Nothing is dead

Every week somebody announces that X is dead, or that Y just killed Z, and every week it's the same lazy bullshit. It's ragebait with a LinkedIn collar on.

SEO was dead. Google was dead. SaaS was dead. Prompt engineering was dead. Junior devs were dead. Coding itself was dead. Somehow every one of those corpses put in a full day of work this morning.

Here's the tell: the post is always confident, always binary, always zero nuance. That isn't a take, it's clickbait. Somebody learned that engagement loves a funeral and decided to bury a technology that's sitting two desks over, very much alive, paying somebody's mortgage.

And it works, which is the depressing part. The dumber and more final the claim, the further it travels. We've trained whole platforms to reward the person who is confidently wrong and scroll past the person who is carefully right.

Real things almost never die. They get older, they get a smaller job, they get boring, and boring doesn't trend. "This is now one solid option among several for a specific use case" is true, useful, and worth four likes. "It's DEAD" is wrong and worth four hundred.

If you want to sound smart, do the opposite of the funeral. Say what changed, who it changed for, and what it didn't change. Hold two ideas at once. It's less fun to write, and it makes you the person people actually ask.

I've been building long enough to watch a dozen things get killed online and show up to work the next day. Declaring death is easy. Being right is the part nobody is optimizing for.