more cloud infrastructure than iPhone. And that's ok. That's still a big deal. But let's be real about what kind of deal it is.