A lot more software developer are only there for as a career than artists in the art world, so you’re immediately surrounded by people who see stuff like code performance and readability as “something nerdy”, while you can push out more lines of code instead of optimizing. Not more features, more lines of code, as coding got taken over by the careerists.

That mixed with:

• most tech criticism used to come from out-of-touch parents, thinking you’re from one Quake match away from getting a machine gun to “play it in real life” (was even prevalent in non-US countries due to all kinds of moral panics);
• seeing unsupportative parents utterly devastating their kids’ careers in tech due to weird beliefs and expectations,
• seeing at least some tech fad eventually working out after the toxic hype cycle (Jack Tramiel wanted you to use your C64 for food recipes),
• forgetting that many hyped tech did actually die off (remember Kinect and NFTs?)

lead to people to think LLMs are the next big thing even if AGI won’t come.

There’s also the issue of how society frames AI “extremism”. People like to think in horseshoe theories, and that extremists are necessarily annoying. The tech industry likes to frame “vibe coders with AI psychosis” and “people really not wanting to engage with AI” as the extremes to avoid. In reality, the two extremes are TESCREALists, and anti-tech extremists. Also seen many “totally not vibe coders” using AI to generate a general understanding for the code to avoid scrutiny, while seen “AI assisted” coding going just as off the rails as vibe coding due to overly trusting the chatbot, with many still going down the AI psychosis route.