I'd argue against calling software engineering "solved" (I'd use the word "disreputable" instead), but otherwise I agree with this article here.
It was already extremely disheartening to see basically the entire global software industry abandon all quality overnight. Imagine you run a restaurant out in the countryside and you have your regular customers, until one day some company puts up a dispenser on the other side of the road that pumps out some undefined, brown, lukewarm broth that tastes like cardboard but only costs 20% of a meal at your restaurant, and you have to watch as all but maybe one client never set foot in your restaurant ever again.
But it's much worse when it comes to things like blog posts. I have a list of technical topics that I once would've liked to do research on and write blog posts about... but what's the point now? I would only be feeding a bullshit generator so that it could generate some slightly more plausible bullshit in the future, making it yet more effort to debunk. And if any technical opportunity arose from it, then at least 3 slop projects would pop up immediately, in turn demotivating anyone who'd work on any reliable implementation (and their motivation had already taken a serious hit because they no longer consider the operating systems reliable that their software was supposed to run on, and it's a considerable amount of work just to remain where they are...).
And yeah, this year I've also noticed a distinct lack of... idk, "interesting technical things"? There was that one blog post from the FEX devs, that was really interesting. Then there was some good news about battery technology research (both lithium and sodium), which I assume will have a serious impact in the real world, but on an intellectual level, as someone who's not in that field at all, I'd file those under "neat". And that's it. That's the entirety of "interesting creative technological output" that I remember coming across in 2026.
