A mass decathexis

March 20, 2026

A lot of very smart people became software engineers over the last decade. The bulk of their energy was taken up by the mechanics of programming - satisfying the compiler, stitching together glue code, fighting dependency hell. The work that, for many, had quietly become the whole identity.

Since ~mid-2025 [0], this is no longer the case. A huge amount of energy has been released, spread amongst many very smart people.

This is the concept of decathexis in psychology [1]: the withdrawal of psychic energy from one object, leaving it free-floating and searching for a new one. Thousands of engineers just withdrew theirs from the mechanics of programming. All that cognitive energy is now unattached, restless, looking for somewhere to land.

I have no idea what we will do with it. I’ve observed a few places so far:

  • The indecisive are building everything, because saying no is harder than saying yes when the cost of building tends toward zero
  • The ones who would endlessly optimize their vim or IDE setups are now endlessly optimizing their own workflows
  • Any engineer with an entrepreneurial bone in their body is churning out working demos and turning their ideas into companies at light speed [2]
  • Some have disappeared into the meta-work — building tools for building tools for building tools [3]

So far, it hasn’t yielded the benefits I’d hoped. Most software is still buggy. Ecosystems remain fragmented. Anything not at the top of the priority list is still getting dropped on the ground.

But as usual, I remain optimistic. Even those of us at the cutting edge are only just starting to feel the effects of this decathexis. The newly-freed energy is still percolating, searching for the right vessel.

A lot of very smart people just became available. We’ll see what they do.

[0] For me, I stopped opening my IDE around the release of Opus 4.1. It feels like it’s been years, but that was only ~7 months ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decathexis

[2] Stripe Atlas startups in 2025

[3] See Ramp’s background agent, OpenAI’s in-house data agent, and Stripe’s Minions.