The New Sparse Frontier: Flattening by AI
Ask any software engineer with a decade of experience what it feels like to work in 2026, and you will hear the same tremor in the voice. It is not the fear of a machine becoming sentient. It is the quieter, more corrosive dread of becoming obsolete while still sitting at the keyboard. The technological cassandras will tell you to rejoice or to panic, depending on which cult they have sworn allegiance to. The pro-AI congregation preaches a gospel of frictionless creation where you whisper a wish to the machine and a fully formed application tumbles out. The anti-AI cult, meanwhile, is busy declaring a psychic death of craft, insisting that every line of generated code is a little soul-murder. Both are tedious. Both miss the geometry of the actual crisis. ...