Stuart McClure has spent over three decades building companies at the frontier of technology and security. That gives him an unusual vantage point from which to assess the AI moment: he has seen hype cycles come and go, has built genuine AI-native products before the term was fashionable, and has watched the gap between marketing and engineering reality widen year after year.
This foundational essay is his clearest statement yet of what is at stake. The AI hype must die — not because AI is overrated, but because hype kills the thing it celebrates. When every product is "AI-powered," when every vendor claims their technology is "transformative," when every conference panel is populated with people who have staked their personal brand on AI's imminent triumph over every human limitation, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses.
The casualties are real. Investment flows toward marketing rather than engineering. Security teams are sold false protection. Talented engineers spend their careers building demos rather than durable systems. And when the inevitable correction comes — as it always does — the cynicism that follows makes it harder to do the genuine work that genuine AI progress requires.
Stuart is not anti-AI. He is deeply, pragmatically pro-AI in the way that a serious builder must be: committed to what the technology can actually do, impatient with claims it cannot yet support, and focused on the hard engineering problems that must be solved for any of the promises to be kept. This essay is the opening volley of that argument, and the seed from which the four-part AI Exposed series grew.