Every few years, the industry rediscovers a familiar truth: complexity does not disappear, it relocates.

We rename patterns, rebuild the same structures with better tooling, then act surprised when the old trade-offs return. Sometimes they do improve. Often the real progress is simply that we have better ways to observe and contain failure.

History does not make you cynical.
It makes you harder to sell to.

#SoftwareHistory #Tech #SystemsThinking #SoftwareEngineering #HypeCycle #ByernNotes

Every trend follows the same choreography:
excitement, overuse, disappointment, blog posts, courses, certifications, rebranding.

The technology changes.
The language changes.
The choreography doesn’t.
The incentives rarely do.

Eventually, we rediscover restraint and call it a new paradigm.

#TechTrends #HypeCycle #SoftwareIndustry #MetaTech #ByernNotes

Every new tool promises to reduce complexity.
Most of them succeed by relocating it somewhere else and calling it abstraction.

Instead of fewer problems, you get problems with different failure modes, new vocabulary, and better marketing.
The system looks simpler until something goes wrong.

The bill always arrives.
It’s just rarely itemized.

#SoftwareArchitecture #Tooling #HypeCycle #EngineeringJudgment #TechCulture #ByernNotes

I’m not anti-cloud, anti-AI, or anti-modern tooling.
I am anti-unexamined defaults.

Every abstraction optimizes for something.
Cost, scale, speed, control, ownership, responsibility.
If you don’t know what a system optimizes for, you are probably paying for it somewhere else.

Skepticism is not negativity.
It’s how engineers stay employed.

#SoftwareArchitecture #TechSkepticism #HypeCycle #SystemsDesign #EngineeringJudgment #TechCulture #CriticalThinking #ByernNotes

Every few years the industry discovers a new way to rename “autocomplete” and call it a revolution.
This time it’s AI agents, last time it was microservices, before that SOA, before that CORBA.
Same problems, same trade-offs, better GPUs.
Still fun though!

#AI #HypeCycle #TechCulture #TechTrends #TechIndustry #SoftwareHistory #SoftwareEngineering

I like this part in particular:

But now that the hype has evaporated and the opportunists have migrated to AI, VR can finally breathe again. It can go back to what it was always meant to be: a creative frontier for gaming, exploration, and presence.

https://atomicpoet.org/objects/035530af-e02a-486b-a7ba-a3998d16143e

#VirtualReality #HypeCycle

Please bro, we’re so close to AGI, just $20,000,000,000 more bro

Via Audrey Watters’s newsletter

#AI #audreyWatters #hypeCycle #LLM #samAltman