I think AI coding hype follows roughly four stages:
1. Amazement
You try it and can’t believe how much code it generates from a few prompts.
2. Expansion
You start more and more projects because shipping suddenly feels cheap and fast.
This is also the phase where people start convincing everyone around them:
- coworkers
- management
- friends in other companies
because nobody wants to “fall behind” in 6–12 months.
That creates a massive snowball/FOMO effect.
3. The grind phase
You realize the generated code has architectural issues, sloppy mistakes, weird abstractions, duplicated logic, broken edge cases, etc.
So you start:
- re-prompting
- switching models
- increasing reasoning effort
- reviewing fixes
- generating fixes for previous fixes
And suddenly you spend your days reviewing AI-generated pull requests instead of building software.
4. Realization
You realize AI coding increases output much faster than it increases certainty.
The code still needs:
- review
- testing
- ownership
- architectural understanding
- long-term maintenance
Usually by expensive senior engineers.
And the interesting thing is:
this whole cycle can take many months or even more than a year because people become socially and professionally invested in the narrative themselves.
Once teams, managers, and entire companies have been convinced that this is the future, it becomes psychologically and politically very hard to later say:
“Actually, the ROI is much lower than we expected.”
This is what we've been seeing with every company we work with.
Try justifying spending 100k on token spend when only 18k even makes it to a stable prod feature.
In the rush to maximize AI token spend, companies are wasting over 44% on bug fixes