I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine.

What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt?

People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era.

After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understanding of what you are building does not exceed the reality of the mess you and your team are actually building if budgets allow.

This seldom happens, even in solo hobby projects once you cost everything in.

It's not about agile or waterfall or "functional" or abstracting your dependencies via Podman or Docker or VMware or whatever that nix crap is. Or using an agent to catch the bugs in the agent that's talking to an LLM you have next to no control over that's deleting your production database while you slept, then asking it to make illustrations for the postmortem blog post you ask it to write that you think elevates your status in the community but probably doesn't.

I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.

> What are you building?

This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs?

Hard to shake the feeling that this looks like one big pyramid scheme. I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering.

> I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.

It was, and is. But not universally.

If you formulate questions scientifically and use the answers to make decisions, that's engineering. I've seen it happen. It can happen with LLMs, under the proper guidance.

If you formulate questions based on vibes, ignore the answers, and do what the CEO says anyway, that's not engineering. Sadly, I've seen this happen far too often. And with this mindset comes the Claudiot mindset - information is ultimately useless so fake autogenerated content is just as valuable as real work.