Let's bust those myths right away. AI has been in use for seventy years, and it was solving real problems long before it could write prose. Its mathematical foundations span three centuries. Yet for most developers working today, AI arrived in 2022, in the form of an LLM. LLMs are just one corner of the field, though a very loud one.
This talk is not a history lesson. It is an account of how programming was shaped by decades of attempts to make machines decide and, more importantly, how they failed. What survived quietly turned into ordinary software nobody calls AI anymore. The talk ends where we are now, with LLMs and the systems built around them. It is the oldest story in engineering: success arriving through a long series of failures.