AI Hype: My Thoughts

The AI hype is hard to miss—and so is the pressure around it. New models and tools appear constantly, sometimes several in a single week: Grok, GPT, Kimi, and others. Do you remember weeks like that?

I've been watching this hype play out, especially among programmers on Twitter and YouTube, where so much of the content seems to be about new models, becoming more productive, and how to automate more and more.

Somewhere along the way, trying them started to feel less like curiosity and more like an obligation: "I'm not doing enough. What if AI replaces me? My limits reset, so I guess I'll go to bed later and push even harder." You know what I mean.

I understand where this pressure comes from. But following every release doesn't tell me whether a tool is useful for what I'm building. I can be curious about a new model without treating it as something I have to adopt.

Today, one of the programmers I respect, Michael Paulson (ThePrimeagen), talked about this in a video and shared a post written by George Hotz:

"What I don't like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it's mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself..."

I really like this post because it captures what the AI hype feels like right now. Why are people speaking out about it? Well, probably because they've felt that pressure themselves.

But the idea that you're hopelessly falling behind isn't true.

I enjoy programming and learning things that interest me. When I'm working on a project, I want to understand why a tool fits and what happens when it fails. That takes longer than trying it once and moving on to the next thing, and I'm okay with that. My health, exercise, sleep, nutrition, relationships, and mental well-being still matter more to me.

Recently, I started learning Lua because I want to try making a game, just for fun, writing the code myself. It doesn't have to be the most productive thing I could do. I want to enjoy making it and understand how it works.

Sometimes, I feel the same pressure on LinkedIn. I open my feed and see post after post about how to become more productive, why I'm doing everything wrong, and why I need to work even harder.

Well... learning is good. And pushing yourself can be good too.

But when all that advice starts affecting your health, disturbing your sleep, or making you feel that you're never doing enough, it stops being useful. At that point, it's just noise.

That's it.

The quoted passage is from George Hotz's "I love LLMs, I hate hype".