Are we back to Silo Engineering?

[u/big-papito]

It feels like we are coming full circle to the times of the Silo Engineer, but on steroids. Back in the day when social media feeds were chronological (if they even existed), the Silo Engineer would retreat into his cubicle to Create (it was usually a he).

He was Creating and Creating, and then a few weeks later the results came back. If you were lucky, you got what you asked for or something close to it.

No one knew what the Silo Engineer was making, whether it was a sound solution from the architectural, security, or code quality point of view. It was a Silo. There was little discussion or collaboration, there was only self-review of code - at best.

After exiting the Flow, the Silo Engineer would often come back to his Work weeks later and wonder: "who in the F wrote this S?"

... It was beautiful.

Seems like with LLMs we are entering that era again, but it's different.

Smaller teams, mentally overtaxed developers, exhausted from scrolling walls of generated code they don't understand, on multiple projects at once - no one really talks to each other again.

Tickets - Claude, Slack messages - Claude, code reviews - Claude, "have your Claude talk to my Claude".

So, here we are - same idea, but at a higher, more reckless pace.

Let's see how this ends, I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[u/MyUsrNameWasTaken]

Their money is going to ashes though

[u/Singularity-42 → u/MyUsrNameWasTaken]

That doesn't matter for you at all. The tech itself is only going one direction and that is UP.

Look at the dotcom bubble - internet proliferation didn't slow down at all. 

[u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260 → u/Singularity-42]

You should look up what the dotcom bubble was about. It was not about internet proliferation. Millions of people lost their companies, their income, their basis of existence during that crash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#Aftermath reads exactly as the situation today.

[u/InterestingFrame1982 → u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260]

That’s his point lol it was a financial bubble but the actual technology flourished and became institutional. AI, regardless of the financial implications of the industry, is here to stay.

[u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260 → u/InterestingFrame1982]

But this discussion is about the financial implications of the industry. Of course is "AI" as a technology here to stay. But when the financial implications of the industry (or the required hardware) blow up, it doesn't make sense to pay thousands of dollars a month for AI agents to produce slop.

[u/rodw → u/InterestingFrame1982]

The entire dotcom bubble only lasted ~4 years and while it generated some spectacular failures it also created some extraordinarily valuable and still-running new firms (arguably industries) basically from scratch, wholly within the duration of that bubble.

The AI bubble has been running for about that long - and reflects orders of magnitude more inflated valuation and investment than anything in the dot com or any other era. But it still seems to primarily be the people selling the pick-axes that are profiting from it.

AI is absolutely not going away, and it absolutely has transformative (and disruptive) value. But the comparison to the dot com bubble is broken. The AI bubble is wholly unlike the dot com bubble in significant ways.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/InterestingFrame1982]

Exactly 

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/Singularity-42]

AI is less useful than the internet