You know that one tech thing everyone's rolling their eyes at right now? The one getting roasted on timelines for being "all demo, no delivery"? Yeah, I'm low-key riding with it. Don't @ me.
2026 hit and suddenly the whole industry is in full backlash mode. Keynotes promised the moon, VCs threw money like confetti, and now the receipts are in: most pilots flop harder than a bad matatu jump, costs balloon, and half the "revolutionary" stuff ends up gathering digital dust. CIOs are quietly killing projects left and right. Reddit threads are full of "I told you so" energy. Gartner even has graphs showing the classic hype drop-off incoming.
And me? Sitting here in Nairobi with my VS Code open, secretly leaning on it for the boring-but-painful parts of shipping code. Guilty as charged.
The Hype Is Real (and Annoying)
You already know this: flashy conference talks claiming it'll 10x your life, replace juniors, run companies autonomously. Then reality checks in. Context windows evaporate mid-task, hallucinations sneak in like uninvited guests at a nyama choma, and you end up in what I call the "Debug Loop from Hell." Agent suggests a fix. Fix breaks three other things. You debug the fix. Loop repeats until you want to yeet your laptop into traffic.
Productivity? I give it a generous 6/10 on a good day. Sometimes it feels like having a super-eager intern who means well but needs constant babysitting. Other days? Pure gold.
But Here's Where It Sneaks Up on You
I use it for the stuff I used to dread:
- Spinning up boilerplate so I don't stare at empty files like they're judging me.
- Debugging those weird edge-case bugs that make you question your life choices.
- High-level planning: "yo, how should I structure this new feature without turning the codebase into spaghetti?"
- Building quick scripts and small tools when I just want to prototype and move on.
Biggest win so far? Automating my release flow. Push code to GitHub, tests run automatically, if they pass it cuts a new release tag, maybe even deploys previews. No more manual YAML edits at 2 a.m. because I forgot a step. I described the pipeline once ("automate testing on push, create GitHub release if green, handle rollbacks"), got a solid starting .yml, tweaked it twice, and boom it's been humming ever since. Saved me weekends. Actual weekends. In Nairobi traffic, that's priceless.
The Secret Sauce (and Why I Keep It Quiet)
I pipe outputs from my terminal buddy straight into VS Code diffs so I can review before anything touches the repo. When it starts looping or forgetting what we're doing (classic context amnesia), I just switch tabs to my zen mode: Quill Editor. No bells, no AI nagging, just me and the code in flow state like the old days. Balance, baby.
It's not magic. It's not replacing me. It's more like that one friend who shows up with tools when you're fixing the sink — helpful for the grunt work, but you still turn the wrench yourself.
Everyone else is busy writing thinkpieces about how it's overhyped trash. Meanwhile, I'm over here shipping a little faster, sleeping a little better, and pretending I didn't just confess this on my blog.
Am I part of the problem? Maybe. But if the problem means automated releases without me crying over CI configs... sign me up quietly.
What about you? Dunking hard or secretly using it too? Drop a comment. No judgment zone.
(If you're curious about Quill Editor, the zen code editor I built for when tech gets too noisy: check my post Building Quill Editor: My Journey to a Zen Code Editor.)
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