Tech is in a burnout that nobody can truly define.
I feel like everything is pushing people towards tech, making everyone forget that other realms exist in life.
All the AI models are focused on developers, everyone is told to learn to include development and AI in their workflows, everything needs to be digitalized as if not doing that will make you "lose money".
That is exactly what we call a burnout, a state in which a domaine became so vast, it turned vague. A state where everyone is trying to get involved, and everyone has THE TOOLS to get involved to the point you cannot differentiate between a developer and a project owner.
All you have to do to be a "Tech Billionaire" nowadays, is just have a none abused idea and a Claude Max subscription, good writing & prompting and you're good to go. Add that little sparkle at the end, "Do not make any mistakes" and BAM! You have an entire project built from head to toe in seconds.
You don't even NEED to understand the hows and whats of the project no more, because you can hire an agent to discuss with your investors, hire an agent as a chatbot for tech support, hire an agent to manage the emails, complaints, and bugs, and another agent to fix those bugs and deploy again.
You can just "Buy that MacBook" and get you a 5$ Cigar and an iPhone, post yourself making money on social media, get engagement, prompt claude to make a course on how to use claude to make a startup but without giving the full truth, and BAM! You're even more rich.
Through all this, a question crosses my mind: Who the fuck are all these kids?
I remember my first time writing code in 2018, I was 14 years old, just bought a 950 pages Java Basics book, and downloaded Eclipse on my Intel Pentium Desktop PC.
I spent the entire first day crying all because I wrote the code correctly but it never ran it. It just kept throwing an error and I had no one to explain it.
Through countless hours of tinkering and heavy tears, I found out I didn't have any JDK or JRE installed on the PC... Causing this compilation error. I had no compiler. lol.
Nowadays people don't know the effort required to learn coding, because nobody IS learning how to code, instead they use code as a "tool".
Code has always been a "tool" but not in the proper sense of the term.
Every developer pre-AI era loved coding, as much as they hated it, everyone was obsessed with their creation and knowledge. It meant something to know how to code and how to think of a structure for your application. Nowadays, every tech bro tells you to use AI and not write the whole code.
I just can't see it. Maybe I'm extremist in my view, but it's either you write the code, or AI writes it for you, there's no in between; cause if I give AI some code to correct and it rewrites it 567 times better than me, I'm definitely going to give up on coding and just let it do the thing for me. There isn't that taste to it anymore.
Due to all of this, you see now, lawyers, doctors, writers, hell even construction workers, getting code written to them through AI to build an entire startup in minutes based on their field of expertise. Yes this has benefits and downsides to it indeed, but I believe the benefit is very rare.
Most of the time, the most damaged people in such situations are the developers that cannot make a living anymore because of this literal "Freelancer AIs" that took over their place, and also because of how diverse the Tech world became.
We used to be hyped about tech, we used to wait for an Apple WWDC, we used to be excited to death about a Nintendo Direct, but nowadays, we look at their products and go "Hm, yeah, I could probably build the same thing" or "Hm ahh yeah that processor, and that os and that graphics card. Only that much RAM??" as if we started knowing a little too much... As if EVERYONE started understanding a bit too much in the tech world.
Back in my old days, when game consoles were released, they either used this obscure PowerPC combo for twin Graphics card, with a very platform specific RAM config, and a "at Home" built OS or you just never knew what's inside of it. You just knew it was powerful. I miss that feeling.
Yes it is indeed true that, the more you know, the more aware you are, the less you enjoy things; and the cherry on top is the fact that EVERYONE understands EVERYTHING nowadays.
The expertise, the niche circles, and the deep hidden communities, just faded away because of how much tech is being released, and how much Advertising is being done on them making us just hear the same words everyday the point we do not enjoy anything anymore.
I swear this is all connected and it is all inside of a cycle that cannot be solved unless we just diassociate for a while then comeback to check what's new. I'm not even excited about MacOS and iOS 27 anymore. I used to be FURIOUS waiting for the next update to see what new they came up with, but I just know it's the same now, AI oriented slop with graphical candy to please the eye. No real software is being developed.
Software used to be magical and especially unique to the developer. Everytime I get my hands on a clinical device, from a scanner, to just an old XP computer, I fall in love with software again.
The design, the font, the colors, the LCD screen, everything them FITS SO WELL. As if everything was taken in consideration when building the product to the point that it gives off a "Perfectionist" Vibe. I don't see that anymore with these unified UIs, these unified tools and backends. Everyone is on SwiftUI for design, Python for machine learning, Visual Studio for C development, Windows as a work machine, no modifications, stock, basic, blue and white, it feel fucking empty. I hate it. I hate it so much, I fucking despise it. It kills me to see what I once considered my world, tech, turn into this monotone, clone world where everyone lives exactly the same just like the Vladimir Lenin Communism dream. Things used to have "soul" and that soul came from the developers.
Nowadays, software is being written by robots and not humans anymore, to the point that no matter how hard we try, liquid glass will never feel like Aqua Aero.
It sickens me and I hope this AI bubble not only bursts, but burns with its data centers down to the grave, and I'm not going to stop trying to learn coding to master what's hard.
Answers used to require us to go through libraries of books to find them, now I just talk to my phone and it answers back with my whole life connected to the answer.
I don't blame whoever said "The only piece of tech I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise", they're completely right. It's not skeptisism anymore, they don't try to hide it anymore, everything is mother fucking connected.
I wrote this from an M1 Macbook Air, and mark my words, very soon, I'm deleting this MacOS bs and shoving void linux in this thing once and for all. Thank you for reading.
Anas Dhifallah