the new small talk

Yo, so. This one’s been sitting in my head for a couple weeks and I need to put it somewhere.

Everywhere I go, AI comes up. Group chats. The cafe. Some random guy in passing. Doesn’t matter where or who. Somewhere in the conversation a model gets mentioned, and suddenly everyone’s got something to say.

I don’t know when that happened. But this is the small talk now. The thing you can always bring up.

The One Thing We All Yap About

Here’s what gets me. It’s not even that we all like AI.

Some of us love it. Some of us genuinely can’t stand it. Doesn’t matter. Everyone’s got a take, and the haters have the longest ones. I know people who’ll spend twenty minutes telling you how much they don’t care about a model release, which is a wild thing to do if you actually don’t care.

Nobody agrees. Everybody talks anyway. And somehow that’s enough to keep the whole thing running.

“Did You See They Dropped a New Model”

This one line. I swear it has started more conversations this year than anything else.

Claude drops something. Someone posts it in the group chat. “oh they dropped a new model.” Then someone goes “i think the other one’s better imo.” And boom, we’re off. Twenty messages about a thing half of us haven’t even properly tried yet.

It’s the closest thing we have to talking about the game last night. Except the game is a benchmark, and half of us thinks the benchmark is fake anyway lol.

Random Conversations Out of Nowhere

The part that actually interests me is what this did to people.

Before all this, two developers with nothing in common had basically nothing to talk about. You’d do the nod, the “hey man,” and move on. That was the entire interaction.

Now there’s always a way in. There’s always a take to give. I’ve ended up twenty minutes deep with total strangers because one of us said something about a model. I don’t even talk to people like that. But drop a model release and suddenly I’m yapping.

That’s a lot. A whole shared thing just kind of appeared out of nowhere.

idk, It’s Kinda Nice

And yeah, I know, I’m literally doing the thing right now. This post is me starting a conversation about AI. I’m part of the problem or whatever.

But honestly? I think it’s nice.

We found something that’s just ours. All of us. Doesn’t matter if it’s love or hate or somewhere in the middle. Any place, any time, any dev, someone’s got a hot take ready. And it doesn’t even have to be a good one.

Weird thing for a whole profession to bond over. But it gave developers random conversations to start, and honestly I’ll take that.

:)