I opened my email this morning and there were three product announcements from companies I have never heard of. Each one was going to change how I work. Each one had a logo I will not remember by Friday. I closed the tab and made more coffee.
That used to be unusual for me. For years I read every announcement. I clicked through every demo. I built side project after side project just to keep up with whatever wave was supposedly cresting. Now I just feel tired.
If you're feeling the same thing, Id like to suggest that you are not broken. You are just on schedule.
I've been in this industry long enough to have watched a few waves come through. RPA was going to eliminate back office work. Low code was going to make every business analyst a developer. Blockchain was going to remake supply chains. AI copilots were going to ten x our productivity. Agents are now going to replace whole roles. Some of these were real shifts. Some were not. All of them arrived with the same breathless tone, the same conference circuit, the same blog posts about how everything was about to change.
Something Ive learned is that every tool that survives eventually becomes Tuesday. It stops being the future and starts being part of the floor you walk on. Nobody writes a blog post about npm install anymore. And Im pretty positive no one is getting excited about Jira. Git is just there. The wave that felt like it was going to drown you is now the puddle you step over without thinking. That is what success looks like for a tool. Boring infrastructure that you stop noticing.
