I understand your pain, we're just a peak hype, I think people will learn to backtrack and use the tool in a more sensible way. It always happens. I remember when MongoDB and other NoSql databases came out, people went as far as to say that "SQL is dead" and refuse to use a normal SQL database for anything. Not even for the most obvious relational application. People would store everything as key-value pairs with no schema and do all the joins in the application layer. Fast forward 10 years and we're back to using SQL for most of our applications. NoSql hasn't disappeared, it has just been reduced to the nice where it's useful.
Also reminded me of Kafka (Kafka as a database!) and microservices (monoliths are evil, microservices are the future). I'm sure we can dig up similar hypes on various scales throughout the history of this industry...
Perhaps so-called AI is slightly different from hypes like NoSql and microservices in that these reduced to usages that practically apply to only a fraction of the engineering population (albeit, it's still good for anyone to know about them even if we never use them), whereas AI will probably still affect us all even after the dust settles. Just in much less spectacular ways than is being trumpeted currently by some groups.
Reminded me of No Silver Bullet: "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity. "
Technology moves fast and is prone to hype. While NoSQL and Kafka were certainly oversold, almost every mid-large scale tech company has at least one nosql system and kafka-like system in use. The proponents weren’t wrong, they oversold the impact.
There is other tech that did completely change how we do things. CI/CD, Containers, Kubernetes, distributed tracing etc. are considered standard now (but weren’t not that long ago).
Containers and Kubernetes are not as standard as we'd like to think. They're standard for things of certain size, but for small-to-medium there are a good amount of serverless options. For a moderately sized website, it's easier to just stick the thing in Vercel than having to deal with the complexity of Kubernetes. Of course, once you grow then you do need that complexity, but I'm willing to bet that many people who got onboard into it don't actually need it, they just did it because everyone else is doing it.
