Nobody knows anything: AI agent hype, token-maxxing and the engineer identity crisis
cnakazawa · x · 2026-11-03
burcs published an essay titled "Nobody knows anything" pushing back on the AI agent hype cycle.
- From prompt engineering to MCPs, skills, sub-agents, workflows and alphabet-soup "stacks", new jargon appears daily, fueling FOMO: people burn millions of tokens yet little actually ships — "performative software engineering."
- He traces it to an identity crisis: AI eroded the pride of "I build software," so engineers now differentiate via token burn and stack complexity.
- A crowd of modern charlatans is monetizing that insecurity, selling snake oil rebranded as agent-lifecycle tooling.
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