It’s pretty simple, actually — a confluence of the following factors, in no particular order:

• They have effectively sucked up all the air in the room, but I still think there are plenty of other interesting things to think and talk about. Software engineering remains a large and wide discipline, and all the vast world beyond software is plenty interesting, too.

• I have avenues where I am thinking and writing and talking about them. Just not here.

• They are interesting in various ways, but I don’t usually have anything to say that others are not saying better. I think about them a fair bit at work — it’s literally part of my job to think about them, given where I sit in our org — but little if any of that is ready for public consumption.

• I do not believe that anyone is obliged — no matter how heated the moment, and no matter how long they have been writing publicly — to comment on any given topic. Do I have thoughts, many of them deeply considered on LLMs? Yes. I do. Do I feel obliged to spend more of my time on that topic than on others I find more profitable? I do not.

The running theme here is that I think we are spending far too much of our time and energy on these things culturally. I want to contribute to a culture of thinking about other things — things that are more important, more enduring, more fundamental.

I recognize this post itself contributes to the problem named here. I write it so that if (or when!) it comes up again in the future, I can simply point to this and move on! In the meantime, you can expect to hear relatively little from me on this front, and much more on other things. Go read other folks — the enthusiasts and the critics and the (few) folks walking a careful line in between — and let me know when you find real gems along the way.