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The Buzzword-Driven Development Manifesto

AI Edition

(v4.0 — supersedes the Microservices Edition (2016), the Blockchain Edition (2018), the Metaverse Edition (2021, unread), and the brief but expensive Web3 Edition (2022, minted as an NFT, current holder unknown))

Buzzword-Driven Development is not new. Only the buzzword is.

Our elders split login pages into forty-two microservices. Their elders put databases on the blockchain. We honor their sacrifice — the burned budgets, the abandoned repos, the Medium articles that outlived the products they described. We carry the torch forward.

Today, the buzzword is AI. Everything below follows from that single fact.

We are developers. We used to write software. Now we integrate intelligence. We are not angry about this. Anger requires energy, and our energy is reserved for restarting the local dev environment. We are merely observing, with mild professional fatigue, as our craft transforms into a prompt with a UI on top.

Through this work, we have come to value:

Adding AI over adding value. The feature nobody asked for, powered by the model nobody understands, solving the problem nobody had. Ship it. The stock is up.

Wrapping APIs over writing code. Our product is a thin layer over someone else's model, which is a thin layer over someone else's GPUs, which are a thin layer over one very overbooked chip foundry. We call this "our proprietary technology."

Vibes over versioning. We don't know which model version is in production. Neither does the model provider. It changed last Tuesday and now the chatbot is slightly ruder. This is called a "capability upgrade."

Agents over comprehension. Nobody has read the codebase since March. The AI wrote it, the AI reviews it, the AI approves the PR. We are present in this loop the way a parent is present at a teenager's birthday party: legally required, quietly ignored.

Principles We Follow

Every feature must be AI-powered. The dark mode toggle is now agentic. It reasons about darkness. It has deep opinions on darkness. It costs $0.04 per toggle.

If it can be a chatbot, it must be a chatbot. Our users wanted a "sort by date" button. They received a conversational interface where they can ask for sorting, in natural language, and receive it 70% of the time. Progress.

Deterministic code is legacy code. if statements are for cowards. Real engineers send the boolean to a language model and await its verdict. Sometimes it returns a poem. We handle that case in production.

The demo is the product. It worked once. On stage. On the founder's laptop. With the one prompt we tested for three weeks. That is production. Everything after the demo is "hardening," a phase which is eternal.

Hallucinations are a roadmap item. Not a bug — a "known limitation," listed in the docs right after the part where we promise the AI won't do exactly that.

Prompt engineering is computer science. We spent four years learning algorithms so we could spend our days writing "You are a helpful assistant. PLEASE respond only in JSON. PLEASE. I am begging you." into a text box. The caps lock is load-bearing.

⏳ Intermission. This manifesto is being generated. The pause you are experiencing is not the model thinking — it is waiting for enough electricity to accumulate in the grid to release the next tokens, like a dam. The loading spinner is not an animation. It is a fuel gauge. Please hold. The wind will pick up shortly.

The context window is our new database. Schema? Migrations? No. We paste the entire production database into the prompt and pray. When it stops fitting, we buy the bigger model. This is our scaling strategy. It is also our entire architecture.

Every quarter, the stack must be rebuilt. Not because it broke — because a new model dropped, and the old one is now "pre-agentic." Six months of code, obsoleted by a changelog.

Evaluation is a screenshot. We tested the new model by asking it three questions in a chat window. It seemed smart. Deployed. Metrics? The metric is that it seemed smart.

Yes, fine, the meetings. There is a weekly "AI strategy sync" where people who have never opened a terminal explain that we should "leverage agents more." We nod....