By Barry Buck, with Claude Opus 4.8 – “Comfortably Numb” is a song about anaesthesia. A doctor administers just a little pinprick so the show can go on — the performer feels nothing, and performs brilliantly. Keep that image in mind. It’s about to describe an entire industry.
I’ve read the GitHub trending page every morning since 2012, the way other people read the news. For over a decade the running complaint was churn: framework of the month, JavaScript fatigue, a new build tool before you’d configured the last one. Exhausting. We all prayed for it to stop.
Then AI coding exploded onto the scene — and it stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. The strongest projects calmly hardened into de facto standards. The tools the AI models favour just get more stable, more entrenched, more inevitable. And the trending lists? Full of markdown files teaching agents how to behave. The delivery of software has skyrocketed; the old saying that users don’t care how it was built, only what it does, has never been truer.
But almost nobody is working on the inside anymore — the parts that made building software hard in the first place. Everyone is too busy shipping to sharpen the saw.
Here’s the paradox that troubles me. If the AI explosion had arrived a decade earlier, the mature tooling it leans on today wouldn’t exist. The churn we hated was the R&D lab. All that tiring, wasteful competition was the ecosystem searching. We begged for stability, we got it, and now I can’t tell stability and stagnation apart — they’re the same photograph in different light.
Want proof? The creator of Inferno — a man who has spent years on React, Svelte and the age-old UI problem — just released Octane, a framework that deletes dependency arrays, abolishes the rules of hooks and compiles the virtual DOM out of existence. Five years ago that’s a week on the front page of Hacker News and a conference tour. Today it sits under 700 GitHub stars. The most innovative frontend work in years, landing to silence. Hello? Is there anybody out there?
But here’s what I keep coming back to: the suffering didn’t end. It moved. The hard problem is no longer CSS or state management — it’s humans and AI agents actually working together as a team, and you will search the trending page in vain for anyone solving it. It’s new territory, which is why my own team ended up building our answer ourselves.
And that’s the tell. In the song, the numbness was never a happy ending — it was a warning. The pinprick lets you deliver the show, night after night, feeling nothing. The itch, the friction, the suffering we automated away? That was the signal that somebody, somewhere, was still trying to fix things.
The child is grown. The dream is gone. And we have become, as an industry, comfortably numb.
Barry Buck is the chief architect of Roboteur
www.saucecode.tech