Midwinter

Tech meetups are filled with weary professionals who feel the industry has run out of new ideas, with conversations revolving around AI and coding agents as part of a broader exhaustion. Many believe their work is meaningless theater designed to extract money from tech's wealthy elite.

You can feel the weariness at any tech meetup you go to these days. People put a brave face on and try to pretend that they're still excited about tech, still innovating, still trying stuff... but the room feels tired more than anything. There are no new ideas in evidence, just half a hundred variants of the same conversation of how people are using AI to do... something. Even the current vogue of coding agents is, by and large, part of the same phenomenon: it's not that a lot of people don't care about code or writing good code or anything so much as they're exhausted with an industry where nothing they do matters, management jargon keeps changing arbitrarily, as do the fashions in the tech industry and the entire product that they maintain is, more than anything, an elaborate form of theatre to get money from the people who currently hold most of the wealth in tech.