vboykis Nostalgia Posts About 2013 Tech Spark Industry-Wide Reminiscence
On Sept 11, well-known AI engineer Vicki Boykis (vboykis) posted a series of threads expressing nostalgia for the tech industry circa 2013 and criticizing the current AI-era climate, resonating widely among practitioners and sparking collective reminiscence.
Confirmed
- Across multiple posts, vboykis enumerated hallmark 2013-era tech culture: stickers on laptops, kanban boards, services named after Roman gods, Python-vs-Ruby debates, GitHub still being new, and tech conferences everywhere.
- She recalled that the biggest technical controversy then was whether to finally replace Hadoop with Spark; startups favored .ly domains and cute icons; knowledge spread via O'Reilly and Manning books and Joel Spolsky's essays.
- She also missed blogs written for humans, meeting like-minded people on Twitter, learning senior-level skills from code reviews, a good VSCode, NYT's mostly-free access, a more open internet, and a time when "AI" meant scikit-learn.
- Criticizing today, vboykis said AI discourse is now all cyber threats, math proofs, IPOs, loops and charts — with nobody writing code anymore — declaring "we've lost the plot."
- She reshared a long post by qiqing fondly recalling days when "we were all naive geeks and the mercenaries hadn't arrived," when the only thing that mattered was making the world better and people mocked social-mobile-local hype; the post was relayed by multiple AI veterans, forming a wave of collective nostalgia.
Why it matters
- This nostalgia wave is more than personal sentiment; it reflects engineers' dissatisfaction with cultural shifts in the AI era, as discussion moved from coding and product-building to capital narratives and grand narratives, while the open, sharing tech-community ethos fades.
- The "mercenaries arrived" framing captures a widespread feeling that the industry shifted from an idealist community to a capital-driven ecosystem — a concentrated expression of current AI practitioners' anxiety.
2026-09-11 ~ 2026-09-11 · 6 related posts
Primary sources
- Well-Known AI Developer Nostalgic for the Tech Industry of 2013 — vboykis · 2026-09-11
- [source] A engineer's ode to tech in 2013: stickers, kanban, and when Google was useful — vboykis · 2026-09-11
- [source] Engineers wax nostalgic for an open web: blogs, code reviews, and free pizza Fridays — vboykis · 2026-09-11
- Dev recalls the Hadoop-to-Spark era: blogs written by humans and knowledge via code reviews — vboykis · 2026-09-11
- [source] vboykis laments that nobody writes code anymore amid AI hype about threats, proofs and IPOs — vboykis · 2026-09-11
- AI veterans get nostalgic: missing the hacker-house era before the mercenaries arrived — vboykis · 2026-09-11