2022–now

AI Present

The stack gets a co-pilot

AI pair programming is already changing how code is written. Agent frameworks and vector stores are still sorting winners from demos. The durable layer will look familiar: evals, retrieval quality, product UX, and ownership. Autopilot rewrites without tests are just big-bang migrations with better slides.

14 technologies in this era

Practice · 2021–now

AI pair programming

Stuck

Autocomplete that actually understands the file. Changing how code is written faster than how it's reviewed.

Practice · 2023–now

LLM eval pipelines

Stuck

Regression tests for nondeterministic models. The unglamorous infrastructure that separates demos from products.

Platform · 2023–now

Postgres + pgvector

Stuck

Embeddings back in the database you already run. The quiet winner of the vector DB gold rush.

Platform · 2022–now

Bun

Stuck

All-in-one JS runtime that actually feels fast. Winning scripts and side projects while production waits for edge cases.

Practice · 2023–now

RAG as default architecture

Mutated

Retrieval-augmented generation as the answer to every knowledge problem. Often right; often Postgres with pgvector would suffice.

$ Teams stood up vector pipelines, chunking strategies, and rerankers before asking if fine-tuning or a SQL query would answer the question. Retrieval infra became the product.

Practice · 2024–now

AI stack consolidation

Mutated

The shakeout from seventeen LLM wrappers to three vendors and one observability bill. Hype cycle entering boring procurement.

Practice · 2023–now

Agent ops / LLM observability

Stuck

Tracing, cost caps, and prompt versioning for production LLM features. Datadog for tokens.

Framework · 2023–now

LLM app frameworks

Mutated

Chains, agents, and prompt wrappers shipping weekly. The durable pieces will be boring: evals, retrieval, and product UX.

Platform · 2022–now

Vector DB gold rush

Mutated

Specialized stores for embeddings. Many workloads are folding back into Postgres extensions — after the vendor tour.

Practice · 2023–now

AI will rewrite the codebase

Costly fad

Big-bang rewrite, now with a chatbot. Same failure mode; prettier slides.

$ Exec decks promised autonomous migrations "by next quarter." Teams that skipped tests, ownership, and incremental strangler patterns bought expensive demos and fragile diffs.

Language · 2019–now

Gleam

Stuck

Erlang semantics with friendly syntax on the BEAM. The language your functional meetup loves and your employer has never heard of.

Framework · 2023–now

Multi-agent orchestration hype

Costly fad

LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGPT cosplay — agents delegating to agents for tasks one function call could do.

$ Autonomous agent swarms burned API budgets on coordination loops that a single prompt and a cron job would have handled. Debugging "which agent lied" became the new on-call sport.

Practice · 2024–now

Vibe coding

Costly fad

Accept AI output on feel, skip the diff, hope tests exist. Fast demos; fragile ownership.

$ Ship-to-prod without reading the diff became a flex until incidents revealed nobody knew which prompt wrote the auth middleware. Review debt arrived in one weekend demo.

Practice · 2023–2024

AutoGPT-class autonomous agents

Costly fad

Give the model a goal and a credit card. Viral in 2023; quietly shelved when the loop never stopped spending.

$ Open-ended agent loops burned API credits chasing goals nobody specified well enough to finish. Demo videos outpaced production deployments by orders of magnitude.

© 2026 Fadstack · Shane Code

Opinionated history · not a ranking