I feel like I’ve observed this phenomenon several times in my life now. Most recently with, shudders, vibe coding. I think this way of coding will take off initially. However, in the future where everything is AI generated and no programmers know how to fix anything, what will be valuable? The programmers who actually know how to code. I feel like this is something I should be talking about with students. Look for trends, see how things were in the past, anticipate them to come back.
In order to find the middle, one must first know what the extremes are.
Examples:
- Sports matches (hockey) that swing one way will then have seemingly more potential energy to swing back the other way.
- Trends in fashion being cyclical, everything old swings back to being new again.
- Political parties winning back and forth between right and left.
- Web programming started as predominantly back-end, then swung to be hyper front-end with a million front-end frameworks being invented every microsecond. Now we’re seeing things swing back to back-end frameworks.
- “Everything old is new again”